Improvised Music Company and National Concert Hall present

Navigator Series

Tuesday 19th July -

The sum is greater than its parts in this enticing collaborative series from The National Concert Hall and Improvised Music Company, which brings the world’s finest jazz and world music performers to our main auditorium throughout 2011. Together, we have selected and devised four evenings of buoyant rhythmic diversity, each a voyage of discovery into musical creativity , and navigated by virtuoso musicians from Cuba, Mali and Spain along with the very best of Irish and European jazz musicians.

Better late than never. In 1996, World Circuit Records conceived a unique encounter in Havana’s Egrem Studio between Mali and Cuba’s best musicians, but the Africans never made it. The recording went ahead without them, and the result was the epoch making Buena Vista Social Club. Fourteen years on, the band as originally conceived has made its studio and stage debut, and it has been worth the wait. Afrocubism bridges the continents with music that flows without impediment, the playing sparkles throughout, and it is a truly stellar affair. Eliades Ochoa, the Stetson wearing star of the original BVSC, brings his campesina group Quarteto Patria to the party, and this might be the greatest gathering of Malians ever, with among others ngoni star Bassekou Kouyate, guitarist of the legendary Rail Band Djelimady Tounkara, griot praise singer Kasse Mady Diabate and first among equals, the genius of the kora, Toumani Diabate.

Eliades Ochoa - lead guitar, vocal,

Toumani Diabaté – kora, Bassekou Kouyate - ngoni
Kasse Mady Diabaté – vocal,

Djelimady Tounkara – guitar,

Lassana Diabaté - balafon
Osnel Odit–guitar,

Jose Martinez–bass,

Jorge Maturell–congas,

Eglis Ochoa-percussion,

Lennis Lara – trumpet,

Alain Dragoni – trumpet,

Baba Sissoko– talking drum

BOOK HERE

TOUMANI DIABATE ONLINE HERE

BASSEKOU KOUYATE ON YOUTUBE HERE