Bona covers all jazz bases

Richard Bona. Picture by Ingrid C Hertfelder

Ron Banks
May 20, 2015, 5:10 pm

It is a long way from a mud-brick village in the heart of the West African nation of Cameroon to the recording studios of New York.

But that is the path trodden by electric bass player and singer Richard Bona, one of the headliners of the Perth International Jazz Festival.

The 48-year-old African is now regarded one of the world’s finest bassists, a musician who fuses the rhythms of his native country with contemporary jazz and funk sounds.

A resident of New York for the past 20 years, Bona says he began making music as a percussionist in his Cameroon village at the age of three.

“I really began playing with my family, who were all church musicians,” he recently told an interviewer. From percussion he graduated to playing the church organ, and began to experiment with home-made guitars and other stringed instruments.

photo: www.jazztimes.com

He didn’t always have the money to buy the instruments he needed, so improvised their construction from scrap materials found around his village. One home-made guitar was fashioned with cords strung over an old motor-cycle tank.

Bona was obviously a precocious and musically talented youngster who as a teenager moved to the city in Cameroon, where he discovered the bass playing of renowned artist Jaco Pastorius. “From that point I decided that the electric bass would be my instrument,” he said.

But Bona’s musical development was not confined to the bass. He began to sing with his bands while on bass, and learnt a series of other instruments, such as keyboards, broadening his capability and creativity.

He was only 13 when he fronted his first jazz ensemble in Cameroon, and by his late teens had played in bands in France and Germany.

In 1995 he relocated to New York, where he soon began playing with such high-profile artists as Harry Belafonte (where he was musical director on a European tour), Larry Coryell, Michael and Randy Brecker and Mike Stern.

He has also featured on albums by his idol Jaco Pastorious and toured extensively with the Pat Metheny Group.

read more: https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/entertainment/a/28142235/bona-covers-all-jazz-bases/