Yohannes “Johnny” Tona was born into a musical family in Ethiopia. In November, his band – The Yohannes Tona Ban – released his first CD making a name for himself in the Minneapolis Jazz scene.

MINNEAPOLIS – It is obvious when listening to Yohannes Tona’s compositions that he draws his music from everywhere. Born into a gospel musical family in Shashamane, 150 miles from Addis Ababa, Yohannes has wanted to play the guitar for as long as he can remember. His late father was an organist, while his mother was a renowned gospel vocalist. Apart from gospel music, his other influences growing up were traditional Ethiopian music, reggae and beats from West Africa.

Humble Beginnings

“I would watch the church guitarist play as the choir rehearsed in my mother’s living room,” he recalls. “Every chord he struck, I learnt.”

When his mother was at work, Johnny would practice on the guitar. One day when he was eight he played several songs to his shocked mother. A single mother, with limited earnings, she recognized his passion and talent and did everything to make her son realize his musical dream including getting Tona his first guitar. Thus began his musical career. A few years later, he was playing in the church choir. As soon as he was old enough, he traveled all over Ethiopia accompanying his mother in her gospel tours.

He laughs and shakes his head when he thinks of his first guitar.

“It was a terrible Russian guitar, but it allowed me to practice every musical album, every recording that I could lay my hands on,” he says.

He did graduate from the Russian guitar when he was sixteen. Renowned German evangelist, Reinhardt Bonke, was visiting Ethiopia when, a few days before the conference, Tona was asked to play the acoustic bass guitar for the conference. Although Tona did not own or know how to play the bass, he promised the organizers that he would be ready in time for the conference. With just a few days to spare, he rushed to a carpenter and attempted to convert his six-string guitar to a four-string bass guitar.

“I asked the carpenter to adjust the number of strings and to curve a hole on the base of the guitar. It was a big risk I knew, but I looked forward to the challenge,” he says.

That weekend, he played to thousands of people from different parts of East Africa earning him local fame.

So far, Tona had not had any formal musical training. But after high school he was admitted to the only music school in Ethiopia, Yared Music School where he excelled earning him a scholarship to Boston’s Berklee College of Music.

On a visit to Minneapolis, he was recruited to become the music director for the Ethiopian Church. Over the past five years, Tona has slowly established himself on the local jazz and gospel scenes. He has played with Grammy-nominated Excelsior Choir, Dr. Mambo’s Combo, Darnell Davis and the Remnant Gospel Group, and with top area vocalists including T. Mychal Rambo, Bruce Henry, and Debbie Duncan. 

While in Ethiopia, Tona made a crossover into jazz when he played in coffee shops and high profile venues with a band known as the Afro Sound playing what Tona calls Ethio Jazz. He has continued to play with many Ethiopian artists including Teddy Afro, Danny Wolde and Addis Demelew.   

It is with this experience and exposure that in late 2004 Tona formed his band.

Sand from the Desert
In November, Tona and his band, the Yohannes Tona Band, played at the Dakota Jazz Club where guest heard a sampling of music from “Sand from the Desert,” Tona’s first CD.

While not exactly Afrofunk, the composition is as eclectic as Tona’s influences. Of his music, Tona says, “I play different styles fusing African, old classical and contemporary jazz sounds to make an authentic sound— an Afrofunkjazz sound.”

His band includes: Brian Kendrick (drums), Peter Vricks (sax), Brian Ziemniak (keyboards) and Patrice Delemos (percussion).

The album includes an Afrofunkjazz remake of Miles Davis’ “Saw What” and John Coltranes’s “Naima.” The rest of the album comprises ten of Tona’s original compositions. “Ride Around Addis Ababa,” with vocalist Hana Shenkute is a traditional Ethiopian wedding song with definite influences from the first music that Tona played. Tona collaborates with local Neo Soul artist Aimee Bryant on a soulful composition, “The Kerims.” A local Cameroonian, Kenn Wannaku, Damel Davis and the Remnants collaborate with Tona on “World Praize,” an upbeat worship song heavy on percussions with a West African influence. Other collaborations on the CD include Stokey Williams of Mint Condition and Nachito Herrera.

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You can sample Yohannes Tona’s music on his MySpace profile here. You can also hear him play every Wednesday at T’s Place (formerly known as Dashen), Sunday and Monday at the Bunker’s Music Bar and Grill and Tuesdays at the Blue Nile.

Yawo Attivor is a name Minnesotans and, more importantly, Africans residing in Minnesota, should be familiar with. He has been based in our very own backyward for the better part of a decade, and has been known to pull off some of the most vivacious musical displays the Twin Cities has heard or seen. Therefore, it was with a heightened sense of anticpation that I entered The Cabooze on Thursday the Oct. 12.

The night’s bill included two opening acts, namely, The Lucas Cates Band from Madison, Wis., and Private Property from Iowa City, Iowa. The former, named after their lead singer, is a pop/adult alternative band, and, the latter, a reggae/ska act with a penchant for upbeat and melodic grooves. The music they put on display was excellent and went a long way in whipping the venue into a frenzy.

With a total of three albums in his locker, there was to be no shortage of inspired material for Yawo and his newly configured band to draw from. The setup had Yawo on the string guitar and vocals, supported by a rhthym section of Greg Schutte on drums and Patrice Delemos on percussions. Rounding off the group were Yohannes on electric bass,  Doug Little on saxophone and flute, and to the surprise of many, Ken Leiser from the Lucas Cates band, on the violin. Would this be transformed into wonderful synergy and a great performance? Well, we were soon to find that out.

The group immediately set out to get the crowd moving by dishing out a cocktail of high-tempoed drum-propelled tunes. There wasn’t a soul in the crowd that could resist moving some part of their anatomy to the rhythm. Once the band was at full throttle, they began to treat the crowd to a wonderful array of spontaneous improvisation by injecting solos from individual group members into each song.

Yawo, a master orchestrator, would draw the crowds attention to the next impending solo, and they would always deliver. These moments were made even more thrilling by an ingenious interplay of response solos among band members that often produced applause fom  the crowd, and was a definite hit with those with jazz sensibilities, myself included. A notable highlight was the playing of Ken Leiser on the violin. Needless to say, the incorporation of a violin in an afrobeat ensemble could prove difficult, however, he handled it deftly.

Yawo’s individual performance was a joy to behold. He sung each song with unbridled passion. His vocals never faltered even with all his physical exertions on stage. Here was a musician in his prime, intent on making positive and inspirational music. Typified by songs like ”Celebrate Life,” ”Blewu” (slowly) and ”We’ve come so far,” Yawo easily breaks down barriers with his own brand of conscious and uplifting music.

If you were like me, and thought there could be no more surprises for the night, you were soon to be proved wrong with the introduction of Whitney, a very talented dancer, to the fold. She immediately ignited the show and brought the crowd to its dancing feet with her vigorous yet graceful gyrations to the band’s music. If at this time, your attention had strayed, for some odd reason, it was surely back on track. Yawo was always quick to join her in her routine and, to our delight, she returned a number of times later in the show.

Every member of the audience had surely been moved by some aspect of this performance, and as the show came to an end, sales of his recent album, ”Celebrate life,” started making the rounds. I quickly got myself a copy and proceeded backstage to talk to the man himself.

His boundless energy was still evident as he spoke about his upcoming trip to his home country, Togo, for a series of performances, which have been ten years in the making. The release of his upcoming album by the year’s end was also high on his agenda. When asked to choose which song meant the most to him, he refused, but hinted that ”We’ve come so far” was special in the message it carried. I couldn’t hold him up for long though, as he was itching to go back out and mingle with the crowd.

My exit from The Cabooze was interrupted as I heard a burst of unbridled, hearty laughter. I turned around and caught sight of Yawo hugging two members of the audience, and I thought to myelf, ”Now that is how you take down the fences in this global village of ours.”

MINNEAPOLIS – After the superlative introduction by Minneapolis’s Dakota Jazz Club’s owner, Lowell Pickett, I expected a rich, preeminent performance by Dee Dee Bridgewater, surpassing anything I’d experienced before.
 
Pickett reminded the audience of 135 people how Bridgewater had garnered two Grammy awards and a Tony from her work on Broadway and was honored by France with the Commandeur de L’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres. 

 “Dee Dee Bridgewater has put together a project that blends the music and rhythms of West African traditional music and pop with American jazz and blues,” Pickett said. “But anything I might say doesn’t scratch the surface of the experience you’ll have tonight…The music that’s going to take place on this stage in a few minutes is just incandescent.”

I wasn’t disappointed with Memphis-born Bridgewater and her entourage of ten musicians, seven of them direct from Mali in West Africa.  Her current tour, “Red Earth: A Malian Journey,” delivered all that Pickett promised. 

It’s not that Bridgewater wasn’t dynamic, pouring her heart and bountiful talents into the show, and it’s not that the musicians didn’t display a masterful sound, so in keeping with the polyrhythmic African music to which I am accustomed. And it’s not that the selections didn’t provide an energetic hybrid of African and American sound, but the show did not eclipse my expectations nor my previous experiences in African music. 

That I was not sitting in my seat at the Dakota on October 13th with quite the same agog look of admiration as Pickett’s says, to me, a couple of things. First, I wonder how often Pickett has patronized the Cedar Cultural Center just down the road and around the corner, a music venue that’s rich in world music, especially African music. One of my favorite shows at the Cedar from this past year was Cape Verdean Lura whose show was matchless, who could, without hesitation, compare to Bridgewater’s performance.

And secondly, because a music connoisseur such as Pickett was so profoundly impressed with Bridgewater’s musical offering, practically telling us that hers was a unique performance to the United States, it would seem that Bridgewater is succeeding in a grand way. Her objective in her latest tour is to “spread Malian music.” With her fame and celebrity clout, she’s able to immerse a segment of society whose familiarity with music may not be quite as hip to a world music format as the lesser-paid and paying crowd at the Cedar where African music is expected and frequent. 

Tuesday evening, the 9:30 show went on stage an hour late. With food and drink circulating on the floor, this didn’t pose a problem for most people. When the Bridgewater troupe takes stage, we discover that Dee Dee is a griot in her own right. She loves to tell a good story. With her beautiful hair shaved off, the focus becomes even less visual and more centered on her music and her message. 

On the slightly elevated platform, eight performers squeeze into the space along with a baby grand piano, snare-drum set, several congo drums, a chair for the kora player and room for the band’s squeeze-drum player, xylophone and string bass players, and the star performer, singer Bridgewater. 

She coaxes the audience, “If the music moves you, get up.  Do not be afraid; let the music speak to you.” 
They then launch into an Afro-blues number, starting off with the wild, yet intentional drumming of Baba Sissoko on the talking drum.

Their third number begins with a kora solo played by Habib ‘Dia’ Sangaré. The kora is Africa’s gift to string instruments. Amongst all the drumming that denotes African music, there is the enchanting kora. It seems impossible to play so beautifully. Imagine weaving a complicated tapestry with a handful of threads and a pair of needles, and yet, magically, the artwork spins out. That’s how it is when Sangaré plays his kora. He plucks steel strings stretched between two bracing sticks, resonating in a large, hollow gourd and out pours the sounds of bliss.

Bridgewater playfully demands audience participation with the fourth number. We now all know the words to say to a loved one, having repeated over and over the phase Djarabi (Oh my love). This song, sung in duet with Mamani Kéita, showcases an irresistible blend of both Malian and American cultures. The two women, Bridgewater and Kéita, complement one another. Bridgewater slips back and forth between musical continents seamlessly. She shines like gossamer when she’s closer to her American roots. And she gives us a gorgeous bridge between countries with her powerful vocals and sweeping dance moves.