With Mark Lupescu and Samuel Nin Aubeso

This time I tried something a little more experimental. My brother had given me a book on the origins of blues in West Africa and it really inspired me to try to fuse my music with instruments from this area of the world. I talked to a colleague of Mine Marc Thió and we started the ball rolling. He suggested Mark Lupescu, a Kora player, living an working here. Mark is fantastic at adapting to any music, as a matter of fact he had adapted his kora for playing in any key. Usually the kora is in one key, predominantly in the key of F, so Marks adaptation made it easier to play our tunes together. We started rehearsals and played a gig together at a local restaurant here in my neighbourhood of Poblesec called Bagaria. The feelings were good and we programmed the live stream over Zoom.

We had a last minute change, as Marc had to undergo an operation, so Samuel stepped in on the djembe and for such short notice he did a great job. He also brought along his Barafon, an African xylophone. Just as well, as I broke a string mid concert and the guys were able to step in and played a wonderful instrumental on kora and barafon.

We changed venue for the concert this time to studio space in the same building as how rehearsal rooms, run by Marc Thió. The results were mixed, I think the idea was good but we suffered a little with the sound at the beginning and we had some problems emitting in HD. I think this was due to either lower bandwidth or a new feature on Zoom that we had overlooked which reduces the video quality for multiple attendee meetings. This project has been a very steep learning curve for us and hopefully these kind of problems will be solved in future emissions.

Marc was kind enough to do some mixes of the recordings which you can listen to here: