A New Kind of Fusion

Jazz may be emerging from a long nap.

A couple of decades back, the music responded to its occasionally embarrassing fusion exuberance by going on retreat. For the next 20-odd years, jazz focused on its successful and thankfully unembarrassing 1950s hard bop period. And that’s, more or less, where it has been hibernating. And it was good.

Actually, very, very good.

But the decades have passed, Jazz at Lincoln Center has been enshrined and now it’s time. Not time for any one particular thing but for jazz to do more of what it’s always done so well: refrain from navel-gazing and pilfering from other musical coffers. On April 25, the Knoxville Jazz Festival presents two artists — Lionel Loueke and Michele Rosewoman — who endeavor to disturb the slumber, enriching jazz from other sources.

The headliner for the double bill is jazz’s hottest new property, guitarist Lionel Loueke (pronounced LEE-oh-nel Loo-AY-kay). Although he’s to perform solo in Knoxville, Loueke is more commonly found in the company of assorted jazz luminaries such as Herbie Hancock and Terence Blanchard, or with his multinational trio. From the West African nation of Benin, Loueke’s trio includes others drawn from the jazz diaspora, namely Italian-born, Sweden-reared bassist Massimo Biolcati and Hungarian drummer Ferenc Nemeth.

Their most recent recording Karibu, (Blue Note), featuring Hancock and Wayne Shorter on several cuts, integrates in a most fascinating way what would appear to be native West African folk music and the hard bop tradition.

Via cell phone from New York, Loueke grumbles at the folk associations: “I definitely don’t think I’m a folk musician because you know, first of all, what I’m doing may have some folk elements but has nothing to do with the history in folk music. I’m a jazz musician using different type of texture… If you were to call me an African musician, I would say, ‘Yes,’ but folk musician for me, ‘No.’”

Nevertheless, he’s quick to concede the kora (lute-like African instrument) aspects of his guitar playing, the South African sources for his mouth percussive effects and the pentatonic music of Benin as musical influence.
Not to omit mention of his voice, which is yet another distinctive feature. And again, despite his denials — “I don’t consider myself as a singer… I use my voice, I hear it as a natural [element], that’s how I let it out… but I’m not a singer” — Loueke’s vocal percussion and lyricism (at times in Fon, the native tongue of Benin) create a mysterious and, more often than not, uplifting combination.

In what might have been a deliberate “folk meets funk” contrast planned by the Jazz Festival organizers, Loueke’s set will be followed by a band co-led by pianist Michele Rosewoman and drummer Ralph Peterson. Tia Fuller and Knoxville’s Bob Knapp will join them on saxes, and Essiet Essiet will play bass.

The Loueke/Rosewoman double-bill has an interesting symmetry. In the early 1980s, just as the lights were dimming on the jazz-fusion debauch, Rosewoman launched an NEA-funded project, called the New Yor-Uba. Consisting of a 14-piece ensemble capturing Yoruban music as it traversed from Nigeria to Cuba, New Yor-Uba deployed arrangements of traditional chants from Nigeria but also from Benin.

“Sometimes I think people are on somewhat parallel paths,” says Rosewoman. “And while they’re never altogether parallel, there’s a range where the timbre is the same.” Speaking from her home in Manhattan, Rosewoman isn’t actually referring to her connection with Loueke but of her connection with other pianists.

Hers is a muscular approach to the keyboard, one that could happily give Donald Brown a run for his money in overall funkiness. Like the bass ostinato on one of her tunes, an immediately identifiable element in her recordings is the left hand. As she puts it, “The left hand is almost like the subconscious. And when your right hand is busy and you’re focused on it, your left hand is busy trying to do something, and if you force into a role that someone told you it’s supposed to play, then you never discover its uniqueness.”

Despite her credentials in assimilating new forms, Rosewoman cautions about the possibilities: “I think the music has become a ground for integrating all kinds of stuff. It’s a new world with the Internet and all the world music feeding into it and all the other countries getting into jazz.”

However, Rosewoman detects the danger of becoming facile when surrounded by all this newfound facility. “The integrating of forms, I think, works when there’s a depth of knowledge about both sides of what somebody’s doing,” she says. Otherwise, “there’s a loss of musicality, a lot of stuff is sacrificed, and yet the idea is great, that everybody is learning and absorbing from each other.” That said, Friday evening, April 25 promises to be more of the latter rather than the former.

Knoxville Jazz Festival, featuring Lionel Loueke and The Michele Rosewoman/Ralph Peterson Group
Friday, April 25
Bijou Theatre (803 S. Gay St.) /
8 p.m. / $26.50