Preeminent violinist Regina Carter put on a fascinatingly beautiful performance tonight as she and her band kicked off the opening performance of the 2011 Bellevue Jazz Festival at the Theatre at Meydenbauer Cente. If the rest of the Festival is half as good as Regina was tonight it will be a festival full of wonderful performances that I will not want to miss. Click on the above link to get to the schedule for the rest of the festival.
Regina performed music from her latest recording Reverse Thread. In 2006 Carter was awarded a MacArthur Fellows Program grant which armed her with the funds and the freedom to follow her muse and create the arrangements for Reverse Thread.
Carter made the decision to record this album primarily influenced by African folk tunes. To achieve the uplifting and stirring result, she added an accordion and kora, the West African harp traditionally played by village storytellers, to her longstanding rhythm section. Kora virtuoso Yacouba Sissoko was brought on board to help recreate the spirit of passing stories from generation to generation. The result is a beautiful compliment to Carter’s sumptuously seductive violin.
Regina Carter also turned to the World Music Institute in New York City, in which she found a diverse and inspirational resource for material. She looked not just to the music, but also the accompanying sounds and nuances of everyday life from anthropological and sociological perspectives.
With Reverse Thread, Regina Carter takes a giant step forward by making a meaningful musical contribution on her own terms. Regina Carter, Violin; Yacouba Sissoko, Kora; Will Holshouser, Accordion; Chris Lightcap, Bass; Alvester Garnett, Drums and Percussion
Toumani Diabaté
November 10th, 2008
Toumani Diabaté Sunday, November 9, Triple Door
And so we went to the Triple Door tonight for the final concert of the 2008 Earshot Jazz Festival and oh what a concert it was. Toumani Diabaté put on an ethereal performance sending the packed SRO house way out to another star system. Earhot Jazz Director John Gilbreath said later that he had never seen the Triple Door when it was so packed and yet so quiet. Everyone fell under the spell of Toumani and his magical kora. Near the end of the performance he stopped and thanked everyone and begged John to bring him back to Seattle yet again. Then he explained how to play a kora: its easy he said and not as hard as a piano. You just use four fingers – one thumb for bass, one for melody and two index fingers to improvise. “If you can play one song you are a master” he explained.
The kora, a 21-string harp from West Africa, may strike American ears as an uncanny ancestor of a wide range of popular music from this continent. Toumani Diabaté, a virtuoso from Bamako, Mali, has done as much as any player of the instrument to bring its delights to audiences around the world.
Diabaté is from a long line of Malian griots – traditional bearers and interpreters of the country’s ancient court music and history. In fact, he can trace his family’s involvement in music back 71 generations.
Diabaté’s the Best Of Toumani Diabaté stands out from his many other albums as the first internationally-released compilation of music by an individual kora player. In recent years he has collaborated with the likes of Taj Mahal, Peter Gabriel, Ballake Sissoko, Salif Keita, and Ali Farka Toure. With Farka Toure, he recorded a set of duets, In the Heart of the Moon, which won the Grammy for Best Traditional World Music Album in 2005.
Diabaté aims to open up the kora tradition to a wide variety of influences. He counts, among his inspirations, many kinds of music, including icons of American music such as Elvis, James Brown, and Louis Armstrong to name but a few.
Photographs by Seattle photographer Daniel Sheehan, a photojournalist specializing in portrait photography,  jazz photography, and photojournalism  for publications and corporations and a Seattle wedding photographer with an unobtrusive, story-telling approach creating award winning Seattle wedding photography.
