Full story: The Washington Post
Cotonou, an Atlantic port, is the largest city in the West African nation of Benin. It was there in the early '90s that a teenager named Lionel Loueke borrowed his brother's guitar and started playing in local dance bands. It wasn't easy. There were no accessible music schools or stores, so everything had to be learned by trial and error and by ear, usually from second-generation audio cassettes. And when one of his guitar strings broke, Loueke replaced it with a bicycle brake cable.
That early struggle was the beginning of a journey that brings Loueke's jazz trio to Blues Alley Monday night. It was a path that took him to schools in the Ivory Coast, Paris, Boston and California, won him jobs in bands led by Terence Blanchard and Herbie Hancock, and landed the guitarist a contract with Blue Note Records. Last December, Loueke got word that he'd received an unrestricted $50,000 United States Artists fellowship for the 'caliber and impact' of his work.
Copyright, Blaise APLOGAN, 2010,© Bienvenu sur Babilown
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