Jazz Articles about Lionel Loueke

Lionel Loueke: Mwaliko

by Ryan Lippell
March 18, 2010

Lionel Loueke: Mwaliko Blue Note 2010

An album of duo and trio recordings, Mwaliko is the kind of world-infused smorgasbord that only guitarist Lionel Loueke could cook up--it contains hard swing, makossa, balladry, Beninese folk and a jazz standard. Hailing from Benin in West Africa, Loueke boasts a curriculum vitae whose scope is similarly impressive. Spanning more than a decade, and starting with bicycle chain-strung guitars in Benin, he completed formal music study in ...

Lionel Loueke: Karibu

by Joel Roberts
May 5, 2008

Guitarist/singer Lionel Loueke's remarkable odyssey from the West African nation of Benin to the apex of the jazz world is quickly becoming the stuff of legend. After hearing a George Benson CD as a teenager, Loueke became enamored with American jazz and began traversing the globe to further his musical education, first in the neighboring Ivory Coast, then in Paris and Boston, studying at Berklee, and finally in Los Angeles, where his audition at the Thelonious Monk Institute had the ...

Lionel Loueke: Karibu

by John Eyles
March 30, 2008

Guitarist Lionel Loueke, from Benin, has enjoyed a steadily rising profile since arriving in the USA in 1999. Karibu is his fifth album as a leader, his first for a major label. When Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter endorse a rising star and then agree to be sidemen on his album, it is time to sit up and take notice. (They were last sidemen on a Blue Note album in 1967.) Hancock recalls the first time he heard Loueke play, ...

Lionel Loueke: Karibu

by Mark F. Turner
March 20, 2008

With an emotive sound that is rooted in his homeland of Benin, Africa, guitarist Lionel Loueke is having a positive impact on the current jazz environment. His Blue Note debut, Karibu (from a Swahili word meaning “welcome"), is an appropriate invitation to his unique appeal which includes virtuoso guitar playing and vocals in his native language. Loueke has already produced noteworthy recordings--Virgin Forest (Obliqsound, 2007), and brightened the recordings of up and coming artists such as singer ...

Herbie Hancock: River: The Joni Letters

by George Kanzler
March 6, 2008

The participation of such former and present Grammy nominees and winners as Norah Jones, Tina Turner, Corinne Bailey Rae, Luciana Souza and Leonard Cohen (reading “The Jungle Line" like a beat poet), as well as the iconic stature of Joni Mitchell herself, may have immeasurably helped in winning this CD the Grammy Album of the Year award. But that doesn't diminish the significance of it being the first jazz album to win the award in forty-three years. For make no ...

Herbie Hancock: River: The Joni Letters

by John Kelman
October 11, 2007

While it might be easy, on the surface, to view pianist Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters as a continuation of Possibilities (Hear, 2005), nothing could be further from the truth. Possibilities was an unapologetically pop record; River is unequivocally jazz--although such broad classifications shouldn't matter. River is, quite simply, a superb disc that takes Joni Mitchell's extant jazz proclivities and gives them an even greater interpretive boost. The majority of River is culled from Mitchell's “classic" songwriting ...

Lionel Loueke: Virgin Forest

by Terrell Kent Holmes
June 5, 2007

Guitarist/singer Lionel Loueke's Virgin Forest blends West African rhythms with standard jazz idioms, boiling down the music to its soul-catching essentials. Loueke sings and scats in Fon and Mina, languages from Benin and Mali, and his vocals and guitar playing are so seductive that one doesn't need to understand either to be drawn in. Even songs whose titles suggest minimal circumstances--"Kponnon Kpété (A Plastic Bag and 25 Cents) and “Madjigua (Wishing For Money)--burst with joy and energy, ...