Among the international artists merging jazz and their native cultures is the Beninese guitarist Lionel Loueke.
LIONEL LOUEKE, a guitarist from the West African country of Benin, was a spellbinding presence at Joe’s Pub a couple of months ago as he started into the title track of “Karibu,” his exceptional major-label debut. His long fingers flickered across the strings, eliciting not just a syncopated groove but also a shifting undergrowth of chords. He was just as busy vocally, clicking his tongue in percussive counterpoint, singing phrases in a floating cadence. It all felt rooted in African folk traditions but also cosmopolitan, progressive, harmonically fluid.
Nate Chinen Interviews Lionel Loueke (mp3)
The Panamanian pianist Danilo Pérez.
Mr. Loueke, 34, has quickly earned a reputation in jazz circles as a startlingly original voice, the kind of player who gets others talking. He made a splash five years ago as a sideman with the trumpeter Terence Blanchard, and now he tours and records with the pianist Herbie Hancock. When Blue Note signed him last year, it confirmed what many already knew: He’s one of the most striking jazz artists to emerge in some time.
“Among the young musicians I’ve heard recently, he is the one that stands out for me,” Mr. Hancock said. Mr. Hancock appears on “Karibu,” which is out on Tuesday, along with another jazz legend, the saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter.
Over the last decade or so there has been a proliferation of international artists dealing seriously with jazz without tuning out their native cultures. Consider Mr. Loueke’s band mates, who performed with him at Joe’s Pub: the bassist Massimo Biolcati grew up in Sweden and Italy, and the drummer Ferenc Nemeth is from Hungary. A short list of others would include the Cuban drummers Dafnis Prieto and Francisco Mela, the Puerto Rican saxophonists David Sánchez and Miguel Zenón, and the Israeli clarinetist and saxophonist Anat Cohen. What’s striking about these musicians is the elasticity of their approaches. They have shown that jazz can assume a range of dialects without losing its essence.
“There’s a line of thought that is growing,” said Danilo Pérez, a Panamanian pianist and composer whose 2000 album, “Motherland,” can rightly be considered a touchstone for the current generation of jazz hybridists. “People are coming to jazz with open ears and a perspective from their own place.”
Those variegated perspectives have already had an impact on the sound of jazz. To be a capable young jazz musician today is to be comfortable with virtually any groove, however complex or asymmetrical, and conversant in folk and pop dialects from several continents. Remarkably, for a genre so frequently described as America’s indigenous art form, jazz is now unmistakably a global proposition, in terms of aesthetics as well as audience.
Jazz has always been a polyglot music, informed not only by the folkloric music of Africa and the Caribbean but also by the pluralism of places where such traditions commingle. (Havana had a formative influence on the music, along with New Orleans, Chicago and New York.) Latin jazz essentially proposes its own rich history, running parallel to the mainstream jazz lineage, with which it often intersects.
Mr. Loueke engages with the jazz tradition itself, in his own fashion. “Jazz is a language,” he said at a cafe near Union Square a couple of months ago, after his most recent trip to Benin, where he goes once a year to visit family. “I have my accent, I have my way to choose different words. But most important for me is to understand that language.”
Many of his peers have a similar mind-set. “The people who have been most successful in these cross-cultural combinations are as rooted in the jazz tradition as they are in their own traditions,” said Mr. Zenón, whose fourth album, “Awake,” is due out on Marsalis Music next week. “There’s all this stuff that’s already there, that you don’t have to think about. Then you’re adding all the stuff that you’ve learned.”
That was certainly the case for Mr. Loueke, who now lives in North Bergen, N.J., with his wife, Benedicta, and their two small children. He grew up in an intellectual middle-class household — his father was a mathematics professor, his mother a grade-school teacher — and he played in traditional Beninese percussion groups from an early age.
He also absorbed both Afro-pop, owing to the influence of a guitar-playing older brother, and sambas, owing to the vestigial Portuguese-Brazilian presence in his mother’s coastal village. (Benin, now home to one of Africa’s more stable democracies, figured prominently in the Atlantic slave trade.) A Hybridist Jamming With the World
He didn’t pick up the guitar until he was 17. “Benin has no native guitar style,” he said. “We have some distinct rhythms, and the traditional singing is unique. But the guitar, it all comes from Nigeria, Mali, Congo, Zaire.”
The Israeli clarinetist Anat Cohen.
Nate Chinen Interviews Lionel Loueke (mp3)
As an aspiring guitarist, he was voracious in his tastes: “I really checked out music from the whole continent.”
After hearing a George Benson CD, he developed a similar curiosity about jazz. It didn’t take him long to draw a parallel between jazz soloing and the improvised vocalization of West African griots. He also heard in jazz an elusive groove that animates African music: “There are things you can’t write on the paper, how it feels.”
So the nuance of swing is no less subtle than, say, the lilt of Malian kora music. And just as impossible to notate.
In 1990 Mr. Loueke left Benin to study music in Ivory Coast, but jazz was not a part of his training there. That really began a few years later, when he moved to Paris to attend an American-affiliated conservatory. There he first heard albums by contemporary guitarists like Pat Metheny and Bill Frisell, studying them closely. And after graduating, he received a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where his teachers soon began telling him he was unique.
There is no way to assess the globalization of jazz without acknowledging the influence of an institution like Berklee, which directs resources toward recruiting and scholarships abroad.
“Domestic Caucasian students are a distinct minority at Berklee,” Roger Brown, the school’s president, said. “Our students can’t leave here without having been exposed to what an Argentine musician or a Norwegian musician or a Malaysian musician brings to the equation.” (When Mr. Pérez, who is on the faculty at Berklee and the New England Conservatory, recorded his composition “Panama Suite” recently with a group of students from both schools, he counted musicians from 11 countries among them.)
Mr. Loueke met Mr. Biolcati and Mr. Nemeth at Berklee, and they struck an immediate rapport, partly because all three were engrossed in African music. They formed an African-infected collective trio called Gilfema, and in 2001 they separately auditioned for the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance, a postgraduate program then based in Los Angeles that selects a handful of students every other year.
All of them were accepted. The admission panel included Mr. Blanchard (the program’s artistic director), Mr. Hancock (the institute’s chairman) and Mr. Shorter.
“My first impression was, I’ve never heard anybody play the guitar like that,” Mr. Hancock recalled. Mr. Blanchard was just as impressed; within a year, he brought Mr. Loueke into his band.
The jazz world was then in the process of becoming especially receptive to cross-pollination, thanks partly to a surge of interest among artists born and raised in the United States. Some of these, like the pianists Myra Melford and Jason Lindner, have pushed beyond eclecticism toward some kind of authority. Others, like the alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa and the pianist Vijay Iyer, both of Indian descent, and the trumpeter Amir ElSaffar, who is Iraqi-American, have used jazz as a means of exploring their heritage.
Audiences and consumers, meanwhile, were growing steadily more accustomed to global influences. And grant-bestowing organizations were rewarding work with a multicultural bent.
Against this backdrop the new crop of international artists has received perhaps an unprecedented degree of support. Ms. Cohen, the Israeli clarinetist, reflected recently that the jazz musicians of a generation ago faced more rigid expectations: “You had to cut it. And all the other people making music that is more today’s norm, they were really outsiders.”
Ms. Cohen, whose profile in New York includes prewar swing as well as Brazilian choro and her own material, added that in Israel she played mostly Dixieland and big band jazz; her world-music pursuits really began after she arrived at Berklee.
Mr. Loueke’s last album — “Virgin Forest,” released on ObliqSound in 2006 — was a whirlwind tour through his world, featuring the singer Gretchen Parlato (another Monk Institute peer) and a percussion ensemble recorded in Benin. “Karibu” stakes a stronger claim as a jazz record (as opposed to a “world-jazz” record), with its abstraction of the John Coltrane ballad “Naima” and a reinvention of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark.”
Both of those tracks reflect Mr. Loueke’s cultural vantage, notably with respect to rhythm. But any jazz fan with a modern inclination will recognize the searching spirit behind the music. That impulse has been jazz’s perpetual challenge and great constant, from the very beginning.
In this sense the greater pull of artists like Mr. Loueke can be understood in the jazz realm not only as transformative but also as true to the tradition. Not everyone will see it this way — jazz has an avid and well-informed conservative constituency — but Mr. Hancock does.
“His scope is so broad,” he said of Mr. Loueke. “He draws on his African heritage. He’s comfortable in the area of electronics, with a more acoustic style of playing, with a Spanish style, a Brazilian style. But he brings new things to the table.”
He added: “If what Lionel is showing is a reflection of a growing trend of musicians to be open and influenced by a broader palette of cultures, it’s a very healthy one, and one that will continue to keep jazz alive into the future.”
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