This is the first album from my new project, “Heavy Rain, Heavy Sun”.
This musical collection represents the convergence of two journeys in my life.
The first: In the late 1990s, I was extremely fortunate to be part of Mac Tontoh’s final band, the Kete Warriors. Mac was a founder member of the band Osibisa, which enjoyed worldwide fame in the 1970s.
The second: For the last eight years or more, I have been studying the Japanese shakuhachi, under the tutelage of Mende Ryuzan, a former student of Katsuya Yokoyama.
Recently, my experiences with the Kete Warriors in Ghana and on tour in the UK have been on my mind, and I wanted to see if what I had learned about west African rhythms would work as a fusion with Japanese scales and the shakuhachi.
I’ve found this experiment very rewarding – it feels like a starting point. As I write this the world is struggling to overcome the Coronavirus pandemic, but when we come out on the other side I hope to form a band to play this material live.