Bona Voyage

Richard Bona Plays NCPA


Once upon a lifetime, comes a moment when all the beauty of the world can be encapsulated into a single note of music…

A singular strain that ebbs and flows through the whole range of human emotion, until the collective soul resonates at the same frequency, and the sheer power of that moment simply drenches all who are fortunate to be in it. Such was the power of Richard Bona’s performance at the NCPA Bombay on Friday evening. It was as if God was in our presence. It was as though the angels had perched themselves along the dome walls of the auditorium, and were watching over us.

Attempts to describe the phenomenon called Richard Bona have been made before, usually all gushing in superlatives of some form or another. Of all that’s been said before, here is one that comes somewhat close- "Imagine an artist with Jaco Pastorious's virtuosity, George Benson's vocal fluidity, Joao Gilberto's sense of song and harmony, all mixed up with African culture. Ladies and gentlemen, we bring you Richard Bona!"—Los Angeles Times

A brief historical interlude- The grandson of a famous percussionist and singer, Richard Bona was born in 1967 in Minta, a village in the center of Cameroon. He was eleven when he went to Douala with his father; the sprawling, sea-port city was the second largest in the country, with almost two million inhabitants. He immediately got himself a job as guitar player in a dance group. Subsequently, the French owner of a local club gave him the task of setting up a little, jazz-inspired group and he was entrusted with a collection of some five hundred vinyl albums so that he could soak it all in. Richard discovered jazz, the freedom, complexity and virtuosity of the music invented by the American descendants of his forebears. It was how Bona came across the Jaco Pastorius album, the one with his name on it (Jaco Pastorius, Columbia 1976). Before Jaco, he had never even thought of playing bass. Before long, he was playing electric bass with a dexterity hitherto unknown to the local Douala jazz circuit. Cleary, the influence was strong enough to hold. Years later, Billboard magazine said of Bona, “Richard Bona is the hottest electric bass player since Jaco Pastorius – and the first since that past master with the potential for solo stardom.”

In 1989, when he was 22, Bona left Africa for Paris, where he quickly built a solid reputation playing with Didier Lockwood, Marc Fosset and André Ceccarelli, and taking part in studio sessions with musicians of the stature of Manu Dibango, Salif Keita and another Weather Report stalwart, Joe Zawinul (My People, 1992.) Richard crossed the ocean in 1995 and settled in Manhattan. He hooked up with Joe Zawinul again, and was invited to accompany him on a world tour. As fate would have it, Bona surfaced as the legendary Harry Belafonte’s musical director, bassist and arranger. A fabulous eighteen month collaboration ensued, as Richard Bona grew from strength to strength as one of the most in-demand collaborators in the circuit.
He has worked with a virtual who’s who of artists, and is one of the most widely respected solo performers in the world music/jazz circuit today.

And it’s easy to see why. Bona’s band was as eclectic as his musical antecedents. The drummer is Cuban, the percussionist Columbian, while the keyboard player and trumpet player are inner city New York. His lead guitarist looked like he was from Tel Aviv, and really underage, although he played a mean axe when called upon. And of course to round out the sextet, on bass guitar, vocals, whistles, pedals, finger-tapping and sheer genius, one Richard Bona.

The breathtaking array of musical styles left us dizzy and out of breath pretty much from the word go. This music was beyond nomenclature. It could just as easily be jazz, as it could be pop, or latin, or bossa nova, or simply earth. In one masterful a-capella, Bona started off a song by saying he would be performing an Indian song, while his band sauntered offstage. He started off with a beat, recorded a bass line over it, programmed that bit, and kept adding layer after layer of sound to this to build up to a crescendo that sounded like a 50 man chorus singing. This song was over seven thousand years old, he said, and that’s why we had all forgotten it…

On bass, Bona was simply masterful. It was reminiscent of Jaco in his heydey. But when those bass lines were punctuated by the range of his vocal scatting, it was simply mesmeric. The crowd literally gasped and gushed at every turn, sometimes breaking into involuntary cheer in mid-song. It was that hard to contain one’s emotions.

And then it happened. That singular moment. The band, the audience, the angels, even the constantly coughing uncle in the second last row. The note passed like electricity through each one of us, and held us together for what seemed like an eternity, but was actually just a moment in time. And then we erupted with the joy that each one of us knew we had felt, and shared together.

HE was surely here…