Out of Africa

In early October, just after concluding two concerts in Kuwait City with Herbie Hancock and two weeks before embarking on a month of European one-nighters with Dave Holland’s Aziza quartet, Lionel Loueke was on the phone from Switzerland. The subject was his 2018 release, The Journey (Aparté), which contains 15 of the guitarist/singer’s compositions. Some are instrumental, but on most Loueke applies his lilting tenor to lyrics in Fon, French, Mina, and Yoruba, all languages spoken in his homeland, Benin, on the Atlantic coast of equatorial Africa.

“I was thinking about this project for a long time,” said Loueke, who’d spent the day teaching at the Jazz Campus of Musik Akademie Basel. “I wanted to do an acoustic, melody-oriented project that mixed all my influences from the beginning to where I am today, combining classical musicians and instruments with traditional instruments from Africa and jazz musicians in the most organic possible way.”

The album’s title is as multi-layered as its contents. On one level, it’s about why so many Africans have decided to leave their homes and take the perilous journey to Europe—and the stark conditions they face upon arrival. Loueke frames this story of modern migration within a succession of lovely melodies, orchestrated by Robert Sadin, a favored collaborator of Herbie Hancock () and Wayne Shorter (), and interpreted by a cohort of virtuosos from the U.S., Europe, Brazil, the Caribbean, and West Africa.