FULA FLUTE TRIBUTE TO OBAMA
Photos of Kakande with Mory Kante at Zanzibar in Washington DC
Fula Flute: "Djandjou"
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Listen to a performance by the David Rogers Quintet of my composition
Le Gros Be-Jean recorded live at Barbes on Feb. 9th 2007:
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The Best Thing Since Fula FLute!!!
Member Since: 1/10/2007
Band Website: www.fulaflute.net
Band Members: Me, moi and I.
Influences: Thelonious Monk, Sayyd Abdul Al-Khabbyyr, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Don Cherry, Bach, Hubert Laws, Karl Berger, Collin Walcott, Nana Vasconcelos, Steve Lacy, Cecil Taylor, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Baden Powell, Gato Babieri, Kante Manfila, El Hadj Djeli Sory Kouyate, Kikala Diakite, Alain Bergeron, Mamady Mansare, Bailo Bah, Famoro Dioubate, Keba Cissoko, Boris Vian, Robert Charlebois, Yaya Diallo, Felix Leclerc, Chuby Checker, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Ian Anderson... and more.
Fulani flutist bewitches in twilight serenade
Daily Freeman, Tuesday Morning, June 25, 1996 - LIFE - Music Review - Page 7 (Kingston, NY)
by Kitty Montgomery, reviewer
WOODSTOCK — Accompanied by the waterfall tumble of hermit thrush song, Sylvain Leroux’s timeless wind-painting on Fulani traditional flute bewitched listeners inside Mountain View Studio - and out- in a twilight performance that carried into the hills Saturday evening.
The particular hill nearest this performance space is the resting place of some of Woodstock’s most discerning spirits — the Artist’s Cemetery. Once flutist Harvey Sollberger, a legend among America’s musical avant garde, led 20 students from his FluteFarm at Creative Music Studio to serenade the great Georges Barrere at his gravesite, just about level with Mountain View’s current roof top. What the spirit of this French flutist extraordinaire thought of Sollberger’s pensive tribute we don’t know, but Leroux’s pipings must have confused him.
Leroux, a native of Montreal who’s branched from jazz to master an instrument indigenous to Guinea, West Africa, achieves the free flight most classical flute players touch only momentarily in a lifetime of playing.
Taught by Mandingo musicians in Guinea, including Mamady Mansare, flutist with the Ballets Africains, the lesson Leroux shares with audiences is that, given the absence of cerebral separation in music — into notes, lines, aesthetic shaping — paradise is where you’re at for the duration of a tune. In the Fulani tradition, carried on by the Manding, music is not intended as a pretty pursuit. The flute song is the last voice of a nomadic people, once the Songhai Empire until they were conquered/ Sorrow sometimes shades the flow — a touch of Paradise Lost - but never arrests it. Leroux plays his own heart as he performs — a perpetual motion organ that regenerates as it spends.The songs are distinctly evocative — multi-colored as iridescent cloth, with centered deep tone, a slipping silver vibe and a flow flow that envelops like a tropical mountain stream.
In the midst of Fulani/Mandingo songs, Leroux played a familiar J.S. Bach sonata on classic flute as an epiphany. Roll over, Barrere here is the musical brook as this composer intended it to run - free.
Traditional French-Canadian songs have a Baroque haunt, and one had a sense of witnessing the revelation of a tradition’s source. Leroux’s original tunes lit by the multiple musical influences of his life, were an update on the man’s total beautific trip.