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Today, WOMAD NEW ZEALAND releases the full three day festival schedule and as is tradition, it is brimming with the very best musicians from around the world with 32 musical acts across 24 countries represented over six stages.
Jojo Abbot is a Ghanaian artist creating art through travel and collaboration. Currently on her Spring Tour in the US promoting her first body of work, FYFYA WOTO, Abot starts strong with performances at the world famous Apollo Theater, Kings Theater with Ms Lauryn Hill and Brooklyn Museum. With a unique multimedia approach to her work expressed through immersive visuals and soundscapes, her provocative AFRO-HYPNO-SONIC sound and aesthetic creates a world all her own. Fusing elements of Afrobeat, reggae, electronica, jazz, soul and more, Abot represents an evolving expression with a truly global resonance.
Singer, composer, arranger and bandleader, Daymé Arocena was recently dubbed by The Guardian as ‘Cuba’s finest vocalist’. The young Afro-Cuban artist, mentored by Gilles Petersen and winner of the prestigious Juno Award in 2015, has a rich understanding of her heritage but is also constantly finding new musical inspiration and connection through her love of soul and jazz.
Cuban vocalist, arranger, composer, and choir director Daymé Arocena makes a soulful mix of jazz and neo-soul, rooted in the West African and Cuban Santeria tradition. Born in Havana in 1992, Arocena was raised in a Santeria household and listened to a broad range of sounds, from traditional Cuban and African music to jazz, soul, and pop. Growing up, she studied classical music and played a variety of instruments before settling on singing as her main focus. By age eight, Arocena was already singing and dancing professionally, and at age 14, she became lead singer with the big band Los Primos. While still in music school, she formed the all-girl jazz ensemble Alami.
Jane Bunnett & Maqueque After graduating as a choir director, Arocena and Alami were invited to perform at Havana's Jazz Plaza Festival by Cuba's Minister of Culture. It was during that performance that Arocena caught the ear of visiting Canadian jazz clarinetist Jane Bunnett. Bunnett then brought the young singer to Toronto to perform and featured her on her 2014 Cuban jazz album, Jane Bunnett & Maqueque. Also in 2014, Arocena collaborated with British DJ Gilles Peterson on his Havana Cultura Sessions project. She then signed to Peterson's London-based Brownswood Recordings label. In 2015, Arocena released her debut album, Nueva Era, with the EP One Takes arriving the following year. Her sophomore long-player, Cubafonía, arrived in 2017.
Chico Trujillo have been touring their explosive cocktail of party music around the world for almost 20 years. With a sound rooted in classic cumbia, they shake up the mix with reggae, bolero and rumba and draw on the energy and feistiness of their ska/punk past.
Chico Trujillo are a New cumbia band merging cumbia, ska, reggae and rock, among other styles. The band formed in 1999 in Villa Alemana, Zona Central, Chile, following a tour that lead singer Aldo Enrique Asenjo Cubillos - known as “Macha” - undertook with his then band La Floripondio through the cities of Germany, the Netherlands and Austria. Chico Trujillo’s first songs were born of jamming sessions with Asenjo and his friend Antonio Orellana, and their sound gradually attracted new members to the band. This lineup led to their first album, Chico Trujillo y la Señora Imaginación, in 2001.
Chico Trujillo has performed concerts at universities, musical venues, festivals and various events, including the Cumbre Guachaca Chilena at Estación Mapocho and concerts campaigning for the rights of the indigenous Mapuche.[3] They have also featured on the Lollapalooza music festival lineup in both Santiago and Chicago.[4]
Chico Trujillo has also gained a considerable following in Europe, in particular Germany.
Cameroonian singer/songwriter Blick Bassy was born in 1974 and grew up in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, but he came to appreciate his cultural heritage when he was sent to live with his grandparents in their village at the age of ten, learning about the Bassa culture of his ancestors. At 17, he formed his first band, Jazz Crew, following it with Macase in 1996. The latter group released the albums Etam (1999) and Doulou (2003). Bassy left Macase in 2005 and moved to Paris, where he freelanced as a musician with Manu Dibango, Cheick Tidiane Seck, Lokua Kanza, and Etienne Mbappe before getting a contract to make his first solo recording. His debut solo album, Léman (which means "mirror"), was released in the U.S. by Four Quarters on May 19, 2009. Two years later, he returned with Hongo Calling. Around this time, he relocated to Cantin, a small village in Northern France. In 2015, Bassy delivered his third full-length album and first for France's No Format label, Akö. He then spent much of the next several years touring heavily around the world.
Long one of the most influential and innovative figures on the U.K. reggae scene, producer Adrian Sherwood and his famed On-U Sound label pioneered a distinctive fusion of dub, rock, and dance that made waves not only in roots circles but also in the pop mainstream. Born in 1958, Sherwood first surfaced during the late '70s at the helm of a series of disastrously short-lived labels; he formed On-U Sound in 1979, and counted Creation Rebel, Prince Far I, Bim Sherman, and the Mothmen (later to form Simply Red) among the roster's earliest additions.
While the On-U Sound crew's original focus was on live sound system performances, the emphasis soon switched to making records; when none emerged as a breakout success, Sherwood began mixing and matching lineups, resulting in new acts including New Age Steppers, African Head Charge, Mark Stewart & Maffia, and Doctor Pablo & the Dub Syndicate.
Sherwood's distinctive production style soon began attracting interest from acts outside of the dub community, and in 1980 he helmed the Slits' "Man Next Door," followed a year later by the Fall's Slates EP. On-U Sound releases from Public Image Ltd. and the Pop Group also earned the label considerable attention, but reggae remained its focus; Sherwood soon recruited guitarist Skip McDonald, bassist Doug Wimbish, and drummer Keith LeBlanc -- together the onetime house band at the famed rap label Sugar Hill -- and under a variety of names (most commonly Tackhead), the trio brought new power and definition to the company's densely textured recordings. The group also issued several LPs under its own name, as well as teaming with the self-described "white toaster" Gary Clail as Gary Clail's Tackhead Sound System.
The mid-'80s, Sherwood was among the most visible producers and remixers in all of contemporary music, working on tracks for artists as varied as Depeche Mode, Einsturzende Neubaten, Simply Red, the Woodentops, and Ministry. He became increasingly involved in industrial music as the decade wore on, producing tracks for Cabaret Voltaire, Skinny Puppy, KMFDM, and Nine Inch Nails, and although On-U Sound continued to reflect its leader's eclectic tastes, the label remained a top reggae outlet. In 1994, Sherwood mounted Pressure Sounds, a new label dedicated to reissuing seminal reggae and dub releases from the likes of Lee "Scratch" Perry, King Tubby, Augustus Pablo, Jackie Mittoo, and Horace Andy. The first in a new series of reissues known collectively as On-U Sound Master Recordings, complete with CD-R tracks, arrived in 1997. In 2003, he launched his solo artist career with Never Trust a Hippy, which was followed in 2006 by Becoming a Cliché. Both were released by On-U in conjunction with the Real World label.
Sherwood collaborated with Lee "Scratch" Perry twice in 2010, first for the Mighty Upsetter album, followed by a remix collection taken from it entitled Dub Setter. In the summer of 2012, Sherwood resumed his own recording career with the release of a solo album, Survival & Resistance. A few years later, he began collaborating with dubstep originator Pinch (Robert Ellis).
Sherwood & Pinch's Late Night Endless appeared in 2015, followed by Man vs. Sofa in 2017. Both albums were co-released by On-U and Pinch's Tectonic. Also in 2017, Sherwood (billed as On-U Sound) teamed up with Coldcut for the full-length Outside the Echo Chamber. Released by Coldcut's rebooted Ahead of Our Time label, the album included guest appearances from Perry, Roots Manuva, Ce'cile, and others.
Thievery Corporation make abstract, instrumental, midtempo dance music whose classification falls somewhere between trip-hop and acid jazz. Featuring the production skills of Rob Garza and Eric Hilton, Thievery Corporation released several warmly received singles on their own Eighteenth Street Lounge (ESL) label (named after their own Washington, D.C. bar and nightclub) in 1996. Although previously known primarily among acid jazz and rare-groove DJs, the group shot to minor celebrity when a track from one of their early 12"s appeared on respected DJ/producers Kruder & Dorfmeister's mix session for Studio K7's DJ Kicks series. Similar in many respects to that Viennese production duo, Thievery Corporation subsequently grew in popularity among a wider audience of DJs and headphonauts.
The duo's debut LP, Sounds from the Thievery Hi-Fi, appeared in 1997, along with a compilation of Washington, D.C.-based electronica artists entitled Dubbed Out in DC (both albums were released by ESL). After signing with the British label 4AD, Thievery Corporation began to work on their second LP but were forced to postpone its release date after tapes were stolen in a mugging. The stopgap remix compilation Abductions & Reconstructions was released in 1999, and their second proper album, The Mirror Conspiracy, followed one year later. The duo's growing fame made them a natural choice to select tracks for the 2001 Verve compilation Sounds from the Verve Hi-Fi.
They returned to their own work in 2002 with The Richest Man in Babylon, and the mix album Outernational Sound and remix EP Babylon Rewound both appeared in 2004. That same year, the track "Lebanese Blonde" was featured in the highly successful Garden State soundtrack, which later won a Grammy Award. Released in 2005, The Cosmic Game featured guest vocalists Perry Farrell, the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne, and David Byrne, and the remix compilation Versions followed in 2006. As election season approached, Thievery Corporation released the politically minded studio effort Radio Retaliation in September 2008. Featuring a guest appearance from Mr. Lif, Culture of Fear arrived in 2011 and mixed social commentary with dub tracks. Their 2014 release, Saudade, turned their music in a different direction, being a bossa nova-based effort with guest vocalists like LouLou Ghelichkhani, Karina Zeviani, and Elin Melgarejo. For their eighth studio album, 2017's Temple of I & I, the duo temporarily relocated to Jamaica, where they could fully channel their dub/reggae influences into the recording process.
Kamasi Washington didn't pick up a saxophone until he was 13 years old, but by that point, he'd already been playing several other instruments. That's when he found his calling. Within a couple years, he was the lead tenor saxophonist at Hamilton High School Music Academy in his native Los Angeles. After graduation, he attended UCLA to study ethnomusicology. While enrolled at UCLA, he recorded a self-titled album with Young Jazz Giants, a quartet he had formed with Cameron Graves and brothers Ronald Bruner, Jr. and Stephen "Thundercat" Bruner, released in 2004.
After the Disco From that point on, Washington continually performed and recorded with an impressive variety of major artists across several genres, including Snoop Dogg, Raphael Saadiq, Gerald Wilson, McCoy Tyner, George Duke, and PJ Morton. He self-released a handful of his own albums from 2005 through 2008 while also performing and recording as one-third of Throttle Elevator Music. In 2014 alone, Washington demonstrated tremendous range with appearances on Broken Bells' After the Disco, Harvey Mason's Chameleon, Stanley Clarke's Up, and Flying Lotus' You're Dead!, among other albums that covered indie rock, contemporary and progressive jazz, and experimental electronic music.
The following year, Washington contributed to Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly and released The Epic on Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder label. An expansive triple album nearly three hours in duration, it involved the other three-fourths of Young Jazz Giants -- by then part of his larger collective, alternately known as the Next Step and West Coast Get Down -- and a string orchestra and choir conducted by Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. A critical and commercial success, The Epic landed at number three on Billboard's jazz chart.
Washington toured the U.S., played dates in Europe and Japan, and continued session work with contributions to albums by Terrace Martin, Carlos Niño, John Legend, Run the Jewels, and Thundercat, all while continuing to tour. Washington debuted the six-song project at the Whitney Biennial in March along with a film by A.G. Rojas and artwork by Amani Washington. In early 2017, Washington premiered Harmony of Difference, an original six-movement suite, as part of the Whitney Biennial, and compiled that recording for a six-track, 13-minute EP -- his first original music since The Epic two years earlier. Issued in September, Harmony of Difference explored the philosophical possibilities of counterpoint. Composed as a suite, it contains five separate movements and a sixth, "Truth," as a finale, that includes tenets and themes from its predecessors. Here's that single - Truth
The CoffeeBar Kid was honored to interview writer and traveler Ruth Hobday, who along with Geoff Blackwell and Photographer Kieran Scott visit 200 women around the globe to hear their unique stories. As part of the promotion of this book Groove is giving away an autographed copy - listen to the interview and leave a comment on our facebook page.
Creating a truly genre spanning album influenced by jazz, blues, folk, swing and all things American Roots, The Frank Burkitt Band is releasing their brand new album Raconteur on March 9th 2018.
And in celebration, they’re taking the album on the road on a 10-date tour of New Zealand in April.
Playing from Wellington to Auckland and everywhere in between, the Raconteur tour will be the first time since 2016 audiences will get to experience The Frank Burkitt Band’s unique on stage act.
The four-piece band can’t be pinned to just one genre; their matchless sound spans many musical varieties creating an aural feast for their audiences.
Raconteur is an album filled with truly wonderful moments indicative of Burkitt’s ability to not only convey profound messages but entertaining anecdotes in his songs and they cannot wait to bring the album to life on stage around New Zealand.
“Touring New Zealand is one of the best things a musician like me can do. Great venues, beautiful locations and audiences who love good song-writing. I have made so many great friends whilst touring in the past and can’t wait to make some new ones this time around. Can’t wait to unleash Raconteur to the world too”.
THE FRANK BURKITT BAND – RACONTEUR TOUR APRIL 2018
Thursday 5th San Fran Wellington (with Bill Hickman)
Friday 6th Globe Theatre Palmerston North
Saturday 7th 4th Wall Theatre New Plymouth
Thursday 12th The Boathouse Nelson (with Kim Bonnington)
Saturday 14th Murchison Theatre Murchison
Sunday 15th Blue Smoke Christchurch (with Adam McGrath)
Thursday 19th Common Room Hastings
Friday 20th Nivara Lounge Hamilton
Saturday 21st Vic Theatre Auckland (with Albi and the Wolves)
Sorry, folks. One of our pesky lil' groover-gremlins has tripped the big switch. We're putting on the overalls, strapping on the utility belt and going in. We hope to be back up and going very soon. In the meantime trying humming a little Sinatra!
Don't forget Groove is also available on Tune-In Radio App - search for 'Groove 107.7FM' or in the 'Local Radio' section if you are in Wellington.
Tui Award–wining Kiwi jazz ensemble The Jac share some behind the scenes highlights from their recent tour of South Korea, including a performance at the prestigious Jarasum International Jazz Festival. Read more here
Drums + Sax = Drax
In more local jazz-guys-done-good news, Drax Project are enjoying some great buzz as the opening act for Lorde's recent New Zealand tour, and commercial radio airplay with their new single Woke Up Late.
These NZ School of Music jazz grads (bar one), are getting ready to launch their debut album early next year and pumping up the volume in two great gigs in the closing nights of the New Zealand Festival. Read more here
Cécile McLorin Salvant: Dreams and Daggers
The Dominion Post music reviewer Colin Morris shares his thoughts on Cécile McLorin Salvant's new album, Dreams and Daggers. Our friends in the know tell us her upcoming 2018 New Zealand Festival gig is selling fast – so book before Christmas to secure your seat! Click here to read more
And finally, Get your 2018 dairies out! Summer might be now, but we're looking forward to a jazz hot winter at next year's Wellington Jazz Festival, 6-10 June 2018 and tickets for the big headliners go on sale 26 March.
Groove is New Zealand's only Cafe Style Jazz Radio Station. Also the only locally owned & operated, independent commercial radio station in Wellington. We specialise in Lounge, Swing, Classic Jazz, Blues, Acid Jazz, Funk, Soul and anything with a Groove. We also champion local artists, DJs, funk collectives - anyone who makes groovy music. We love to help the local community including on-air messages and broadcasting live at events. We want all Groovers, young and old to live and breathe the vibe in Wellington's funky, vibrant city. Groove is your soundtrack. Tune in here or on the Tunein mobile app (Search for Groove 107.7FM or Stations in Wellington NZ). We're not currently broadcasting on FM but hope to be back as soon as we get some sponsorship for a new transmission site. Are you in business? We are also the most cost effective way to reach the people with style & money in New Zealand via radio. To find out more about our advertising deals, click on the link above.
