Banning Eyre - THE MATRIX

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Banning Eyre

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Who I Am & Where I Live:

Name: Banning Eyre
City: Middletown, CT
Country: United States

My Life

Biographical: Banning Eyre is a writer, guitarist, photographer and producer. He has written about international music, especially African music, since 1988. During all that time, he has been a lead producer for the syndicated, Peabody Award-winning public radio program Afropop Worldwide. He also comments and reports on music for National Public Radio's All Things Considered, and has contributed over the years to The Boston Phoenix, Guitar Player, Global Rhythm, fRoots (Folk Roots), Songlines, The Beat, CD Now, CMJ, salon.com, Music Alive, New Music Monthly, Music Hound and All Music Guides and other publications. He has traveled and done music research in 16 African countries, as well as in the Caribbean, South America and Europe. In 1995, Eyre co-authored AFROPOP! An Illustrated Guide to Contemporary African Music with Sean Barlow. Eyre's acclaimed book focussed on Malian guitar styles, In Griot Time, An American Guitarist in Mali, was released by Temple University Press (2000) and in the UK on Serpent's Tail (2002). The companion CD Eyre compiled, In Griot Time, String Music from Mali, was released on Stern's Africa.

Eyre spent a month in Zimbabwe in 2001--his fourth visit there--and wrote a report on music censorship there for the Danish human rights organization, Freemuse. The report, Playing With Fire, Fear and Self-Censorship in Zimbabwean Music, is available here. In Zimbabwe, Eyre has done especially deep research on the legendary bandleader, songwriter and music stylist Thomas Mapfumo--a figure of historic dimensions. All of this comes together in Eyre's 2015 book, Lion Songs: Thomas Mapfumo and the Music That Made Zimbabwe. Eyre has also produced a companion CD for the book--Thomas Mapfumo, Lion Songs: Essential Tracks in the Making of Zimbabwe.

Eyre has a background in technology; he worked for 10 years as a software technical writer in the Boston high-tech industry (1985-1995). He brings all of his skills to bear in his current work as the Senior Editor at afropop.org.

Eyre has played guitar professionally since the mid '70s, working in genres as diverse as jazz, flamenco, dance-rock and reggae. In the 1980s, he played guitar, wrote songs, performed and recorded in New Mexico, Oregon and Boston with The Porcupines and that band's offshoot, The Strunk and White Band. For the past twenty-five years, Eyre has specialized in guitar styles from Africa. In the early 1990's , Eyre played in a series of Congolese dance bands in Boston: Freestyle, Rumbafrica, Kolo Mboka and Sankai, and in the West African folk ensemble Cora Connection. Later, based in New York, Eyre formed ongoing collaborations with guitarist/singers Abdoluaye "Djoss" Diabate (Mali) and Abdoulaye Alhassane Toure (Niger).

Eyre has also applied what he learned in Zimbabwe, largely with Thomas Mapfumo and the guitarists of Mapfumo's band The Blacks Unlimited. The Glamour Boys was a New York based acoustic ensemble that combined traditional mbira music from Zimbabwe with guitar. In 2000, that act evolved into what is now Eyre's principal group, Timbila, a one-of-a-kind fusion of roots music from Zimbabwe and Mozambique with a New York sensibility.

Eyre also continues to perform solo concerts blending original compositions and adaptations of traditional and popular music from all over Africa. He calls this show, in all its various forms, "A Guitar Tour of Africa."

During his travels, Eyre has performed with The Super Rail Band of Bamako, Djelimady Tounkar, and Sali Sidibe (all from Mali), Wendo Kolosoy (Congo), and with Ephat Mujuru, Thomas Mapfumo and The Blacks Unlimited and others in Zimbabwe. He has contributed guitar performances to a number of Thomas Mapfumo albums, notably Chimurenga '98 (aNOnym reCOrds, 1998), Chimurenga Explosion (aNOnym reCOrds, 2000), Toi Toi (aNOnym reCOrds, 2003), and Exile (Chimurenga Music Co., 2010). A song he created with Mapfumo and his band in 1998, "Ndiayani Wapuradza Musha (Who Has Destroyed My Home?), became a hit on Zimbabwean radio. Eyre also played on a track on Taj Mahal and Toumani Diabate's Kulanjan (Hannibal, 1999), which was voted Folk Roots "Album of the Year" in the UK and cited by President Barack Obama as one of his favorite records.

Eyre teaches African guitar styles, both privately and in workshops. Eyre is also the author of an instructional book on African guitar called Guitar Atlas: Africa, published by Alfred in the summer of 2002.

My Media

Website: http://www.banningeyre.com
Website 2: http://afropop.org
Twitter: BanningEyre
Book Purchases: http://www.amazon.com/Banning-Eyre/e/B001K8LSRU
YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/afropopworldwide

Contact Information

Email: banning@afropop.org
Address: 183 Pearl St.
Middletown, CT 06457

Clips

Banning Eyre On Thomas Mapfumo
By Banning Eyre

15 views

THE MATRIX IS MUSICIAN / ARTIST RECOMMENDATIONS BY THE MOST POWERFUL, SOPHISTICATED & SUBTLE SOFTWARE YET DEVISED:

⇒ the minds of other artists

IT'S BASED IN BAHIA, GROUND ZERO FOR BRAZIL'S SUN-CARONA VIBRANT AFRO-BRAZILIAN CULTURE

⇒ ...rooted in a region called the Recôncavo, analogous in Brazil to the Mississippi Delta in the United States.

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⇒ To wherever people want to take it...

IT IS THE NEXT-STEP EVOLUTION OF A SPECIALTY RECORD SHOP

⇒ ...opened in Salvador to showcase magisterial musicians almost completely unknown to the world...many of them living in poverty or close to it and unable to avail themselves of traditional (and costly) means of publicizing.

PRE-BRAZIL — IN NEW YORK CITY — WE "RESCUED" UNPAID ROYALTIES FOR PERFORMERS & COMPOSERS INCLUDING:

⇒ Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand, Led Zeppelin, Philip Glass, Mongo Santamaria, Airto Moreira, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Jim Hall, Taj Mahal, Robb Royer of Bread, Speedo & the Cadillacs, and many more! With Speedo's (Earl Carroll) amazing story (kid singing on the streetcorners of Harlem to doo-wop fame to working as a beloved school janitor) I learned (as Quincy Jones had figured out decades before) that greatness and fame are completely independent. The wave repeated here in Brazil with Raimundo Sodré, who went from zero to national fame and back to zero.

HENCE A (and so far the world's only) SMALL WORLD CURATION NETWORK...

⇒ A wave of Exu's cyberwand opening pathways allowing ANY ARTIST — FAMOUS OR NOT — in ANY FIELD — in ANY PLACE in the world — to potentially be reached by ANYBODY from ANYWHERE. (Exu -- eh-SHOO -- is the Afro-Brazilian deity responsible for opening pathways.)

BY WHAT WIZARDRY?

⇒ We've all heard of six degrees of separation, more properly called a small world network. Within six or so steps we can move through a chain of people knowing other people to just about anybody on the planet.

SIMPLY CHANGE "KNOW" TO "RECOMMEND"

⇒ In exactly the same way, step by step we can move through chains of ARTISTS CURATING ARTISTS to to just about any artist on the planet.

LIKE THIS...

⇒ From Quincy Jones we access one of his protégés, stellar young Cuban pianist Alfredo Rodriguez. From Alfredo Rodriguez we access a fabulous multinstrumentalist Alfredo plays with, Munir Hossn. Two more steps and we've reached the above-mentioned Raimundo Sodré, formerly virtually unreachable in Bahia...

Raimundo Sodré Now

Dengo

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DICTATED SILENCE

⇒ Sodré's meteoric major-label career was crushed by the Brazilian dictatorship years ago and he was forced to flee Brazil under threat of death...into a 19 year exile. He became almost impossible to find and hear, even after returning to Brazil.

MUSIC FALLS LIKE RAIN

⇒ But now lines of everbranching interlinked recommendations rise from Bahia to form a (small world) network rounding the planet like the arboreal canopy of a vast Amazonian rainforest. When the dictatorship ground Sodré into the dust, they unwittingly planted a seed.

FROM SODRÉ, A WORLDLINE TO SPLENDID BULE BULE (LEATHER HAT) ABOVE... AND TO OTHERS IN THE CLIP...

⇒ "The time has arrived for these people of color to show their worth ... I want to see Uncle Sam play tambourine so the whole world can samba!"

AND FROM BULE ON...

⇒ ...tendrils twining through urban centers and beautiful backwaters... through New York boroughs, Burkina Faso... County Clare... Cape Town...

THROUGH ARTISTS ACROSS THE BOARD

⇒ ...writers, journalists, photographers, painters, illustrators, architects, choreographers, filmmakers...

IS THE MATRIX AN ALTERNATE REALITY?

⇒ Only if your reality has been defined by corporate mass media. The original meaning of "matrix" is "source", from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!

DOES THE MATRIX WATCH YOU?

⇒ Zero surreptitious tracking, data mining and data brokerage per Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, et al.