Richard Bona comes from a tiny village in Cameroon, and now makes his home in the great cities and concert halls of the world. It wasn’t good luck that opened all these doors. At every turn, it was Bona’s outsized talent, intense concentration, and fierce determination that propelled him into an ever-expanding universe, beyond the confines of musical or cultural boundaries.
Today, Bona is a singer/songwriter, bass player, composer, bandleader, and digital and analog engineer/producer with a singular artistic vision. Behind these achievements lies a storybook life. Born in the village of Minta in 1967, Bona was a baby who cried all the time, and the family soon discovered that the one thing that calmed him was music.
By the age of five he was playing the balafon (a wooden-slatted melodic percussion instrument) in his grandfather’s traditional music band. At eleven, his family moved to the capital city, Douala, where he became an in-demand dance band guitarist before discovering and quickly mastering the language of jazz—at just fourteen.
Bona moved to Paris in 1989 and New York in 1995, establishing in these two cities a reputation as one of the most exciting jazz bass players on the planet. And all this before he began his solo recording career with Scenes from My Life in 1999. Now Bona’s seventh solo album, Bonafied, an intimate, mostly acoustic, multi-genre set of songs, offers personal stories, tributes, philosophy based in lifelong love of nature, and a spirit of musical adventurism that just won’t quit.
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Discography
Richard Bona, 3 August 2006
