![]() ![]() But you did not pursue the path of a jazz performer. And that's really how the music took hold of me, and what I am today.ĭF: As a teenager hanging out at the legendary jazz club Ronnie Scott's, you were meeting American icons like Benny Carter and Ray Brown. So from 11, 12, 13, I was seeing Ray Charles, I was seeing B.B. And he was a freak of nature: he loved Black music, and he allowed our relationship to form under the fusion of Black musics. ![]() So this incredible man called Thomas Blowfield took me in, adopted me. And a year and a bit after that, my mother was deported back to Nigeria. My mother, when we moved to London, got married to a beautiful English man called Roger Harrington. MM: Well, it all goes back to a great man, a white man called Thomas Blowfield, who was basically a father figure. What were you looking for when you built the Shakes? ![]() Your band mixes elements of jazz, funk, African music, and more - there's even a tap dancer in the lineup. Wynton came to play there, and brought a lot of support to the community I was building there, and then asked me to come to Jazz at Lincoln Center to try to do something similar in creating a kind of vibration, and a movement of sorts, within Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola.ĭF: And then you formed your band, Mwenso and the Shakes, who'll be performing on Wednesday at The Greene Space. He allowed me and believed in me in a certain way to bring me from Ronnie Scott's, which is where I was already building a community. So I stalked him, in a certain way, and he basically empowered my life, and so many others out here. And I think that's still very much how it is for today. And if you wanted to be about jazz music and be serious, you find him. and I don't even think just if you were Black, but I was Black and I was young in London, England, I was 14, 15 years old. What kind of things were you doing there? In Africa, it's just around you in a certain way.ĭF: You came to New York City after connecting with Wynton Marsalis, and you started working for Jazz at Lincoln Center. It has nothing to do with hustling and being out here, using it in a way as money and stuff. MM: In Africa, and in other cultures and traditions, it was based on how we honor the gods, how we deal with ceremonial traditions, how we deal with actually bringing people together. Was music a big part of your household, growing up? But what if we thought about it like you need it just like water, that you need it just like to eat? So it's actually trying to change the way people think about music, and thinking of it more as a thing that you need daily, something that can help your intellectual and spiritual development, the way that we grow as human beings.ĭF: You grew up in Sierra Leone. Michael Mwenso: You know, we think about music as an extra activity. David Furst: This series is rooted in your vision of Black music as healing and nourishing. ![]()
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