THE WORLD IN NEW YORK
Three women's voices in world music - live performances by Angélique Kidjo, Yungchen Lhamo, and Susan McKeown.
World Financial
Center Winter Garden
Wednesday, November 1st at 7PM
220 Vesey Street
Battery Park City Directions
Admission FREE
» New Sounds Live 2006-2007 Concert Season
Singers Angelique Kidjo, Yungchen Lhamo and Susan McKeown have achieved international acclaim as musicians whose work incorporates their native traditions. They bring us music from Benin, Tibet, and Ireland - without ever leaving New York. All three are now city residents (in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan, respectively). This New Sounds Live concert, "The World in New York," is a unique triple bill featuring music by these three remarkable women.
Grammy-nominated songstress Angelique Kidjo has stirred up the West African traditions of her childhood in Benin with styles as diverse as Caribbean zouk, Congolese rumba, Jazz, Gospel, and Latin groove and shaken them together with her childhood idols Bella Bellow, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, Miriam Makeba and Carlos Santana. From records that take Brazil’s Bahia region and explore connections with her native Benin, to others that link Congolese rumba and West African balofon, or dig into African roots in music from the United States, there’s a unique soulfulness to all she’s done. While she often utilizes Benin's traditional Zilin vocal technique and jazz vocalese, Kidjo is fluent in and sings in English, French, and African languages Yoruba and Fon.
Kidjo is the daughter of a performer; she started early with her mother's theatre troupe, eventually singing professionally by her twentieth birthday. Although she recorded an album with a hit single in the early eighties, due to political conflicts in Benin, Kidjo relocated to Paris. By the end of that decade, she had become one of the city’s most popular live performers. With some 6 or 7 albums still in print, throughout her career, she has collaborated with a diverse group of international artists like Santana, Dave Matthews, and Gilberto Gil. She is married to musician and producer Jean Hebrail with whom she has daughter Naïma-Laura (born 1993), and is currently based in New York. Kidjo’s next record is due out in 2007.
Her name means "Goddess of Song," and she has become the leading female vocalist from Tibet, a place that she fled on foot in 1989 at age 23, via the perilous navigation of the Himalayas in order to escape the oppressive Chinese regime governing the region. For the next four years Lhamo toured Tibetan refugee camps in India, working and singing and learning more Tibetan music. She finally met the Dalai Lama and was encouraged to use her vocal gifts to make the world more aware of the Tibetan problem. She moved to Australia in 1993, then to New York City in 2000. Lhamo has toured the world, singing unaccompanied a combination of songs of her own composition and traditional Buddhist chants and mantras. She’s worked with Annie Lennox, Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumpkins, Peter Gabriel, Sheryl Crow, and Natalie Merchant. Her latest record, Ama, (which means Mother in the Tibetan language) was released in April 2006 on the Gabriel’s Real World record label.
McKeown, the adventurous vocalist and producer, grew up in Dublin, Ireland and from an early age was drawn to traditional songs both in English and Gaelic. After studying at both Dublin’s Municipal College of Music and New York’s American Musical and Dramatic Academy, she settled in Manhattan's East Village and from there carved out a career over the last decade as both a highly original singer-songwriter and a gifted interpreter of traditional song. McKeown’s distinctive voice is one of the most striking that you’ll hear out there in the Celtic vein as an interpreter of traditional tunes. In her original songs, her often-dark lyrics draw influences from sources as far flung as the ancient Irish legend of The Táin, the words of Chief Seattle, the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and urban life in Manhattan. Her arrangements of Celtic tunes are unusual, unexpected, and pleasantly surprising, with hurdy-gurdy solos, pairings of banjo and erhu, and most recently, on “Sweet Liberty,” included a mariachi horn section and African call and response chorus. She’s worked with the Klezmatics, Richard Thompson, Cathal McConnell, and had her arrangements recorded by Fairport Convention. McKeown lives in New York City with her daughter.
Additional Resources:
» Angélique Kidjo’s website
» Yungchen Lhamo’s website
» Susan McKeown’s website
» New Sounds Live 2006-2007 Concert Season
» World Financial Center