Lionel Loueke

Lionel Loueke (born 27 April 1973 in Benin) is originally from West Africa originating, living in the U.S. jazz guitarist, fusion music with stylistic bonds of his West African homeland plays.

Life and work

Loueke comes from a middle class family in Benin; his father was a mathematics professor, his mother a teacher. Loueke moved in 1990 to the Ivory Coast, where he began his music studies, which he continued until 1998 in Paris at the American School of Modern Music in 1994. Even then, he pursued the goal to specialize in jazz, inspired by a George Benson album, which brought him a friend from Paris. Before that he played in traditional African percussion groups and was interested in African pop music like his older brother, who is also a guitarist. In Paris he became acquainted with the music of contemporary jazz guitarists such as Bill Frisell and Pat Metheny.

From 1999, he studied jazz guitar at Berklee College of Music in Boston with a degree in 2000. Working in a global competition, he was admitted to study at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz at the University of Southern California, which he attended from 2001 to 2003. The jury sat among other things, Herbie Hancock and Terence Blanchard, on the Blue Note albums Bounce ( 2003) and Flow ( 2005) Loueke participated. In 2006 he played on Possibilities and 2007 on River: The Joni Letters by Herbie Hancock from.

2005 first album Gilfema appeared under his own name at ObliqueSound which he recorded with two Berklee classmates in the same Gilfema Trio ( Massimo Biolocati, bass, Ferenc Nemeth, drums). There followed in 2008 by another album of the trio ( with clarinetist Anat Cohen ) and two live albums by Loueke (in a trance in 2005, Virgin Forest, ObliqueSound 2006).

In 2008, he played a his first album on Blue Note, Caribou with his old team partners and Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter as guests. 2010 was followed by the album Mwaliko at Blue Note, play along on the Angelique Kidjo and Esperanza Spalding. In the early 2010s Loueke was spread out on tour with Herbie Hancock. His album Heritage, the Robert Glasper produced, appeared in October 2012 on Blue Note Records. The critic of the British jazz specialist magazine Jazzwise dash out the power of rhythm and the autonomy of the sound.

He also took the jazz singer Gretchen Parlato on ( which had been recorded simultaneously with him into the Thelonious Monk Institute ) and starred in Land of the Sun by Charlie Haden and Distancia the Mexican jazz singer Magos Herrera.

In 2009 he became a Fellow of the Los Angeles-based non-profit organization for promotion of artists United States Artists. He lives privately with his wife and two children in North Bergen, New Jersey, professional, however - when not on tour - to find in New York City.

Prizes and awards

2008, 2009 and 2010, he was the guitarist the Rising Star Award in the Critics Poll of Down Beat. 2008 won his Kponnon Kpété for Best World Music Song in the Independent Music Awards. In 2010 he won with Mwaliko the Edison Jazz Award in the category of World Music. 2013 he was awarded the ECHO Jazz in the Katergorie International Guitarist