KIT Water Music presents in cooperation with WDR Cosmo
JANKA NABAY & the BUBU GANG

Eintritt 10,- €

At a mixing session in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Janka Nabay, the famed modernizer of indigenous Sierra Leonean Bubu music, proclaims: „Everywhere is sorrow, tears, blood and happiness. At the same time.“ Nabay is not your typical purveyor of „global grooves“ where cultures easily mix in a melting pot of electronic beats. For Nabay, the world is a strange and contradictory place. Violence and joy, the modern and the traditional, inexplicably coexist in our cosmopolitan world. These paradoxes are frequently on his mind when reflecting on the composition of his own music. Build Music, Nabay’s second album for Luaka Bop, embodies the conflicted nature of his own life as a musician in the United States. He considers himself — at the same time — a spokesperson for the ancient Bubu music of his Sierra Leonean homeland, and a self-described „black cowboy“ on a trans-Atlantic mission to sculpt his futuristic music with the mindset of a revolutionary artist.

Nabay’s personal story has been told often in the press — he is a resourceful and resilient émigré who fled the trauma of Sierra Leone’s civil war of the 1990s, and has spent many years working a chicken fryer and on food trucks to support himself. In 2010, aided by the enthusiastic support of PRI producer Wills Glasspiegel, Nabay fell into a crowd of celebrated Brooklyn musicians who joined him as collaborators. In 2012, Nabay released his acclaimed debut in the United States, En Yay Sah (Luaka Bop) to praise from Pitchfork, Vice, NPR (Best of 2012), The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post (Best of 2012). In En Yay Sah (translation: „I’m Scared“), Nabay and the Bubu Gang developed Nabay’s songs into an improvised weave of guitars, keyboards, backup vocals, and electronic drums.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLKjFQYl_Go
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T9wr8PLUE0