About Lion Songs Records

It all started when…

Banning Eyre published his fourth book, Lion Songs, The Music That Made Zimbabwe in 2015. Despite solid reviews, a nice buzz in the Zimbabwe music community, and a Society for Ethnomusicology book award, the book has not exactly been a blockbuster sales-wise.

BUT, the accompanying CD, Lion Songs: Essential Tracks in the Making of Zimbabwe, continued to sell robustly month after month, year after year, mostly in downloads, all over the world.

That success inspired Eyre to pursue a long-held goal of launching an independent record label dedicated to the music he loves most. The label will release mostly acoustic, mostly African music not available on other platforms.

The June, 2021, release of Boubacar “Badian” Diabate’s Mande Guitar is volume one of what will be an ongoing series of recordings by master guitarists from Africa. No single release so far better captures the label’s aesthetic—intimate, soulful, and mesmerising.

Next came two of Eyre’s collaborative projects in New York City. The band TImbila has an Africa origin story. Eyre met mbira artist Nora Balaban in Zimbabwe in 1997, and they’ve played together ever since. The Timbila release on this album is a double CD, one disc featuring TImbila’s Afrodelic rock incorporating both Zimbabwean mbira and Mozambican timbila xylophone, which Balaban also studies and plays. The second disc is a collaboration with the late Zimbabwean mbira maestro Chartwell Dutiro, who gave this album its name, Sadza With the Head of a Mouse.

Voyagers is a trio with Eyre on acoustic guitar, Malian kora player Yacouba Sissoko and Austrian saxophonist Edith Lettner. Lettner had been making regular visits to New York performing in various jazz setting. Voyagers was a project that came together during those years, featuring original compositions by all three players, and some traditional pieces from the Malian Mande repertoire. It’s a daring act, all melody and rhythm with no percussion. But the music gelled, and days before the COVID pandemic closed down New York City, and much of the world, the trio recorded the Lion Songs release Chasing Light in a Brooklyn apartment.

The pandemic lockdown found Eyre at home at Afropop central in Middletown, CT. Those long months of relative isolation proved an opportunity for Eyre to focus on his own guitar compositions. Many creations came together, some solo guitar pieces, some guitar duos. After the pandemic passed, Eyre made regular visits to the Coffeehouse Studio in Middletown, and from those sessions a collection of 14 pieces emerged, Bare Songs, Vol 1.

The journey begins here…

BARE SONGS: VOLUME 1

These songs are bare. They have no words, no vocals, no rhythm section backing. They are guitar solos and duos, sometimes lightly enhanced. Most are late-night creations, born and nurtured during the long, quiet nights of the pandemic.

They distill over 50 years of folk, blues and rock roots, long-lost classical and jazz training, and decades of immersion in African fingerstyle guitar traditions.

They aim to soothe, stimulate, provoke and inspire collaboration from others who may someday help clothe their nakedness.

They are my children and I hope you love them half as much as I do.

 CHASING LIGHT

New York-based acoustic trio Voyagers create musical magic in the form of grooving traditional African & contemporary African-inspired jazz compositions — without drums

Steeped in tradition, alive with improvisation, and imbued with rare jazz magic, New York-based acoustic trio VOYAGERS combine traditional African music with their own original African-themed compositions on their debut album Chasing Light (officially out April 1, 2022, on Lion Songs Records).

Featuring kora maestro Yacouba Sissoko from Mali, Austrian saxophonist  Edith Lettner, and American guitarist Banning Eyre — three world-class musicians who’ve long had their own well-established musical careers — the Voyagers trio combines a high level of talent, virtuosity, stage presence one would expect with something else quite unexpected. With kora, saxophone, and guitar so perfectly linked in rhythms and melody, Voyagers manage to create engaging traditional African music & contemporary African-inspired jazz compositions without drums. 

The result is pure, grooving musical magic, alive with spontaneity and a sound and style so entirely their own. 

Mande Guitar

Mande Guitar: African Guitar Series, Volume 1, WITH
 Boubacar “Badian” Diabate

Born and raised in Bamako, Mali, in a family of djeli (griot) musicians, Badian is a master guitarist who has accompanied legends. Here we get an intimate, acoustic session, showcasing his extraordinary technique and lyricism.

What they’re saying about Mande Guitar:

“It blows my mind realizing we can still have our minds blown. The guitar.  Wow. Segovia, Jimi Hendrix, Doc Watson, Derek Bailey, Wes Montgomery, Roscoe Holcomb, Robert Johnson, and George Van Eps all play the same instrument. You’d think there’d be nothing left to do. Hearing Boubacar Badian Diabate is a beautiful reminder that we’re nowhere close. We’ll never get to the end of it. This recording of Boubacar Badian Diabate blows my mind. He’s doing things I’ve never heard anyone do before.”
– Bill Frisell, American guitarist, composer and arranger.

“Badian is great. He’s not doing what all the young guitarists at weddings do. He’s original. I like that.”
– Djelimady Tounkara, Pioneering innovator of Mande guitar.

“Anyone who is a fan of Malian music, the desert blues, or even just the acoustic steel-string guitar, will find Mande Guitar irresistible.”
– Lucy Duran, Producer, scholar, and leading authority on Mande music.

“Love it. Sounds great. Badian is a revelation. Such beautiful playing!“
– Bela Fleck, Musician, composer, producer, and arranger.

$12:00

LION SONGS (cd)

Essential Tracks in the Making of Zimbabawe

The songs that made the difference…

This compilation is Banning Eyre’s picks of the quintessential songs in Mapfumo’s four-decade-plus career. Interspersed are brief excerpts from Eyre’s interviews with Mapfumo over the years.

$15:00

Timbila is a New York-based band that merges traditional music from Zimbabwe and Mozambique with East Village rock. Its American founders met in Zimbabwe in 1997 and have been creating together ever since. Chartwell Dutiro is a maverick mbira player from Zimbabwe with a story that begins in the sacred musical rituals of his home village, passes through the international limelight of the world music years in the company of Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited, and continues today in the U.K. Dutiro and Timbila began collaborating in 2013, and have developed an entrancing, expansive repertoire together. This album shows two sides of the collaboration: first, Timbila backing Dutiro in new interpretations of ancient Zimbabwean songs; then, Dutiro acting a producer for Timbila’s original compositions and arrangements. This two-way musical encounter has yielded an unexpected delicacy….sadza (the staple food of Zimbabwe) with the head of a mouse! 

Praise for Sadza with the Head of a Mouse:

Timbila with distortion! A cutting edge sound that brings Mozambican tradition into the 21st century.  — Angelique Kidjo

What were you people smoking?  — Seun Kuti

Timbila brings their own mojo to some of the richest African musical traditions, with great heart, chops and authenticity.  — Bonnie Raitt

A raucously good album! In a moment you hear what would usually take five songs to cover: Central Africa, Bamako, Ireland and mbira... and that’s just in one guitar solo.  — Derek Gripper

This music may be thousands of miles from where it started, but far from being some sort of ethnomusicologist’s exercise, Timbila’s latest album never loses sight of music as a way of communicating human emotion, proving that, like sadza, music is what you bring to it. — Ben Richmond, from his album review on afropop.org.

$20:00 (2 CDs)