Richard Bona

Richard Bona

Gear

Bio

Richard Bona is a singer/songwriter, bass player, composer, bandleader, and digital and analog engineer/producer with a singular artistic vision. He comes from a tiny village in Cameroon, and by the age of five he was playing the balafon (a wooden-slatted melodic percussion instrument) in his grandfather’s traditional music band. At eleven, his family moved to the capital city, Douala, where he became an in-demand dance band guitarist before discovering and quickly mastering the language of jazz—at just fourteen. Bona moved to Paris in 1989 and New York in 1995, establishing in these two cities a reputation as one of the most exciting jazz bass players on the planet. And all this before he began his solo recording career with Scenes from My Life in 1999. Now Bona’s seventh solo album, Bonafied, an intimate, mostly acoustic, multi-genre set of songs, offers personal stories, tributes, philosophy based in lifelong love of nature, and a spirit of musical adventurism that just won’t quit.

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