Jazz Pianist And Innovator Randy Weston Renews a Connection With His African Past
Soundcheck | May 25, 2017
American pianist, composer, and “Legend of Jazz,” Randy Weston, has once again stretched across history to forge connections to an African past, as he has done for decades now.
On his latest recording, The African Nubian Suite, Weston takes as his subject matter the very origins of humanity – the fossilized skeletal remains of “Ardi,” a hominid who lived around 4.5 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia. This "planetary music," as Weston calls it stretches across millennia, looking to the Nubian empire (now northern Sudan/southern Egypt), African folk traditions, Sufi music, blues, and jazz. Randy Weston, now a nonagenarian, joins us to play some of this music live.
