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Veteran Global Guitarist Banning Eyre to release Bare Songs Vol. 1 on Nov 15 2024, in Debut Solo Guitar Release
When Banning Eyre was five and living in Bernardsville, New Jersey, his mother, an amateur folk singer, introduced him to her nylon-string, Martin parlor guitar. He didn’t take to it right away, but after flirtations with the trombone and the banjo, Banning returned to guitar at the height of Beatles fame and learned to bash out the chords for “The Ballad of John and Yoko” and folk songs from Jerry Silverman’s Folksingers Guitar Guide. Lonnie Donegan’s “Putting on the Style” was a favorite. One Woodstock-summer guitar lesson armed him with a 12-bar blues vamp, and he was off and running. Banning’s first guitar, a Yamaha steel-string, became his constant companion, a source of solace for a smart, physically awkward kid, as he teased out unschooled finger-style inventions on his axe.
When he was 10, Banning’s father landed a job running a shipping company in Montreal. The family frequented the Trinidad and Tobago pavilion at Expo ’67, and the next year, toured Caribbean islands on a freight ship. Steel drum and calypso music now joined Harry Belafonte, Leadbelly and the Tijuana Brass on the home stereo.
In high school, Banning got serious about music, studying classical guitar. That continued through his college years at Wesleyan University, with its renowned ethnomusicology program offering alluring introductions to the music of India, Indonesia and Africa. Banning eventually realized that a career in classical music was not for him. He moved to New Mexico, found a flamenco guitar teacher, and picked up an electric for the first time. With two friends, he co-founded a funk-rock-blues-reggae band called The Porcupines. The band wound up gigging in campus bars around the University of Oregon in Eugene, but greater success seemed out of reach. Ever restless, Banning applied to the Berlkee College of Music in Boston, won a scholarship, and moved back East to study jazz there for three semesters.
In Boston, Banning got his baptism in the guitar music of Africa, largely through his friend Sean Barlow, then on his way to launching the public radio series Afropop on NPR in 1988. Post-Berklee, Banning continued to write and record original songs, reuniting with ex-Porcupine members to play Boston bars as The Strunk and White Band. Meanwhile, he held down a jazz guitar duo gig at the iconic, downtown French restaurant, Maison Robert. But everything changed when he joined Sean on a 1987-88 Afropop research trip to the two Congos, South Africa and Zimbabwe.
African music, especially guitar music, became a consuming obsession. Within a few years, Banning was playing guitar with Boston-based Congo music bands (Rumbafrica, Kolo Mboka, Sankai), and also, writing and reporting on African music for The Boston Phoenix, Guitar Player Magazine, Billboard, Folk Roots, Option, Global Rhythm, NPR’s All Things Considered, and of course, the radio show, then rebranded as Afropop Worldwide.
Banning had long wrestled to balance his two great passions, writing and guitar-playing. Neither seemed a particularly promising career path, but writing and radio production proved a better way to pay the bills. During a three-month solo journey through Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Ghana and Zimbabwe Banning imagined a way to combine his passions. He could write books that would focus on character and history, always through the lens of music.
In 1995, Banning left his Boston job as a software technical writer and moved to Bamako, Mali. (He would never work a straight job again.) His sojourn in Mali (1995-96), and then Zimbabwe (1997-98), led to two landmark books in the literature of African music. In Griot Time: An American Guitarist in Mali (Temple, 2000) chronicled his apprenticeship with Djelimady Tounkara of the Super Rail Band of Bamako, and offered a vivid portrait of a musical city where ancient traditions were blossoming anew. Lion Songs: Thomas Mapfumo and the Music that Made Zimbabwe traced the life and work of the iconic bandleader/singer/composer through the tumultuous history of Zimbabwe. Lion Songs won a book award from the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Banning’s new life opened doors to thrilling encounters with some of Africa’s greatest living musicians: The Super Rail Band, Sali Sidibe, Toumani Diabaté, Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited (Banning co-composed two classic Mapfumo songs), Baaba Maal, Wendo Kolosoy and many lesser-known artists. Moving between his home in Middletown, Connecticut, and Afropop headquarters in Brooklyn, Banning collaborated in New York’s buzzing African music scene, notably with mbira maestro and fellow traveler Nora Balaban. Banning and Nora formed the mbira ensemble Glamour Boys, and then Timbila, an adventurous Afrodelic rock band that freely adapts traditions from Zimbabwe and Mozambique into original compositions and arrangements.
Banning began performing solo concerts at Barbes in Brooklyn and at schools and other small venues. His “A Guitar Tour of Africa” blended stories and demonstrations from his ever-extending travels in Africa and the diaspora. Amid all this immersion in traditions, Banning always came back to his roots, sitting with his guitar and inventing. The lockdown of 2020-21 kept this traveler at home, and nurtured a creative outpouring. Banning spent long nights with a bottle of wine, a loop pedal and his guitars, gradually refining a set of original instrumental pieces. Over the course of 2023, he frequented Mike Arafeh’s Coffeehouse Studio in Middletown, with black tea rather than wine, laying down tracks for 26 compositions.
All but one of the 14 tracks on Bare Songs Vol. 1 are original pieces from those sessions. The exception, an adaptation of the Mande classic “Lamban,” was for years Banning’s opener in the “Guitar Tour of Africa.” Banning says, “I never believed I would play African styles as convincingly as my teachers. They were extraordinary and I’ve been blessed to learn from them. But in the end, for me, it’s about rhythm and melody, not complex harmony, rock hyperbole or adherence to any one tradition. The real goal is to tap emotions, and these spare compositions, straight from the heart, aim to do just that.”
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Banning Eyre is an author, guitarist, photographer, radio producer, and Senior Producer for the groundbreaking Peabody Award-winning public radio series Afropop Worldwide. He has been researching and learning African guitar styles for over 35 years, including a seven-month apprenticeship with Malian guitar master Djelimady Tounkara and years of collaboration with Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited of Zimbabwe. Eyre has developed an original composition and performance style that incorporates traditions from Mali, Congo, Zimbabwe, Madagascar and beyond, along with his own background in American finger-style guitar. He performs solo and with the trio Voyagers, the band Timbila, and with various musicians playing African music in New York City. His first collection of original guitar pieces, Bare Songs Vol. 1, is out November 15, 2024.