- The Guardian,
- Saturday February 5 2000
Richard Bona is a deceptively quiet guy. At Ronnie Scott's in London, his vibrant orange shirt hinted at ebullience, but he played his bass so softly that the audience, unaccustomed to delicacy, almost missed the point. His voice has been described as angelic, but rather than an ethereal sound, he has the shivery, grounded timbre of a Tiresias, shifting between childlike wail, unbearable sweetness and stern gravitas. His music's exuberance shot out suddenly, startlingly, like bright sunshine during a ballad fragile as mist. The effect was both marked and delightful.
Bona manipulated this pleasing incongruity in both his delivery and his choice of grooves. He was wary one minute, annoyed with a noisy audience the next, then gleeful, enraptured as the layers of sound accumulated. Such unnerving, lightning agility harks back to another weather-changer, Joe Zawinul, who adopted Bona into his band in 1995. It's only nine years since Bona came west from East Cameroon, spurred by the revelation of Jaco Pastorius's bass-playing; legend has it he hopped on a plane to Paris wearing only a pair of shorts.
There was more sunshine in Aaron Heick's perky saxophone and Etienne Stadwijk's Hammondesque bursts on keyboard. In Eyando (a song about turtles, but you'd never know as none of the lyrics are in English), drummer Jonathan Joseph built pace imperceptibly, a momentum of sound released gradually, winding down again to an ambience underscored by a constant, disturbing tribal pulse. That nice ambiguity continued with Stadwijk's blurry pools of sound over the sharpness of multiple rhythms picked out on percussion, guitar and bass.
Bona's ease with his music was evident when, after a track that conjured a foot-tapping African fiesta, he broke into another ballad that quickly changed from poignant moodiness into all-out funkiness, the contrast starkly illustrated by Bona's own vocal screeching of brakes. That humorous moment was surpassed when Heick started laughing and Bona himself had to stop playing, seized by hilarity. "How about a surprise?" he chuckled. "That's what makes the music so beautiful, and that's what beautiful about Ronnie Scott's. You can't do this in Japan." Pure he may be; innocent he's not.
