Richard Bona says his village home in eastern Cameroon was filled with music. His grandfather was a singer and storyteller, and he taught the boy an early lesson: music must tell a story. When Bona was sick with cholera as a baby, the sound of the balafon soothed him. Bona recovered fascinated by the instrument and soon built his own, which he played for as long as twelve hours a day. He also began singing publicly in church at age 5. Before he left his village at 11, Bona had earned a reputation as the boy who could play any instrument: flute, hand percussion, balafon, or guitar. When he tired of the balafon, he built a 12-string guitar, using bicycle brake cable for strings.

Bona moved to the big city of Douala where he soon rented an electric guitar and started playing in local bikutsi and makossa bands. In 1980, the course of his life changed when a French-run jazz club opened at a local hotel. The patron of the establishment sought out the talented kid he'd heard about and offered him a lucrative job playing jazz. Bona says he knew nothing about jazz at the time, and took the gig for the money. But he soon found out there was an important fringe benefit. At the club were 500 jazz records, and in marked contrast to the clubs that were hiring other young musicians around the continent in those days, Bona's bosses wanted him to learn and grow as a musician. He spent his days listening and learning about music, and his nights trying out what he had learned.

As Bona began his studies, one of the first things he heard was the 1976 album Jaco Pastorius. The mellifluous sounds of the trailblazing Weather Report bassman seduced young Bona instantly. This album, especially the song "Portrait of Tracy," changed his life. Hard to imagine that a decade later, with Jaco dead and buried, Bona himself would be hired to fill his shoes in the bands of Joe Zawinul and Joni Mitchell.

In 1989, Bona moved to Paris and worked with local jazz musicians--Didier Lockwood and Marc Ducret--and also African stars. Manu Dibango was already a legend by then, but Salif Keita was just becoming an international sensation. It was the dawn of global Afropop, and Bona worked with both of these giants. As great an honor as this was, jazz was now the thing that motivated Bona, and inevitably, he soon found his way to one of the world's greatest jazz cities, the place he has lived ever since, New York.

The year was 1995, and one of Bona's first moves was to find Joe Zawinul, with whom he had briefly worked in France. Soon, Bona was playing with the Zawinul Syndicate, touring and recording two records with the band. In 1997, Bona began an important two-year stint as musical director of Harry Belafonte's band. Belafonte's public profile was in resurgence at the time, and Bona found himself in the spotlight more than ever before. In 1998, Bona started performing a regular Tuesday gig at the Izzy Bar with his own band. The gig was a tribute to Jaco, and it generated considerable excitement, preparing the way for the release of Bona's first album, Scenes from My Life (Columbia) in 1999. Singing in Douala and Banwele, Bona told stories--as his grandfather had taught him--but in a musical language his ancestors could scarcely have imagined. In 2001, he followed with Reverence, a complex, sophisticated work inspired in great measure by his Christian faith, and his journey from a small village to the greatest city in the world.

Over the years, Bona has worked with jazz greats Mike Stern, Chick Corea, Larry Coryell, Herbie Hancock, and Michael and Randy Brecker. In 2001, he recorded with Pat Metheny and Bobby McFerrin, and he is set to tour in Metheny's band in 2002.

Contributed by: Banning Eyre