Category Archives: Africa

Kaleta and SoSaLa

“MFM SPEAKS OUT” w. Host Sohrab aka SoSaLa & Guest Kaleta

Have you listened to MFM SPEAKS OUT yet? Check it out here: https://mfmspeaksout.simplecast.com/episodes/kaleta-F6R_FegB.

Legendary Afrobeat guitarist and MFM member Leon “Kaleta” Ligan-Majekodunmi joins “MFM Speaks Out” podcast host Sohrab Saadat Ladjevardi, aka SoSaLa, to share his 50-year journey through music, activism, and survival. From growing up in Benin and Lagos to touring with Fela Kuti, King Sunny Adé, Shina Peters, and Lauryn Hill, Kaleta reflects on Afrobeat as both a musical language and a political force. The conversation explores Kaleta’s firsthand experiences inside Fela’s world, and what it means to carry cultural responsibility as an artist in diaspora. Along the way, Kaleta reflects on immigration, artistic survival, gun violence in America, and why music must always carry a message. This is a powerful, unfiltered look at Afrobeat’s past, present, and future — told by someone who lived it.

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Banning Eyre

CD Review: Banning Eyre “Bare Songs Vol. 1”

Album Review by Dawoud Kringle

Artist: Banning Eyre
Title: Bare Songs Vol. 1
Format: CD
Label: Lion Songs Records
Genre: African guitar music

Buy CD here: https://didier-garcia-x6sp.squarespace.com/store/bare-songs-vol-1

Banning Eyre requires no introduction for those of you who are regular readers of doobeedoobeedoo.info and members or friends of MFM.

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MFM Presents: “Music Is Essential” ZOOM Webinar #5 with Banning Eyre on Bringing African Music into the American Music Scene

Date: Thursday, July 15, 2021
Time: 6pm to 7:30pm (ET)
Venue: ZOOM
Ticket: free

Please register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYud-GtpzorEtU2zBhZA4kaF2uOecvtk13c

Webinar description:

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Sylvain Leroux

Fundraiser: L’école Fula Flute

L’école fula flute is a Guinean music school founded by musician and MFM member Sylvain Leroux in 2014. When him inventing the chromatic tambin by adding three more finger holes to the existing three-hole tambin (or Fula flute) making this new flute capable of playing classical, jazz, or any style of music beyond the beautiful but limited traditional Phrygian scale. This gave him the idea that his new flute could be used to teach the fundamentals of music theory to children in Guinea.

“We have this little school in Guinea, L’école fula flute, that I got involved with and something beyond me happened, the kids profoundly responded to the flute, like if we plugged into a high-tension socket! Then, you donated and made it all possible.

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News From L’Ecole Fula Flute (Guinea) by Sylvain Leroux

My dear MFM Family and MFM supporters,

It’s November, and once again, I appeal to you to support our school for another year.

Thanks to your help, we have come a long way from our humble beginnings in a public hangar to our now secure house and courtyard which is every day humming with activity.

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