I am pleased to see “Fu Chronicles,” my latest work with Antibalas, nominated for a 2020 Grammy Best Global Music album, along with albums by Burna Boy, Bebel Gilberto, Anoushka Shankar and Tinariwen.

I co-produced, arranged and performed on this album, released in February 2020 on Daptone Records.

The songs on this record were the results of two decades of vision and persistence on the part of Amayo, the composer and frontman, and the scores of musicians who kept the heart of these songs beaten until the moment when they could be recorded, as well as the skill and vision of Daptone Records who enters their third decade of putting out quality music made by real musicians with a reverence for and a connection to our musical elders.

Arranging the album was painstaking— so many good parts of the songs had to be compressed, truncated, even sometimes deleted for this to be something resembling a record. A double or triple album wasn’t an option. In the end we managed to squeeze five songs into about forty minutes, the amount of time you are limited to when making a vinyl LP. (anything more and you drastically reduce sound quality, especially in the bass). In their live incarnations, the songs on Fu Chronicles could/can last anywhere from 12-25 minutes long.

We began 2020 with a lot of momentum, with a run of sold-out shows from Los Angeles to Vancouver to Denver. We went home for a few days before the tour picked up in Boston and had bookings through the end of 2020 on four continents prior to the Covid-19 shutdown. I don’t know when we’ll be able to hit the road again, but hopefully this nomination will put us/keep us on the radar till live music is back up again.

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