Malika Zarra, Bokani Dyer

Thursday, January 11th, 2024

Nublu
151 Avenue C, New York, NY, 10009

7 PM Doors | 7:30 PM Show

Malika Zarra - 7:30 PM

Bokani Dyer - 9 PM

$20 GA Advance | $25 GA Day of Show

Malika Zarra

Jazz has been called one of America’s greatest contributions to the world’s culture, a contribution fed by numerous peoples and musical traditions that sprung predominantly from Africa and the African diaspora. At the core of this artform is the art of improvisation, the ability to create something spontaneously.

Malika Zarra epitomizes this understanding of jazz, with her ability to create

spontaneously. Born in Morocco, raised in France, and having lived eleven years in New York City and four years in Morocco, this gifted composer, producer and singer has invented a new Moroccan urban-world-jazz by tastefully using traditional North African chaâbi, Amazigh (Berber) and Gnawa polyrhythms to underpin her distinctly contemporary urban compositions, all the while maintaining a sophisticated improvisational and refreshing approach to her music-making.

An award-winning singer/composer/producer, Malika is a multi-cultural shape-shifter, an enchantress who leaps effortlessly between seemingly unconnected languages and traditions, uniting them while utilizing each to further enrich the others. The exotically beautiful artist with the velvety, sinuous mezzo-soprano voice has demonstrated a rare ability to communicate both powerful and subtle ideas and feelings in Amazigh (Berber), Moroccan Arabic, French and English now a much-in-demand headliner at concert halls and festivals the world over.

Malika Zarra has woven together the complex and varied strands of her musical journey on her third release, RWA (The Essence). Rooted in Africa, Europe and America, RWA evokes on one level the triangular trade that bled the African continent for centuries. But from the forced meeting of Africa and Europe in the plantations of the Americas was born a myriad of popular music: blues, jazz, rock’n’roll. This too is Zarra’s musical inheritance, and through her own triangular journey she has arrived at a unique and fully mature musical conception with RWA.

“This album,” she says in summary, “is an invitation to celebrate the essence of what we are, what is unique and free inside us, but also to pay tribute to the ties that unite us, beyond any borders or division.”

Bokani Dyer

A multi award-winning and established artist, with a growing global reputation, Bokani Dyer was born 1986 in Gaborone, Botswana, where many artists from South Africa, including his father, musician Steve Dyer, were living in exile during apartheid. Dyer moved back to SA as a child in 1990, growing up mainly in Johannesburg before moving to study jazz at the prestigious University of Cape Town (UCT), where he graduated with distinction. Since then he has established a live, recording and collaborative career that puts him at the forefront of the new wave of jazz artists coming out of South Africa.

The 2011 winner of South Africa’s prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Jazz, Dyer has recorded six albums under his own name including his most recent, 2023’s Radio Sechaba which was released by Brownswood Recordings, a London-based independent record label founded by Gilles Peterson. From his first days as a musician, Dyer has also embraced the jazz tradition of collaboration and ensemble work. In 2018 he recorded the album Neo Native with the Bokani Dyer Trio which won the South African Music Award for Best Jazz Album in 2019 and, in January 2021, Dyer’s “Ke Nako” was the opening track on Indaba Is – a compilation of current South African improvised music and jazz released by Brownswood Recordings.

Among his many domestic and international live performances are an acclaimed show with his trio at the North Sea Jazz Festival in Rotterdam in 2022.