BUFO VARIATIONS

Release date: November 15, 2008

In an Aria and ten variations, Nii Otoo Annan and Steven Feld imagine what the Goldberg Variations might sound like had J.S. Bach been born in Ghana, grown up listening to Bufo toads, and devoted his musical genius to the mastery of polyrhythm as both a traditional African drummer and a  contemporary jazz experimentalist.

The CD begins and ends with Feld's Bufo Aria, a composition from field recordings of Bufo regularis toads, who croak from sewers flanking Accra's roads. The rhythmic alternations, overlaps, and interlocks of the toads and night crickets are then the stimulation for ten overdubbed variations by Nii Otoo Annan, improvised on diverse melodic and percussion instruments from
xylophone and guitar to drums and bells, and recorded while listening to the toads in headphones. On all except one track the toads are then removed from the mix to expose Nii Otoo Annan's complete musical response, generated by and in-sync with the complexity of toad rhythms and timbres. The variations conclude with Nii Otoo overdubbing "Frogs," a previous improvisational jazz overdub of the same material by Alex Coke on tenor sax, Tina Marsh, voice, and Steven Feld, ashiwa bass, from Alex Coke's recent VoxLox cd, It's Possible.