Honey Wine is an album, years in the making, featuring special guest Sophie Nzayisenga. Sophie is a vocalist and the only professional female inanga player in the world. The inanga is a ten string zither-like instrument so rare there isn’t even a wikipedia page for it. We are also joined by legendary jazz bassist and multi-instrumentalist William Parker and percussionist Tim Keiper who is currently percussionist for David Byrne’s American Utopia. Jeremy and Sophie have since toured South Africa, and at the time of the pandemic were set to tour Europe on a grant from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. To be continued!
Jeremy’s story about the project:
“I first met Sophie when I went to Rwanda in 2009 to give street performances in commemoration of the 15th anniversary of the Genocide against the Tutsi. I had for years been fascinated by this rare instrument after hearing it on a CD from the Nonesuch Explorer Series called Burundi: Music from the Heart of Africa (where inanga is also widespread.) As I was planning my trip, I became aware that inanga is the national instrument of Rwanda and voiced my interest in finding an inanga player to collaborate with there, so some friends introduced me to Sophie who at the time didn’t speak a word of English. During that trip we performed together at the Goethe Institute of Kigali.
Soon began a four year quest to bring Sophie to New York City to perform and record with my band here. The first obstacle was funding, which was done through Indiegogo and eventually a grant from the Puffin Foundation. A more troubling and unusual hindrance was the USA immigration bureaucracy. My first attempt to bring Sophie to New York City failed when the State Department denied her a visa in 2013, after I’d already invested considerable personal resources in the project. In 2015, with intervention from the Rwandan government, the State Department finally authorized Sophie to travel to and from the USA.
Some of the songs on Honey Wine are fully improvised such as the title track. Ibeseke is a song of Sophie’s, and the rest are compositions I assembled by studying the rhythmic patterns of classic inanga masters such as Joseph Sebatunzi and assimilating Western and other scales to the pentatonic inanga patterns.”