ABOUT
I’m a Sheffield England based world music bassist and producer, former bassist of Four Bop Drop and Batanai Marimba, former Rafiki Jazz founder-bandleader-bassist (aka Tony ‘tk’ Koni), ex-MD of Konimusic Ltd and former chairperson-then-director of regional refugee arts foundation Arts on the Run. With over thirty years’ experience of rich & varied creative and production work across a vibrant UK & international global roots music & arts scene, I'm continuing development of my solo artist/producer practise, and have recently joined Substack as a music blogger, currently writing about my new 2024 music & Welsh ancestry project Songs from The Tin Tabernacle
‘Bass guitar and percussion player Tony ‘tk’ Koni’s steady,
funky and easy rhythm was seamless, though his leopard skin safari suit raised a few eyebrows!’
(Lucy Wilson Magnus, of Write Response re Rafiki Jazz at Hobart Town Hall, Tasmania)
‘Vital, affirming music, international mouth music if you like,
leading a hypnotic dance with Tony Koni’s bass providing a skanking twist. Producer Tony Bowring’s Konimusic label has the tagline #Crossing Frontiers and this is no fanciful boast’
(Marc Higgins for Fatea re Rafiki Jazz 2019 ‘Saraba Sufiyana’ album)
It’s been a long journey so it’s a long story…
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I grew up in an intensely musical extended family in Sheffield, surrounded almost exclusively by European classical music. My Welsh maternal grandfather, mother, uncle, cousins & sisters were all talented musicians and singers, and my elder sister was an internationally recognised award-winning concert pianist, but I fast realised as a teenager that all this came with a weighty obligation that I was expected to observe and follow. It was the 60’s.. and I rebelled of course, heading for a multicultural jazz and roots underground via pirate radio & vinyl stores..to John Lee Hooker, Mingus & Monk, Ayler & Ornette, and to Burning Spear, Dollar Brand & King Sunny Ade.. eventually stepping out self-taught to play guitar then bass on the local jazz & community roots music scene. I took a few master classes from Afro-jazz bass virtuoso Fred Thelonius Baker and joined Sheffield improv-jazz group Sextet Chromatique and Cath Carr’s steelpan ensemble Classic Steel. I met Ivorian musician and producer Maurice Dezou and we became creative & business partners, starting InterArts to promote West African art & global roots music.
By the early 90’s I was continuing the partnership at a distance having moved to Leon in northern Spain, briefly owning & running a local vinyl & cassette niche record store Inter Artes and a small roots music distribution brand Danza Global Discos. The local & regional music scene there was vibrant, and I joined saxophonist & poet Ildefonso Rodriguez, guitarist-percussionist Alfredo Vidal and soprano sax-player Antonio Segura in free-jazz ensemble Los Tachindas, played with a small orquesta de baile featuring Spanish & Afro-Cuban dance music, and had some crazy times with the memorable improv music and mime group Kinatocaroto.
Living in Leon had hugely energised me, so once back in the English Midlands through the mid-late 90’s, the improv group 4BopDrop emerged featuring flugelhornist Rob Gale, saxophonist Richard Powell & guitarist Nick Hamlyn, and I played bass & recorded my debut CD album in 1997 with them for George Haslam’s SLAM label. Running parallel through this time was the first short-lived incarnation of roots & fusion band Rafiki Jazz, marked by a studio recording on cassette of demo EP Juju Jazz Diamonds and a few local gigs. The band was thoroughly cross-cultural and featured percussionists Gerry Elliot (Ghana) & Pery Baptiste (Barbados), English flugelhorn player Rob Gale, Zimbabwean guitarist Deen Goremsandu, Jamaican ex-Skatalites tenor sax-player Fitzroy Burrell and myself on bass. And local dancehall reggae star Glenroy Grant had started a new band Culture Mix during this time and I played bass & recorded with them too…
Meanwhile in 1994 a chance but ultimately momentous encounter with visiting Zimbabwean mbira and marimba players Arnold Mabere and Wedzerai Zvirevo took me & my bass-playing into deep new territory, and there I stayed. There was an Irish tour and a 1997 album release Pindu by their roots band Sangoma, followed by a 1999 commission funded by Arts Council England to live-record and tour new music from mbira players Zvirevo & the late great Chartwell Dutiro leading the British-Zimbabwean bigband project UK Zimba. A door had opened for me that led to almost ten years as bassist (now aka Tony ‘tk’ Koni) deep inside the persuasive Shona spirit-dance music of the big Batanai Marimba ‘family’ band that succeeded Sangoma. We toured widely, recording four well-received albums, and I was lucky & privileged to be playing in the company of some truly vibrant diaspora musicians, including Zimbabwean singer-marimba & mbira-players Wedzerai Zvirevo & Kudaushe Matimba and percussionist Millicent Chapanda, Fula riti player Juldeh Camara, trombonist Nigel Greenwood, Ivorian percussionist Henri GaoBi, Congolese sax-player Rama Kayimanda, Zambian guitarist Simwinji Zeko and others, who brought & shared their musical gifts from deep oral traditions that really nourished the ‘90’s British global roots music scene.
During this period through into the early 2000’s the partnership Inter Artes with Maurice Dezou had morphed into InterArtsKoni and I was fast discovering that through my own music-making I had also been gathering expertise in commissioning, promoting and producing other music and musicians across a now-burgeoning UK world music sector. As lead partner, I fundraised, managed, programmed and networked. It became a time of much growth as I curated the live global roots music series Deep Roots and cross-genre series The Liquidiser at various UK arts venues, took on agency work for Batanai Marimba and produced NuRootsLive national tours for them and for other distinguished international ensembles including Mabulu and Dilon Djinji (Mozambique), Ifang Bondi (Gambia) and the late Stella Chiweshe’s Earthquakes (Zimbabwe), whilst produced limited edition album CDs for release on the InterArtsKoni - KoniCD house label.
​But by 2005 both the InterArtsKoni partnership and my involvement as bassist & agent with Batanai Marimba had sadly run their course, and Konimusic Ltd (Contemporary African & World Music Traditions) sprung into action with much optimism and many connections, but (a cautionary tale here) very little capital. Konimusic was incorporated as a Sheffield-based not-for-profit limited company with a small board of voluntary directors including myself functioning effectively thereafter as MD.
Back on the music-making front, in Nov 2006 a chance opportunity for me to play bass with visiting musicians Gambian kora player Pa Bobo Jobarteh and Brazilian jazz drummer Cicerus Cajuzinho led to an impromptu recording session at Sheffield’s Bok Studio. The seeds of the 2nd incarnation of Rafiki Jazz were sown here as we recorded & filmed Kelefa Jazz together, a version of ancient Mande classic Kelefa that also drew in local jazz & roots singers Mim Suleiman & Rosie Brown. (versions of this song opened the Rafiki Jazz' performance sets for the following decade). By the autumn of 2007 I released the band’s debut EP ‘Big Muzik from Over There’ through Konimusic, and Rafiki Jazz was born, coalescing into a loose multicultural family of exciting regional and not-so-regional jazz & roots singers & players, developing, arranging & live-recording our music collectively in a quest to curate, give voice to and document those intense musical moments of commonality, plurality and vision as our individual oral traditions, cultures & styles came together. The first Rafikian line-up for this debut EP already reached far, and set the tone for what was to come through later years: Mim Suleiman (Swahili vocals), Rosie Brown (English vocals), Pa Bobo Jobarteh & Seikou Susso (koras & Mandinka vocals), John Ball (tabla), Mr TK aka Tony Koni (bass), Juan Gabriel Gutierrez (chants, beats, bells), Kudaushe Matimba (marimba), Cath Carr (steelpans) and Juldeh Camara (riti, koloko).
By 2009 and the 1st album release ‘More Big Muzik from Over There’ (KoniCD09) there was new kora player-singer Kadialy Kouyate, third vocalist Vanessa Rani Chuttergoon, beatboxer Unome, and Brazilian percussionist Guery Tibirica joining the core group, and for the next 14 years, mostly working with sound engineer Robin Downe and documented by photographer Ayse Balkose & filmmaker Joao Paulo Simoes, the Live Room at Sheffield’s iconic Yellow Arch Studios became the band’s creative space for rehearsal & live recording. Rafiki Jazz was driven by a collective vision, but the project needed leadership, and I had by now enough instrumental & music industry experience to be able to promote and maintain the energy & momentum needed to be both the Rafikians’ bandleader and, through Konimusic, its managing & producing agent.
It was also around this time that I was elected chairperson of a small regional network of refugee artists, in response to a national initiative to encourage creative & professional development opportunities for talented artists who had migrated into the UK as refugees or asylum seekers. We called it Arts on the Run, and in 2010 it became one of several UK-wide regional organisations affiliated to the London-based Platforma Arts & Refugees Network, later to become Counterpoints Arts. I became voluntary director once the network got charitable status, fundraising and managing exhibitions & networking events, research collaborations, creative commissions, artist professional development programmes and much more, including co-writing for the 2019 publication ‘Heritage as Community Research’ ed Helen Graham, Jo Vergunst. I stayed until 2019 before handing over to Sam Holland the director of Sheffield’s acclaimed Migration Matters Festival.
Rafiki Jazz had by now become a rich & dominant force in my musical life. Recording, research, collaborative and touring projects unfolded, and Rafikians came & went, and for the time they were there, their words and sounds were surely woven into something that was always ‘a love-letter to complexity, an embracing of this intricate world within which we live, and a beautiful one at that’ (Rachel Jackson’s sleevenote for Rafiki Jazz 2017 album ‘Har Dam Sahara’: Riverboat Records).
There were band members who came in for special projects: poets Noah Okecho & Zodwa Nyoni, rappers Jaheda Choudhury, Koocheh & Pitso Mabuza, singers Mado Bilonda, Goran Karani, Sarah Sayeed, Kaitlin Ross, Nancy Kerr, Sam Carter, Marilla Homes & Greg Russell, kora player Sura Susso, live-coder Yaxu, avatar-operator Aysegul Balkose, daf player Arad Tamizi, singer & tanbura player Hassan Salih Nour, guitarist Guy Profa, keyboardist Fidele Elikia Weye, guest percussionists Millie Chapanda, K.O.G & Amir Ezzat. And some, like singers Sarah Yaseen & Avital Raz, Indian violinist Vijay Venkat & Egyptian oud & kawala flute player Mina Mikhail Salama, stayed for much longer.
By Spring 2021 my 5th and final album as a Rafikian had been arranged and recorded in the shadow of Covid, on a shared virtual platform but all in realtime. ‘Nduggu-Dust’ (KoniCD012) was released, and those long-time core band-members credited on it were: Sarah Yaseen (vocals, percussion, co-production), Catherine Carr (steelpan, vocals, guitar), Mina Mikhail Salama (vocals, oud, ney), Kadialy Kouyate (vocals, kora), Vijay Venkat (vocals, violin, bansuri), Tony Koni (bass, claves, co-production), John Ball (tabla, santoor), Guery Tibirica (berimbau, pandeiro, gumbe) and of course Robin Downe (engineer). Blogger Henrik Endor of Prole Jazz wrote ‘Rafiki Jazz play global folk music. Hailing from all seven corners of the planet each member brings something unique to this melting pot of sound and the results are alluring, esoteric, dream-like songs. The musicianship is superb, the vocals haunting, the overall effect exquisite’.
It was at this point I stepped down, from both Rafiki Jazz & Konimusic. A timeout and reset was needed, but I was leaving with much pride. So here’s a few highlights from this period: managing Konimusic UK tour productions for Gambian legends Ifang Bondi, for the late Ambuya Stella Chiweshe and for Mozambique’s marrabenta group Mabulu: collaborating with Fay Hield and the University of Sheffield, Arts on the Run and Rafiki Jazz on the Transmitting Musical Heritage ‘Connected Communities’ research project: recording & producing debut music videos with filmmaker Joao Paulo Simoes for singer/krar-player Haymanot Tesfa’s ‘Ambassel’ and for Sufi singer Sarah Yaseen with kawala flute player Mina Salama on ‘Qomee Tharana’: bass-playing trips to Tasmania touring with Mim Suleiman & Trio Rafiki Jazz, and to showcase a 5-piece Rafiki Jazz at Canada’s Mundial Montreal: a wonderful Riverboat Records release of Rafiki Jazz 2017 album ‘Har Dam Sahara’ that hit Transglobal World Music Charts at no.20: and of course two outstanding WOMAD appearances leading two very different Rafikian line-ups, the first on the BBC Radio3 Stage in 2010 with Juldeh Camara, Kadialy Kouyate & Mim Suleiman etc, and the other on a very late-night Siam Stage in 2018 including with Sarah Yaseen, Avital Raz & Vijay Venkat...
And finally…a testimonial from Angie Lemon PR
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‘Tony Francis Bowring struck me from our first conversation to be a musician on a mission. He had dedicated nearly twenty years as the founder and leader of the multicultural, diverse world music ensemble Rafiki Jazz and as managing director of Konimusic until he stepped down in 2021, and I found his outlook and willingness to embrace different cultural narratives, and his expertise on these issues a joy to work with, and also admire greatly his tenacity to hold to his musical goals.
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Tony’s new 2024 mission ‘Songs from The Tin Tabernacle: A Roots Romance’ sounds like the perfect next-stage project as he repositions his music career towards a solo artist/producer practice following a lengthy ‘sabbatical’ break. In total contrast to his previous work centred on celebrating other peoples’ cultures & languages, it introduces creative and collaborative research for a project that honours his own family’s deep musical heritage, as he finds fresh ways to re-imagine stories as songs, and culturally preserve important narratives from his Welsh family’s migration from rural Anglesey to industrial South Yorkshire in the nineteenth century. It should lead to the production of an important body of work for the British folk music archives, combining personal, cultural and social narratives.
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Having worked with Tony professionally and closely with oftentimes daily co-ordination meetings, I can safely say he delivers what he says he will do; he cares about details greatly and mostly cares about musical narratives and dramas and making creative and beautiful sounding music to capture them’.