The Rain is Coming: Regina Carter and "Kothbiro"

Today's random tune is by Detroit-born jazz violinist Regina Carter, who reinterprets an African song called Kothbiro that was composed and sung by Kenyan musician and nyatiti lyre player Ayub Ogada in 1993. Regina Carter began studying the violin along with piano when she was four years old. In high school she took master classes with Itzhak Perlman and Yehudi Menuhin and eventually studied classical music at the New England Conservatory of Music. However, she switched to jazz during her classical studies and finished out her education at Oakland University in Michigan. After graduation, she did a stint teaching music in the Detroit Public Schools, but needing a break and a new direction, she moved to Germany for two years. When she came back in the late 1980s, she joined the all-female quintet Straight Ahead, which did pop and jazz and earned kudos from Branford Marsalis. She went solo in 1991 and has released ten solo albums since 1995, and has played on another seventeen albums in collaboration with a wide variety of musicians such as Kenny Barron, Anthony Davis, Cassandra Wilson, Joe Jackson and Eddie Palmieri. Kothbiro can be found on her 2010 album Reverse Thread. She records the song as an instrumental - the original has lyrics and is about the coming of rain.

Listen to songs like this and more on the KUNM Global Music Show every Monday night from 10 pm - 1 am Mountain Standard Time. Live streaming, program information and the two-week digital archive can be found at http://www.kunm.org.

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regina_Carter