An Afternoon of West African Stories, Spoken and Sung

• Event Date: Saturday, November 18, 2006
• Time: 2:00 pm (CST)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Cost: $8.00

• Performance
• Family-Friendly tag

Storyteller LaRon Williams and Mandingo griot Foday Musa Suso share a concert of stories, kora music and song.

Foday Musa Suso is an internationally recognized musician and a Mandingo griot (musician/oral historian of the Mandingo people) born in West Africa. Suso grew up in a society where griots function as walking libraries, singing their stories for the community while providing history, wisdom, and entertainment. Tribal conflicts, empires and kingdoms, cultural heroes, and family lineage are part of his traditional repertoire that encompasses extensive verbal and musical recitations. In addition to his virtuosic kora (West African 21-stringed harp lute) playing and singing, Suso is also a drummer and composer.

Born in the West African nation of Gambia, Foday Musa Suso spent his childhood on a peanut farm, studying music and history as an heir to the hereditary griot lineage. After years of rigorous study he left his homeland and established himself in Chicago in the 1970's. Since that time he has performed throughout Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. Interested in both traditional and cutting edge idioms, Suso has toured and recorded with many prominent musicians including Herbie Hancock, Philip Glass, Pharoah Sanders, and Ginger Baker.

Over the past few years, La'Ron Williams has been steadily earning a reputation as one of the finest storytellers in the state of Michigan. His salient gift is his remarkable rapport with audiences of all kinds. Children and adults respond with equal enthusiasm to his warmth and vigor as he uses dialect, facial expressions and movement to breathe life into tales which transcend the boundaries of class and age.

Williams is motivated in part by the belief that the power and beauty of African culture should be shared, and that the lessons of struggle, perseverance, and survival of Africans in the Western Hemisphere are part of a legacy we all should recognize and own.

Ultimately, he believes that a narrow love of one's own culture is not enough; that we all have to take the time to tell each other our stories — with all the joy and frowns and pain and smiles that they bring. That "...we have to come to know and accept the ways in which we are different and become aware of an appreciate the ways in which we're alike, and that we have to use that knowledge not to ascribe hierarchy or to produce winners and losers, but to promote understanding and resolution."

This event is supported in part by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.