October 6, 2012 7:30 PM Crossroads Music presents Sorie Kondi : Virtuoso street music from Freetown, Sierra Leone

Sorie Kondi is a virtuosic folk musician from the small West African country of Sierra Leone. He plays the Sierra Leonean version of a thumb piano called the Kondi, an instrument he has taken as his last name, and sings in four different languages (his mother tongue Loko, Temne, Krio, and English). He is also an innovator who has developed both a new type of electrified kondi and a unique playing style. Sorie was born blind in the city of Makeni around 1968. He never went to school but began to play the kondi, a traditional instrument of Sierra Leone as a teenager. It was soon apparent that he had a special talent for music, and by 1984 he started earning some small money by playing at ceremonies and travelling to nearby villages. In 1996, civil war forced him to leave his home and seek refuge in the capital of Freetown. He began recording his first album there in 1998, and finished it just before the war reached the city and nearly all the inhabitants fled. Abandoned, Kondi hid inside his house for 5 days while much of the city was looted and burned down. When the dust settled, the master tapes had been lost and his career plans derailed. Having lost his chance to commercially release a cassette, Sorie Kondi made a name for himself as a street musician. His daily busking on the streets of Freetown made him familiar to many residents in Sierra Leone’s capital city, but Sorie Kondi’s popularity was not enough to bring him out of the grinding poverty that many of the country’s citizens experience. A trip in 2006 to the Lungi region, across the bay from Freetown would provide Mr. Kondi with a golden opportunity to put his career back on track. By chance, an American recording engineer spotted him playing his kondi, and asked to include him in the anthology of Sierra Leonean music he was working on. In February 2007, a prominent local businessman heard this recording and sponsored Kondi’s first album, “Without Money, No Family.” While all of these recording opportunities have boosted his morale, but he continues to live in destitute poverty, struggling to find his daily bread. (In 2010, his daily struggle for survival, the reality of poverty, and the struggle to raise school fees for his children was chronicled in a short BBC documentary). In Sierra Leone, artists earn most of their money from album launchings and live performances in foreign countries as cassete manufacturers and distributors pay very low royalties and Crossroads is very pleased to welcome Sorie Kondie on his first American tour.