The tenth and eleventh days of the EU Jazz & Blues Festival 2026 formed a remarkable musical diptych, two consecutive evenings in which the language of jazz opened itself toward Africa and Cuba, toward rhythm as memory, identity and movement.
On August 10, Richard Bona Quartet brought the immense rhythmic and melodic imagination of Cameroon into a contemporary jazz setting; the following evening, Roberto Fonseca Quintet turned the stage toward Havana, where Afro-Cuban tradition, jazz, funk, classical music and modern urban sounds could meet in a single, incandescent musical vocabulary.
The festival’s own 2026 programme places Bona on August 10 and Fonseca on August 11, describing the former as a fusion of African rhythms, jazz harmony and world music, and the latter as an explosion of Afro-Cuban rhythm and piano-driven energy.
Richard Bona has always been an extraordinary contradiction in the best possible sense: a musician whose virtuosity is enormous but whose music rarely feels like a demonstration of virtuosity. His bass is simultaneously foundation, melody, percussion and voice. His musical identity is deeply connected to his African origins, yet his imagination has never been confined by geography. That quality made the tenth night especially appropriate for a festival whose central idea is musical dialogue across borders. Bona’s playing carries the physical pulse of African music while speaking fluently in the harmonic language of jazz, funk, fusion and contemporary world music.
The concert’s most compelling feature was therefore not simply the technical brilliance of the bassist, but the extraordinary elasticity of the music. Bona can make a bass line dance, sing, converse and suddenly become almost orchestral. His instrument does not merely accompany the band; it frequently seems to generate the entire architecture of a piece. His remarkable vocal timbre adds another dimension. The voice carries the warmth of African storytelling, while the bass provides the rhythmic intelligence underneath it, creating a fascinating correspondence between what is sung and what is played.
The quartet format gave that musical personality room to breathe. In the 2026 European performances, Bona has been appearing with guitarist Ciro Manna, keyboardist Mica Lecoq and drummer Nicolas Viccaro, a combination capable of moving naturally between jazz-fusion sophistication, African groove and explosive rhythmic interaction. Manna’s guitar provided both harmonic colour and electric intensity, while Lecoq’s keyboards expanded the sound toward modern fusion, electronic textures and spacious harmonic landscapes. Viccaro’s drumming supplied the essential kinetic force, responding to Bona not as a conventional timekeeper but as a partner in an ongoing rhythmic conversation.
What made Bona’s performance particularly powerful was the absence of any rigid boundary between composition and improvisation. A groove could begin almost imperceptibly, gather weight through the bass, acquire harmonic colour from the keyboards, become sharper through the guitar, and finally explode into a collective improvisational passage. The music seemed to breathe in real time. There was always the sensation that the quartet was listening to itself as intensely as it was performing for the audience.
Bona’s rhythmic conception is especially fascinating because it refuses the idea that rhythm must merely support melody. In his hands, rhythm itself becomes melody. A repeated bass figure can contain an entire emotional narrative; a syncopation can suddenly alter the temperature of the room; a vocal phrase can become an invitation for the musicians to push the groove in another direction. This is one of the reasons Bona has become such an important figure in contemporary jazz and African popular music. His international career has included collaborations with artists ranging from Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea to Pat Metheny, Bobby McFerrin, Stevie Wonder and Chucho Valdés, but his own music retains an unmistakably personal centre.
And then, almost like opening another door within the same house, the eleventh night brought Roberto Fonseca Quintet. If Bona’s concert felt like an encounter between the African continent and the global language of jazz, Fonseca’s performance brought the audience directly into the rhythmic imagination of Havana. The Cuban pianist is one of the great musicians of the post-Buena Vista Social Club generation, an artist who has continually expanded Afro-Cuban music rather than treating it as something frozen in historical memory. His musical world encompasses jazz, son, rumba, mambo, bolero, funk, hip-hop, electronic music and contemporary urban influences.
Fonseca’s piano playing is extraordinary because of the physicality of his rhythm. He does not simply play Cuban music; he seems to inhabit its internal machinery. His left hand can establish a groove with astonishing authority while his right hand launches melodic lines, harmonic substitutions and improvisational figures above it. The result is frequently orchestral in its density, yet intensely personal in its expression. There is an almost percussive relationship between Fonseca and the piano: the instrument becomes simultaneously a harmonic object, a drum, a melodic voice and a vehicle for improvisation.
The quintet setting intensified that quality. Rather than presenting Afro-Cuban music as a museum piece, the ensemble treated it as a living language. Son-derived rhythmic cells could become platforms for jazz improvisation; a bolero could acquire darker harmonic colours; a funk passage could suddenly reveal its Cuban ancestry; and a piano improvisation could move from lyrical tenderness into almost volcanic rhythmic intensity. Fonseca’s musical education and broad listening have always allowed him to move between these worlds without making the transitions feel artificial. His background includes early exposure to drums, classical music, American jazz, funk and soul, African and Brazilian music, reggaeton, electronica and hip-hop.
The emotional atmosphere of the Fonseca concert was consequently different from Bona’s, but profoundly connected to it. Bona’s music carries Africa as a source of memory and rhythm; Fonseca’s carries Havana as both inheritance and living modernity. Both musicians understand that tradition is strongest when it remains capable of transformation.
There was also something wonderfully physical about Fonseca’s performance. His music invites the body to respond before the intellect has finished analysing it. The clave, the tumbao, the syncopation and the shifting accents create a constantly moving floor beneath the harmony. Yet beneath that irresistible energy lies considerable sophistication. Fonseca’s jazz vocabulary allows him to stretch phrases, alter harmonic expectations and create sudden spaces of suspense. He can move from a thunderous rhythmic statement to a delicate, almost classical piano passage with extraordinary naturalness.
That balance between elegance and propulsion has been central to Fonseca’s career. His association with the Buena Vista Social Club placed him inside one of Cuba’s most important musical legacies, while his subsequent work has continually pushed outward. His album La Gran Diversión, for example, revisits the atmosphere of the 1930s Parisian Cabane Cubaine and the golden age of Cuban dance music, drawing on mambo, rumba and bolero while reconnecting that heritage with contemporary performance.
The two evenings therefore belonged together. Richard Bona and Roberto Fonseca come from different musical landscapes, but both demonstrate the same essential truth: jazz is most alive when it listens beyond itself. Bona brought African rhythmic memory into a cosmopolitan electric quartet; Fonseca transformed Cuban musical heritage into a contemporary, improvisational language. Neither musician treats tradition as a limitation. Tradition becomes the starting point for freedom.
For the audience, the sequence was especially powerful. After Bona’s African-rooted rhythmic universe, Fonseca’s Havana seemed almost like another chapter in the same great story—the story of the African diaspora and its extraordinary musical transformations across continents. Jazz, Afrobeat, Afro-Cuban music, funk, blues, son and improvisation are not isolated territories. They are branches of an enormous tree whose roots run deep into African musical history and whose branches continue to spread across the modern world.
The tenth and eleventh days consequently became much more than two concerts. They were two portraits of musical identity in motion. Bona showed how African rhythm can become a universal contemporary language without losing its soul. Fonseca showed how Cuban tradition can remain unmistakably Cuban while embracing jazz, modernity, experimentation and the wider vocabulary of global music. Together they created one of the festival’s most meaningful consecutive musical encounters: Africa speaking through the electric bass, Havana answering through the piano, and jazz providing the open space in which both could meet.
Olivia Peevas — The Artistic Vision Behind the Festival
Behind such a sequence of artists stands the indispensable artistic vision of Olivia Peevas, director and artistic director of the EU Jazz & Blues Festival. The programming of Bona followed by Fonseca is itself evidence of a curatorial philosophy that understands jazz not as a closed genre but as a vast cultural conversation. The festival’s 2026 programme moves deliberately across continents, generations and musical traditions, from Sting and Anne Paceo through Samara Joy, Chris Minh Doky, Erik Truffaz, James Carter, Ibrahim Maalouf, Richard Bona and Roberto Fonseca, before continuing toward Vincent Ségal, Nicolas Gardel, the Budapest Jazz Orchestra and Paquito D’Rivera.
Peevas’s role is therefore much greater than simply bringing celebrated musicians onto European stages. Her achievement lies in creating relationships between artists who may appear, on paper, to belong to different musical worlds. The transition from Bona to Fonseca is a perfect example: Africa becomes Cuba; electric jazz-fusion becomes Afro-Cuban rhythm; bass becomes piano; but the deeper principle remains the same—freedom, rhythm, improvisation and cultural dialogue.
This is the kind of artistic direction that gives a festival an identity. It asks audiences not merely to consume a succession of famous names, but to listen for the invisible connections between them. Under Peevas’s guidance, the EU Jazz & Blues Festival becomes a musical map of Europe and the world, where borders are crossed through sound and where cultural diversity is not an accessory to the programme but its very foundation.
Her curatorial vision makes these evenings part of a larger artistic narrative: a festival in which jazz becomes a language of encounter, and music becomes one of the most eloquent ways of imagining a Europe without cultural borders.
By Lauren Wulff
