Richard Bona

Made by hand in Minta

Bona Penda Nya Yuma Elolo was born on 28 October 1967 in Minta, in eastern Cameroon, into a household where music was a trade rather than a pastime. His grandfather was a griot and percussionist; his mother sang professionally. He was put on the balafon at four and was singing in his village church by five. Instruments were not something the family could buy, so he built them — flutes, and a guitar strung with cords stretched over an old motorcycle petrol tank.

He came to the guitar properly at eleven. By thirteen he had assembled a band to work a French-run jazz club in Douala, and it was the club's owner who put a Jaco Pastorius record in front of him. That settled the instrument question. Bona switched to electric bass, and to the pairing of bass and voice that has carried his work ever since.

Düsseldorf, Paris, then the New York phone

At twenty-two he left for Düsseldorf to study music, then moved on to France, where the working life meant playing with Manu Dibango, Salif Keita and the violinist Didier Lockwood. He relocated to New York in 1995, and the roll of people who hired him there reads as a survey of the period: Joe Zawinul, the Brecker Brothers, George Benson, Branford Marsalis, Bobby McFerrin. In 1998 he was musical director of Harry Belafonte's European tour.

The association that put him in front of the widest audience came in 2002, when he joined the Pat Metheny Group as bassist, singer, guitarist and percussionist for Speaking of Now, alongside Antonio Sánchez on drums and Cuong Vu on trumpet. Away from the road he held a jazz professorship at New York University, and between 2015 and 2020 he co-owned Club Bonafide, a Manhattan jazz room, with the restaurateur Laurent d'Antonio.

The records under his own name

Scenes from My Life (1999, Columbia Jazz) set the pattern for the solo catalogue. Reverence followed in 2001 and Munia in 2003 on Universal Music France. Toto Bona Lokua, a 2004 record made with Gérald Toto and Lokua Kanza, stripped the approach back to three voices and acoustic instruments.

Tiki (2005) is the most decorated of them: nominated for Best Contemporary World Music Album at the 49th Grammy Awards, and carrying John Legend on "Please Don't Stop", a song still in the live rotation. The concert album Bona Makes You Sweat came in 2008, The Ten Shades of Blues in 2009, and Bonafied in 2013 — certified gold in Poland, a market that has since become one of the most dependable on his touring map.

Heritage (2016), cut with the band Mandekan Cubano and released on Quincy Jones's Qwest Records, was the sharpest turn in the catalogue: an Afro-Cuban record that folded Havana rhythm into Cameroonian song. That Cuban thread now runs through most of what he does on stage.

Running parallel is the partnership with the Cuban pianist Alfredo Rodriguez. The two were introduced by Jones, who mentored both, appear together in the Netflix documentary Quincy, and recorded for Rodriguez's Jones-produced album Tocororo. They have toured as a co-billed act since, including two sold-out sets at Ronnie Scott's in London on 12 November 2021, priced £40 to £60.

Barred from the country in his songs

The other constant in Bona's public life is his standoff with the Cameroonian state. In October 2014 he said he would not return unless visa requirements were dropped. In March 2016 he tore up his Cameroonian passport on social media and blamed the state's treatment of him. In 2017 he was unable to attend his mother's funeral. He told RFI in 2022 that nobody had ever explained the ban.

On 24 July 2026 he went further, telling DW Afrique that he would never return, that he had been declared persona non grata without any reason given, and that he would still like to know the reason for what he called the censorship. He said Cameroon was deeply rooted in fraud, that its youth had been corrupted, and that the country was now a lost cause. The underlying dispute is Cameroon's prohibition on dual nationality, which he opposes. The upshot is a musician whose material comes from where he grew up, performing it everywhere except there.

2026: a trio, and four nights on St Martin's Lane

The touring year has been more or less unbroken. Setlist records place him at Dimitriou's Jazz Alley in Seattle on 24 and 25 March 2026, at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston on 30 March for a show billed as Richard Bona Meets Berklee, and under the big top at the Cully Jazz Festival in Switzerland on 17 April. The autumn run opens with three Polish dates — Tama in Poznań on 12 October, Kwadrat in Kraków on 13 October, Zaklęte Rewiry in Wrocław on 14 October — then Klitgården in Bindslev, Denmark on 17 October and the Teatro Carani in Sassuolo on 30 October.

London is the engagement that stands out: four shows across 2 and 3 November 2026 at Blue Note London, 42–49 St Martin's Lane, billed as the Richard Bona Trio, at 7pm and 9.30pm each night. Berlin's Zig Zag Hall follows on 12 November, the Théâtre Lino Ventura in Nice on 20 November and the Opéra de Limoges on 28 November.

Three further dates are co-billed with Alfredo Rodriguez rather than the trio: Cosmopolite in Oslo on 18 November, Teatr Muzyczny Roma in Warsaw on 30 November, and the NOSPR hall in Katowice on 11 April 2027 — already on sale seven months out, which says something about how the Polish audience has held since Bonafied went gold there. Songkick's count stands at fifteen upcoming concerts across seven countries. Blue Note London's billing and the festival copy both describe him as a Grammy winner; the documented honour under his own name is the Tiki nomination.