Just Announced: SHU, plus Tomas Doncker

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Shu

Shu is, first and foremost, a songwriter. The kind who agonizes over the right melody, fusses over lyrics and tinkers with a chord until the song finally feels ready for birth. But he is also a devoted composer and musician, the kind who is grounded in blues, funk, afrobeat and hip-hop, but keeps reaching beyond traditional instruments and soundscapes, looking for some Radiohead. Finally, Shu is a passionate and experienced performer, committed not just to entertaining, but also to communicating and discovering ambivalence, weakness and half-truths in himself and his audience. Through the songs, the sound, and the stage, Shu always hopes to set off on a ‘naked journey’ leading somewhere bold, brash and exciting, but at the same time somewhere very vulnerable.

Shu’s musical journey is not unlike his personal one. He grew up in Nairobi Kenya, born to a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, a background that made him acutely aware as a child that the world was full of in-betweens, of almost-truths and dualities. Throughout his school life in Kenya, Shu took the world as it was, performing the duties of a good student and ‘promising-young-man’; but he would also escape to a musical world where things were much less clear, and where he could re-imagine things as he heard them. From a very early age, Shu would spend countless hours at the piano, at first working hard to master Chopin or some other classical dude, but then excited to discover that you didn’t have to re-produce the notes on the page – that you could actually play whatever you wanted….

This desire to go ‘beyond the page’ and create something of his own led Shu to constantly navigate multiple worlds, in pursuit of something he suspected might be hidden in between. From Kenya to Harvard and then Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, Shu’s musical and creative self grew alongside his academic self, and his American self grew alongside his African self, all jostling with each other to be heard. In homage to his economics background and the immigrant’s dream, Shu moved to New York after graduating and worked in the corporate world for a couple of years, but then withdrew from that world entirely to write songs, and tour on shoestring budgets, performing over 50 shows in the US, Europe and Africa (including opening for Les Nubians on their US tour). During this time, he recorded and independently released his debut, Shusic, which was acclaimed by critics and DJs around the world and went on to sell almost 4,000 copies. Several songs from the album also won top songwriting accolades from Billboard, the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, and the International Songwriting Contest. In addition to this critical and sales-success, Shu also worked hard to cement his live-show reputation in his adopted home of New York, playing to packed houses at notable venues like The Blue Note, Joe’s Pub, S.O.B.’s, B.B. King and The Cutting Room (where he hosted his own “Punk Soul” series over a number of months, exploring alternative approaches to soul music).

Shu has grown significantly as an artist and a person since his first release, coming to accept and even embrace the uncertainty and in-between-ness of his background, experiences, relationships, and the world around him. This ambivalence has become the common theme of Shu’s songwriting and sound, as he keeps pushing to take himself and his listeners someplace familiar but slightly unsettling, and inevitably finding something broken, yet beautiful, along the way.




Tomas Doncker

Producer, Singer, Songwriter & Guitarist Tomas Doncker has been a mainstay on the New York music scene for over twenty years. He cut his teeth hanging out downtown in the fertile punk-funk explosion of the 1980s. Quickly, he found himself among the ranks of New York's groundbreaking musical elite and in such groups as: James Chance & The Contortions, James White & The Blacks, Defunkt, Latin-groove-meisters Konk and New York's absolute 1st hip hop group, J. Walter Negro & The Loose Joints (featuring Grammy-nominated pianist Arturo O'Farrill).

Tomas has amassed performance and recording credits with a diverse list of musical luminaries including: Bootsy Collins, Ivan Neville, Yoko Ono, Amp Fiddler, Bonnie Raitt, folk-pop-diva Morley, Japanese saxophonist Sadao Watanabe, Grammy winner Prince Charles Alexander's City Beat Band & spoken word / hip-hop pioneers Sonya Sanchez & Toni Blackman. The result of Tomas' passion for production and artist development can be heard on several recent and upcoming releases:

In 2007 (after returning to the United States after an expatriate stay in Japan) Tomas released Inside Out which features his band Daniel Sadownick, Booker King, Etienne Lytle with Hollis Steele co-producing with Tomas. Currently Tomas is residing in Brooklyn New York. Tomas records and regularly performs up and down the East Coast. He recently released a World/Soul CD titled "Small World" which features guest appearances by Martha Redbone, Karen Bernod, Audrey Martell, Keith Fluitt and KUKU, Ayib Dieng and Karma Johnson. This album is co-produced by Tomas along with Daniel Sadownick and the production team of Hollins Steele. Doncker and Nigerian singer songwriter Kuku toured as a duo in fall 2008 with a performance dubbed "In the Absence of a Small World" Tour.

Tomas recently had the pleasure working on a collection of new songs with Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa. The result entitled 'The Mercy Suite" featuring The Shapeshifter Ensemble is a stirring emulsion of song and words brought forth by the illuminating words of Komunyakaa and the resounding musical rhythms of Doncker’s music. It features performances by some of contemporary music's most inspiring artists such as Meshell Ndegeocello, Chocolate Genius, Morley, Marvin Sewell, Karma Johnson, Brandon Ross, Camelia Qabazard, Booker King, Daniel Sadownick and Corey Glover. The Mercy Suite was for release in April,2009. Komunyakaa and Doncker premiered a live version of “The Mercy Suite” at The University of Georgia on April 2nd.