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You were saying that you can share files across the world, and work with people from all over. Where did you actually record your new album?

The basic tracking was in Germany, in the countryside. It was a peaceful place, an amazing place. I wish I could go back again. After that I recorded in San Francisco, another session I did in Paris and another session I did here in Barcelona. It's amazing, because we shared files between Paris and San Francisco. After that, we shared files between Paris, San Francisco, Barcelona and the back to Paris again. The only guy that moved was me [laughs]. It was an amazing experience to work with all these great musicians from all over the world. The record is called Afreecanos and we made it with F-R-E-E, freedom. It means, "We need to do what we fell to do, man." Life is too short. We need to do what we feel and this is what I felt with my producer and we came out with that record Afreecanos and I really like it too. Actually I received the first final copy today in the mail.

You are such a world traveler. Do you have certain places where you love to play and the people are especially receptive?

Actually, I love to play in Tokyo, Japan. Another place I love is Maputo, Mozambique. My bass player is from Maputo, and we've played together for the last seven years. We went to Mozambique for the first time last year and it was amazing. To see the African people try to digest and understand the music we do was amazing. We finished playing and it was silent for almost a minute. We were like, "Oh man, these guys don't like this shit," then suddenly they started to kind of cry, and I realized that they felt it in a different way. They digested the music, and they were reacting. I wish that we could go back. I want to play in Africa again.

I can only imagine how connected they would be to the music. Do you plan to tour this album soon?

Yeah, we plan to do a tour. It is interesting, because the way I look at this tour, we can play with one, two, three, four, five, or six musicians, but that doesn't mean that's how many musicians we are going to have the whole time. Afreecanos is a philosophy. Of course we have some tunes on the record that we have to play, or the record company is going to be disappointed, but I think we're going to go beyond that and try to go deeper into the concept of the album. This is what we try and do live. We're going to do some music off the record but we're going to go farther.

You can hear the freedom in your style as you play, and it comes across even on the CD. Even though the songs are always the same, there is always that freedom inside them.

Thank you so much. It's good to hear that at 10:20 at night here in Europe with this really cold weather. It helps a lot.

—Chas Reynolds
04.22.08

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