He was selected in a worldwide search by a panel of judges, including jazz musicians Herbie Hancock, Terence Blanchard, and Wayne Shorter.Īfter UCLA, he appeared on Blanchard's albums Bounce (2003) and Flow (2005) and on Hancock's Possibilities (2006) and River: The Joni Letters (2007). He auditioned for the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz at the University of California Los Angeles. This inspired Loueke to study jazz in Paris. He played African pop music, but he discovered jazz when a friend returned from Paris with a copy of an album by George Benson. The club's manager heard him and offered him a job. At a club during a break, he took a guitar from the bandstand and started playing it. He got his first professional job by accident. He studied at the National Institute of Art in Ivory Coast, the American School of Music in Paris from 1994 to 1998, Berklee College of Music from 1999 to 2001, and the Thelonious Monk Institute from 2001 to 2003. When the strings broke, he replaced them with bicycle brake cables, which damaged the neck of the guitar and compelled him to find a carpenter to fix it.

When he lacked money to buy new strings, which had to be bought across the border in Nigeria, he soaked the strings in vinegar to keep them clean. It took Loueke a year to earn the $50 he needed to buy his first guitar.

He listened to guitarists George Benson, Kenny Burrell, Joe Pass, and Wes Montgomery. He began playing percussion instruments around the age of 9 but was influenced by an older brother who played guitar, which he began playing himself when he was seventeen. Loueke grew up in what he has described as a family of poor intellectuals in the West African country of Benin.

Lionel loueke albums