YOHANNES TONA MINNEAPOLIS MN
*** updated October 2009 *** ___My NEW CD is available for purchase at CD BABY - here is the link - http://www.cdbaby.com/yohannestona - Thank you for supporting my music. Y.T. ______
In the Twin Cities, where incredibly talented musicians practically grow on trees, Yohannes Tona is one of the most regularly employed, hardest sought bass players in either town. He as played with the Grammy Award winning Sounds of Blackness, Minnesota Music Award winner Alicia Wiley and a host of others from Mint Condition’s Stokley Williams to spoken word star Shá Cage. Presently, he backs piano virtuoso Nachito Herrera each month at famed nightspot The Dakota and the legendary Dr. Mambo's Combo, Monday nights at Bunker’s (Mpls). He did the Paris Jazz Festival with iconic guitarist-composer-vocalist Jef Lee Johnson, has backed The Steeles, Darnell Davis & the Remnant and, in 2008, released The Yohannes Tona Band’s debut CD Sands from the desert….
Amazingly enough, Tona has done all this and more at the relatively young age of 31. Born in Awassa, Ethiopia to a mom who sang spirituals and a dad he describes as “the baddest organ and accordion player in town”, Yohannes picked up acoustic guitar, when he was about 8. He’d watch church musicians play and, later, having a natural ear, picked up piano before easily switching to bass when the chance came to fill in at a religious crusade – before more than 20,000 of the faithful. After high school, he studied at Yared Music School, in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, where joined the local scene and played with such notables as the young Teddy Afro and international recording artist Mahmoud Ahmed.
By the time Tona set his sights on Berklee College of Music (Boston), he was playing so well, he earned a scholarship. In the midst of his studies, a friend invited him to St. Paul. “I checked out the winter”, he recalls, “and went right back.” Word of his musicianship had got around, though, and with a hard sell, the friend landed Yohannes as musical director for St. Paul’s Ethiopian Evangelical Church, complete a place to live and a scholarship to continue is studies. He started nosing around downtown Minneapolis in his spare time, started sitting in at Jasmine’s with Prince drummers Kirk Johnson and Michael Bland, Ipso Facto guitarist Wain McFarlane and others. In short order, his rep got around and the rest, as they say, is history.
Presently, he’s writing new material as well as producing other local and international artists. Tona just got out of the studio, working with 4-time Minnesota Music Award winning vocalist-composer Alicia Wiley on her new album Halfway Home. Wiley states, “Yohannes brings my music to places I didn't know it could go. His playing is magical.”
“Sand from the desert….is a funk-fusion tour de force, showcasing range, texture, finesse and pure fire.” Dwight Hobbes, Minneapolis St. Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Daily Planet
