My drummer:  Markus Leukel

" I started playing drums at the age of 12 on a selfmade drumkit. After one year banging around on this improvised kit without loosing interest my parents bought me a real drumset with a bassdrum, a snare, one racktom and a cymbal. I took lessons for two years from a local drumteacher and learned the basic skills, inclusive reading music which turned out to be very useful for me in the future. At 14 I was ready to join the local brass band. We played a vast variety of music, orchestral music, Big Band, Marches, music from film scores, folk music. It was a great time to understand the drummers role in a band and to prefectionate my reading abilities.

At the age of 20 I studied for one year jazzdrumming with Joop van Erven at the "Hoogeschool voor de Kunsten" in Arnhem/Netherlands. Joop was my most important drumteacher. After one year with him I understood the principals of drumming and I realized also that I had to do a lot of practicing when I wanted to be a professional musician. And this is what I did and still do.

Throughout the 90s I played mainly in a band called "The Parts", we toured extensively in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and France and recorded 3 CDs. The style of this band was very ecclectic, we mixed Rock, Reggae, Latin, Folk and Jazz to something what we called "Next Wave Music", but we never made it to the top.

1996 I joined also the Mark Gillespie Band. Mark is a brilliant singer/songwriter from Manchester and a perfect entertainer. We recorded several CDs, played on big festivals and we were for two years the support act for "Jethro Tull", everytime they came to Germany.

In 1993 I graduated from the "Justus Liebig University of Giessen" in Molecular Biology. Looks like a peculiar facet of my biography but that`s also me !

Around 2000 my interest in music changed more and more in the direction of afro-brazilian-latin music. I played a lot with musicians from westafrica, learned to play the traditional drums and adapted the rhythms to the modern drumkit. That changed my way of playing and thinking rhythms fundamentaly. I also wrote two books on that aspect of drumming, "Afro-Drums" in 2005 and "Ritmos do Brazil" in 2007.

From 2008 to 2010 I worked intensively on the traditional rhythms of Cape Verde. I especially focused on the rhythms of the island of Fogo. The masterdrummer of this island, Senhor Valdomiro Dias accepted me as a student and I learned to play the rhythms directly from this extraordinary man. I fell in love to the people and the music of Cape Verde and in 2010, I moved to Mindelo on the island of Sao Vicente, one of the cultural centers of Cape Verde. Since then I played with the "Who is Who"

of the capeverdian music scene. I`m teaching in my private music school, giving masterclasses on all aspects of drumming and I do a lot of recording in my own home studio.

How I met Claudia Sofia

Claudia was a student of a good friend of mine. He was giving guitar lessons in the same music school where I worked at that time. Later I did some band coaching together with Lucio Vieira, Claudias uncle. She participated in that course. she was about 18 at that time and already had that remarkable voice. But it was not until 2018, when I started performing with her on a regular basis. We played capeverdean and brazilian music and also popmusic from the western hemisphere. A turning point happened in 2022 when I found out by chance that Claudia had a bunch of original compositions. And that material was really good ! We decided to record her songs in a professional studio and it took us two years to finish her first album, mainly due to difficulties in financing that project.

In september/october 2024 we played the first time in Europe. Starting with some shows in Portugal, we continued playing 20 shows in Germany and Austria. It was a big success ! The people that came to the shows loved Claudias voice and her natural and sympathetic performance.

And now we are working on a new european tour later this year presenting our first album "Mas um melodia"