Bridget Kearney and Benjamin Lazar Davis

Bridget Kearney and Benjamin Lazar Davis are celebrating the release of their debut EP, Bawa, a collection of original songs written and recorded in Accra, Ghana, and based on the Bawa music native to the Ghana’s Northwest region. Longtime collaborators in many different settings, the two first met in 2004 when both were students at The New England Conservatory and Davis was in the habit of knocking on practice room doors at random to meet potential musical partners. As Kearney sees it, this strange ritual was actually a great way for Davis to find like-minded musicians, “Ben is so creative and intuitive that the musicians that work best with him are the type that will see that about him, drop everything and go on whatever adventure he has in store.” Since then, Kearney and Davis have been on many adventures together, touring the US as bandmates in Cuddle Magic, playing their own duo shows around the East Coast and as showcasing artists at SXSW, running the Philadelphia Marathon together and most recently traveling to Ghana together to study West African drumming and the gyl (African xylophone) music of the Dagaaba. “We are both life-long lovers of music and students of music,” says Kearney, “so nothing was more exciting for us than going to the source of a music we really loved and learning about it from the masters.” Translating the traditional gyl and drum parts to their two acoustic guitars and singing their own, original, indie-folk infused melodies and words over them, the music sounds, like most music you’ll hear from Bridget and Ben, like nothing you’ve heard before.