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December 02, 2009

Tom Freston, Jimmy Buffett & Chris Blackwell's New Signing...

New York Magazine | Read Full Story >

Tom Freston, the 64-year-old MTV co-founder and former Viacom honcho, has among his hobbies these days the career development of a 30-year-old African singer named Ilo Ferreira, who goes by Ilo….How’d they get to know, and fund, him? “It was an amazing set of circumstances,” Buffett says backstage at Joe’s. “Freston gets fired and he doesn’t have his plane and he’s got me all fired up to go to the Festival in the Desert,” in Africa. So they have to take Buffett’s jet. The route to Mali “is from San Juan to Cape Verde,” where they stopped to refuel. Buffett thought, why not check out the local music scene while they were stopping through. “I went, ‘Let’s see if Cesaria Evora is playing; I’ve always been a fan.’”...The next day, they invited Ilo to lunch at Sodade, an empty upstairs restaurant, along with their traveling companion Chris Blackwell, 72, the man who discovered Bob Marley and today owns a production company, who’d skipped the dinner. “I said to him, ‘You need to go see this kid and tell us,’ ” says Freston….Following lunch, “he started playing, and Chris says, ‘He’s really got it.’”

Read more: Tom Freston and Jimmy Buffett Are Introducing African Singer Ilo Ferreira to America—New York Magazine http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/62371/#ixzz0YXxOQPqK



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