In a career that spans more than a decade, Corey Harris has dug into the roots of African-American music perhaps more deeply than any of his predecessors. More than just a songwriter and musician, he is also a pilgrim in search of the music's earliest origins, beyond the Mississippi delta to the continent of Africa and the three-thousand-year-old underpinnings of contemporary culture. The culmination of this journey is 'Zion Crossroads', Harris' debut recording on Telarc. Inspired and informed by his travels to various parts of Africa over the past decade, the album captures some of the most enduring elements of African-American music - blues, reggae, soul - and infuses them with a sense of history, social consciousness and spirituality. Harris is helped on Zion Crossroads by producer Michael G, the guitarist and co-founder of Easy Star All-Stars, the New York-based reggae collective. Like Harris, he sees the project as a powerful convergence of style, vision, history and culture: "The marriage of Corey's socially conscious lyrics and the revolutionary sounds of reggae make for a potent musical cocktail that arouses the body, mind, and spirit." Personnel: Corey Harris - (vocals, guitar), Keith Brown - (drums, percussion), Peanut - (piano, organ), Stephen Samuels - (bass), Michael Goldwasser - (rhythm & pick guitar, cabasa), Michael Wagner - (trombone), Pam Fleming - (trumpet), Victor Axelrod - (tambourine), Cheikh Hamala Diabate - (ngoni) and others