McIntire Department of Music

Kanda Bongo Man is back with his latest album entitled Swalati. This album contains melodies that curl through the patterns like vines on a trellis. This is Kanda Bongo Man’s Soukous!

It’s lilting, rippling, dance groove that seems to smile from every register, with inseparable melody and rhythm. He is without a doubt one of the most famous exponents of Soukous music from Congo and, has been at the heart of the Parisian Soukous scene since the 80’s.

He is the man, who gave the world Kwasa Kwasa, the infectiously charged Congolese dance style. And, he is credited as being one of the pioneers of modern Soukous. Kanda Bongo Man is, according to his fans, an icon, the one who brought Soukous to them!

Mr. Kanda’s big break came with the album Iyole which became a number one hit all over Africa in the mid 80‘s. He performed at the Womad in England in 1983 and reached the audience he had hoped to find. In 1989, Kanda released his first American-distributed album, Kwasa Kwasa which successfully reached a newer and challenging audience only used to Rock-N- Roll. Nevertheless, Mr. Kanda made his mark; Soukous was introduced into American “World Music scene,” and without a question, he has created a winning Soukous formula that has sold several hundred thousands of albums worldwide, some of which are listed below:

Kanda Bongo Man, the nightingale from Congo presents an exciting & fast moving show of music and dance. His style is known for its shimmering duel guitar parts, which produce intensity, that is hypnotic on the dance floor.

Kanda’s dance move is remarkable, rooted in Congolese tradition, the hips move back and forth while the hands move to follow the hips. It is also performed with amazing dexterity by his exhilarating female dancers. Some press says: “if Kanda Bongo doesn’t make you want to dance, call an ambulance. You’re dead.”

He is part of the third generation of Congolese pop musicians. Born in Kinshasa, Congo. Kanda grew up listening to Congolese legends such as Le Grand Kalle, Franco, Vicky Longomba, Dr. Nico, Tabu Ley, Zaiko Langa Langa and a synthesis of traditional melodies and Afro-rhythms, which developed into a distinctive Kanda’s sound. His first professional musical experience came in the mid 1970’s when he was given the opportunity to front Zaire’s Bella Bella of the Soki brothers. And later he partnered with Soki Dianzenza, one of the brothers, in his Bella Mambo, a group that gave him a center stage, and influenced him tremendously like many others such as Pepe Kalle, Nyboma, Diblo Dibala and Madilu,

Thomas Mapfumo was born in 1945 in Marondera, a small town south of the Rhodesian capital, Salisbury. He spent his first ten years living in the countryside with his grandparents, tending cattle herds, and waking up long before sunrise to do chores before school. Though Rhodesia was moving inexorably toward racial civil war, Mapfumo was living an old-fashioned, traditional life, mostly removed from the bitterness building in the cities and townships. One of his greatest pleasures back then was the music of his people, the Shona, music he experienced in family and clan gatherings not unlike those his ancestors had been holding for centuries. Traditional children's tunes, songs of celebration accompanied by the drums called ngoma, and especially, the sacred music of the metal-pronged mbira, an instrument whose beautiful, cycling melodies could summon the presence of ancestor spirits -- these things formed the basis of Mapfumo's musical personality, a force that continues to shape the history and spiritual life of his country.

When Mapfumo was ten, he moved to Mbare, the poorest and toughest black township of Salisbury. Life was different in the urban home of Mapfumo's mother, stepfather, two brothers and two sisters. Mbare was a center of black protest against the Rhodesian regime, and a scene of random police actions designed to intimidate would-be rebels. In Mbare, Mapfumo heard radio for the first time, and he was wowed by African jazz from Johannesburg and Bulawayo, classic big band Rumba from the Congo, and especially, R&B and soul from America and England.

Mapfumo began to sing, and in high school, he joined his first band, the Zutu Brothers. For the next ten years, while the liberation war that would eventually transform Rhodesia into Zimbabwe roiled though the country, Mapfumo made his way as an itinerant singer. Both in the Cosmic Four Dots, the band where he learned basic musical skills, and in the far more successful Springfields, Mapfumo was the rock 'n' roll singer, the man charged with reproducing vocal performances by the likes of Elvis Presley, Bobby Darrin, Wilson Picket, and Mick Jagger. (To this day, Mapfumo is a walking juke box of hits from the 1960s.) His identity as a singer made him something of a happy rebel. When the police came through his neighborhood one day demanding that everyone line up outside their houses, Mapfumo turned up in the shiny, silver jacket he wore on-stage. This playful show of disrespect nearly landed Mapfumo in jail, where he'd have been lucky to escape with a beating. But a cop who was a Springfields fan stepped in and let him go.

In 1972, Mapfumo moved to a mining town and started a band called the Hallelujah Chicken Run Band. The band got paid for entertaining the miners, but had to work day jobs as well, including tending chickens in a "chicken run," hence the name. It was here, working with guitarist Joshua Dube, that Mapfumo first adapted songs from the ancient mbira repertoire and worked them into the band's Afro-rock repertoire. To sing in Shona was unusual, and in the context of the escalating war, automatically political. So as Mapfumo continued to develop as a songwriter, his devotion to traditional music inevitably politicized him.

As Mapfumo moved on to work first with the Acid Band, and then with the Blacks Unlimited, everything came together. Mapfumo's lyrics reflected the concerns of the people around him --hardships in the rural areas, young men heading into the bush to fight, and a rising sense of indignation at white rulers who had systematically devalued Shona culture for four generations. The guerilla fighters had taken the name chimurenga, Shona for struggle, and Mapfumo decided to call his new sound "chimurenga music."

Mapfumo means "spears" in Shona, and Mapfumo's early chimurenga singles, including "Mothers, Send Your Children to War" and "Trouble in the Communal Lands," lived up to his combative name. "People were being killed by soldiers," recalls Mapfumo. "They were running from their homes, and coming to live in town like squatters. Many used to cry when they listened to the lyrics of these songs." Mapfumo's chimurenga singles captured the imagination of blacks nation wide. Near the end of war, the out-maneuvered Rhodesians arrested Mapfumo.

Abdoulaye Diabaté, also known as “Buru Djoss”, was born in 1956 in Kela, Mali, to one of the most prestigious griot families in the Manden world of West Africa. Kela is known throughout the Manden region (a region that encompasses portions of Mali, Guinea, Senegal, and Ivory Coast) as the Mecca of griot culture and source of some of its greatest verbal artists and oral historians. Griots learn and develop their fine artistry through traditional means that require, first and foremost, that they be born into a griot lineage, and then through years of tutelage within their family’s practice. Abdoulaye’s older brother, Kasse Mady Diabaté, is one of the most famous Manden griots of his generation and Lafia Diabaté, another brother, while not as famous as Kasse Mady, is also widely appreciated in local circles. In keeping with his family’s tradition of excellence, but with a much wider geographic scope, Abdoulaye has now come into his own as a distinctly modern, urban-style griot.

In 1973 he joined the Tenetemba Jazz in Bamako, Mali. Then, he sang with one of Mali’s most beloved popular dance bands, The Koule Star Band of Koutiala. In 1975 Abdoulaye moved to Abidjan, Ivory Coast, where, as “Buru Djoss” he spent twenty years developing his music. He formed his own 12-piece dance band The Super Manden, in which some of the greatest stars of Manden music circulated as band-members; singers such as Salif Keita, Mory Kante, Kante Manfila, and Ousmane Kouyate. In 1978, Super Manden released its first recording Wahabia-Ke Daschi. The album was banned from airplay because the title song criticized some marabouts religious leaders. During these years Abdoulaye also played guitar and sang with many other bands, including the prestigious Ballet Koteba and the all-female pop group Les Go de Koteba.

Diabaté moved to New York in the late 1990s, and has been an active member of the New York/East Coast African music scene as a free-lance singer/guitarist, with his group Super Mandé, as well as with other ensembles. His first U.S. album, released in 2002 on Blue Monster Records, re-explores the traditional Manden repertoire with a new spin inspired by both his new cultural environment and new group of excellent musicians who are, like himself, new “Manden Yorkers”. Currently, Diabaté’s second U.S. album is in production and offers even more punch and groove than the first. Abdoulaye's voice has an indefinable, penetrating quality that touches deep into one's heart and soul and lifts the spirits of the listener. His live shows are an experience that last a lifetime.

In Martin Scorsese’s film, “Feel Like Going Home,” Corey Harris visits Niafunke, the Sahara Desert hometown of Malian master musician Ali Farka Touré, known around the world as the king of African blues. The encounter between Harris, a young, American blues revivalist, and Touré, a musician with a vast sense of cultural history, is as close as any of the films in Scorsese’s series, The Blues, comes to grappling with the African roots of blues music. But for Harris, that was just the beginning.

A few months later, Harris went back to Niafunke. “I wanted to go back,” says Harris, “because I felt like it was important to get with the music from over there, and to bring what little I know from our short tradition here as black people in America, and to put it back together and make a document of it. I’m not trying to say the blues all came from Mali. It’s just one of the strains, one of the really strong strains that make up black music in America. The point is you can take that music that we have over here, and it can go over there and be conversant.”

Harris’s new album, Mississippi to Mali, backs up this bold idea with inspirational new takes on classic songs. While Harris digs into Skip James’s “Special Rider Blues,” Touré gracefully weaves his way through, playing an ancient, one-string fiddle (njarka), and Souleymane Kane adds what Harris calls “the funk,” literally the slap and clop of West African calabash percussion. When the tables are turned with Touré playing guitar and singing a traditional song of the Bozo people, Harris proves no less conversant. Never mind the ancient roots of the blues; this is fresh, vibrant music of today bridging the realities of living traditions on two continents.

Eight of the fifteen tracks on Mississippi to Mali come from those sessions with Touré and two of his musicians in Niafunke. Four more tracks were recorded in Mississippi, where Harris worked with harmonica legend Bobby Rush and veteran blues drummer Sam Carr, and also with Otha Turner’s Rising Star Fife and Drum Band. Turner himself had died just a week before the sessions, so his 12-year old granddaughter, musical prodigy Shardé Thomas, played the fife and sang in his place on two tracks, adding a cross-generational element to this album’s ambitious cross-continental dialogue. These far-flung musical encounters share a feeling of easy informality, by now a trademark of Harris’s work. Harris visited the musicians where they live, got comfortable with them, and rolled tape on the spot. Call this a set of new millennium field recordings. Also call it the most resonant unpacking of the mysterious, ancient history of African American music we’ve heard yet.

Born in Denver, Colorado in 1969, Harris always knew that Africa lay behind the music he grew up loving—R&B, funk, reggae, blues—the whole ball of wax he thought of as “black music.” He went on to study anthropology at Bates College, and in the early ‘90s, made two extended trips to Cameroon. In Africa, Harris explored language, social reality and music in a complex, post-colonial setting, but as much as he loved looking outward, he came home determined to make his way as a blues musician. “Blues was what I understood deepest in myself,” says Harris, “because I grew up with that. My mom was of that generation. She lived in the depression in northeast Texas near Louisiana, so I always heard stories about it. It wasn’t a stretch for me to understand what was going on, even though it took me a while to be able to play it.”

Harris shook up the blues scene with his 1995 debut release, Between Midnight and Day, a masterpiece of rural blues exploration. Ever since then, he’s been finding ways to extend the journey, composing new songs, reinventing old ones, following his instincts fearlessly wherever they might lead. He has performed and recorded solo and acoustic, also with his driving, electric 5x5 Band, and with New Orleans pianist Henry Butler (on the album Vü Dü Menz in 2000). Harris’s Rounder Records debut, Downhome Sophisticate (2002) found him stretching out as a songwriter, merging blues, African pop, rock and electronica in one of the year’s most brilliant and original releases.

On Mississippi to Mali, his sixth album, Harris returns to his roots, but with a whole new spin. “I really approached this as a student,” he says. “I was going to go out and learn something, and deepen my understanding of what it is I do, and why I’m doing it.” Harris had been planning to do an album of duets with blues elders. But after he accepted an invitation to visit Mali, and played a show with the great guitarist and troubadour Boubacar Traoré, he got to thinking about collaborating with musicians over there. Then the Scorsese film came along, and Harris saw a way to bring the two ideas together. “The record was an outgrowth of my desire to collaborate with someone, and actually learn, and then to bring something that they could value as well. That was nice because the styles are so different in so many ways, but then there’s this kernel of similarity at the core.” Harris recognized that kernel of shared experience the first time he heard a recording of Ali Farka Touré. By the time he sat down to jam with Touré a decade later, Harris just knew what repertoire would work. Skip James’s unusually mournful sound had always seemed to contain something ancient for Harris, and the Malian musicians easily found themselves in James’s “Special Rider Blues” and “Cypress Grove.” Robert Petway’s “Catfish Blues”—said to have influenced the young John Lee Hooker, and the model for Muddy Waters’s “Rolling Stone”—was also a natural choice, and the traditional “.44 Blues” makes a particularly satisfying connection with Souleyman Kane’s funky calabash. Harris didn’t want to belabor anything—nothing clever, contrived, or cutting edge—just easy spontaneity.

“There was no rehearsal,” says Harris. “We just sat with Ali. We were there for five days and we got with him on three days for two hours each day. That was it. And before that, it was all just chillin’ and eating and hanging at his crib.” The wild card here was the music Touré would contribute, but once again, despite the desert heat, nobody broke a sweat. “There’s some repertoire they played for me in the key of E which sounds just like Muddy Waters,” says Harris. “There’s one tune called ‘Rokie.’ You’d never know it’s from Mali if you heard it, and they’re telling me it’s a traditional Tuareg tune.”

For the Mississippi recordings, Harris went to songs that for him represent the core of the blues tradition in America. He stomps through “Big Road Blues” with Bobby Rush and Sam Carr, and brews up a one-of-a-kind rendition of “Station Blues” with Shardé Thomas and the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band. Next to Thomas’s soulful, 12-year-old voice, Harris sounds like an old man, and the blend is pure magic against the syncopated, rolling rhythms of the drums. The moment Harris learned about Otha Turner’s death, he thought of including Shardé. “She’s real gifted,” he says, “real calm in her manner, very well brought up, intelligent, definitely someone to watch. From what I hear she also plays jazz flute, she reads, she plays piano, she sings, and she plays all the percussion.” On Mississippi to Mali, Harris joins in on a performance of Shardé’s signature tune, “Back Atcha.”

Harris rounds out the album with three compositions of his own, including a down and dirty blues called “Mr. Turner,” pumped out with Bobby Rush on harmonica and Sam Carr on drums. Mississippi to Mali is dedicated to Otha Turner, and this tune makes it official. “Charlene” is a song Harris wrote and sings in French, using a guitar tuning he picked up by watching a guitarist from the West African Manden griot tradition, and “Coahoma,” the picking, sliding guitar instrumental that opens the album, is a song inspired by trains and named for the Mississippi county where Harris wrote it. Harris ends the album with a solo performance of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.” Book-ending all these extraordinary encounters with two solo pieces, Harris reminds us that he carries the long history of blues—that venerable kernel of culture—within him wherever he goes. And the journey continues.