Djo mpoyi biography sampler
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Congolese rumba
Genre of African music and dance
Congolese rumba, also known as African rumba, is a dance music genre originating from the Republic of the Congo (formerly French Congo) and Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire). With its rhythms, melodies, and lyrics, Congolese rumba has gained global recognition and remains an integral part of African music heritage. In December 2021, it was added to the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage.[1][2][3]
Emerging in the mid-20th century in the urban centers of Brazzaville and Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) during the colonial era, the genre's roots can be traced to the Bakongopartner dance music known as maringa, which was traditionally practiced within the former Kingdom of Loango, encompassing regions of contemporary Republic of the Congo, southern Gabon, and Cabinda Province of Angola.[4][5][6] The style gained prominence in the 1920s–1940s, introd
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A Consumer Guide to FRANCO
by Joe Yanosik
This planerat arbete began gods May as a perfectly normal frosseri on an artist whose music inom first fell for on the several Franco compilations I own, all recommended by Robert Christgau. My binge on guitarist-vocalist-bandleader Franco, the greatest African musician of all time, a self-taught genius who injected African rumba back into Cuban music and co-invented soukous, continued for weeks and at some point I felt compelled to create a spreadsheet of the tracks I owned from those comps, determine which albums those tracks originally appeared on using www.discogs.com, fill out the spreadsheet bygd adding the remaining tracks from those albums and see what I was missing. And that's when it hit me: even though inom owned all five of the excellent Franco comps Christgau had reviewed (The Rough Guide to Franco, The Very Best of the Rhumba Giant of Zaire, African Classics, Francophonic, and Francophonic 2), eight CDs of music, 80 discrete recordi
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If you follow me on Twitter, you know I’m a fan of avant-garde Ugandan labels Nyege Nyege Tapes and Hakuna Kalala. And now and then I’ve written in the Reader about current African artists, among them Nihiloxica, Kirani Ayat, and Muthoni Drummer Queen. But I’ve long listened to older sounds from the continent—soukous, juju, mbalax, highlife, mbaqanga, apala, benga, fuji—and I don’t often have a timely reason to post about them in Chicago.
Fortunately, sharing music that’s decades past its press cycle is one purpose of this column. The Listener is for whatever we like, and that’s the only rule—as Salem Collo-Julin demonstrated last week by writing about a collection of vintage in-store music mixes from Kmart.
To celebrate the second spring of the longest year of my life, I’m revisiting an old favorite: “Ngui-Ngon,” released by all-star Congolese soukous band Tiers Monde Cooperation on their 1983 debut album, Nouvelle Formule