It took a film, a CD and some non-stop touring to establish Staff Benda Bilili on the international scene. Now the Kinshasa street musicians are back with the refreshingly optimistic Bouger le Monde, an album fuelled by their globetrotting adventures.
Music, sex and politics: it’s an explosive cocktail, and just the stuff to feed the kind of controversy that Koffi Olomide is used to. Not only is he the target of anti-Kabila campaigners who apparently pirated his album Abracadabra by pre-empting its release, the Congolese star is also at the heart of a rape case currently appearing before the French courts. But did he really turn up for trial in the Paris suburbs last February as he claims to have done?
The prolific artist Franco, who died in 1989, is still a central figure in Congolese music. The compilation Guitar Hero pays tribute to the rumba giant with an unusual collection of songs remastered with debateable dexterity.
When a high-profile Congolese singer decides to interpret a compatriot master musician, it suddenly becomes clear just how many old-style rumba lovers are still around, as shown by the remarkable commercial success of Koffi chante Tabu Ley.
Sold together in a single box entitled Botyiaki Ntembe, and remastered for the occasion, the two albums, Nani Akoleka Wendo? and Banaya papa Wendo by the singer Wendo Kolosoy were both key pieces in the career of the Congolese singer, who died in 2008 at the age of 83.
In the run-up to the fifty-year anniversary of Edith Piaf’s death, Patricia Kaas kicks off a long list of celebrations with Kaas chante Piaf, a tribute album recorded with the London Royal Philharmonic Orchestra directed by Abel Korzeniowski, and devotes a whole stage show to the “Little Sparrow”.
