Manu Dibango

The nomadic ways of Cameroon's best known maestro Manu Dibango have filled his life with auspicious encounters. Dibango went to Paris at fifteen to study. Though his Protestant parents objected, Dibango pursued music vigorously, moving from classical piano to saxophone in 1954. He got his first job playing piano with Francis Bebey, Cameroon's brilliant writer, musicologist and performer.

Dibango soaked up the jazz scene in Brussels before moving to Kinshasa, Zaire in 1961, just as the Congolese rumba revolution hit its stride. He stayed two years, recording 100 singles with Joseph Kabesele's legendary African Jazz. Working between Paris and Douala, Dibango then tried his hand at Cameroon's beloved makossa music, but also explored a new love, American soul. He married the two styles in his 1973 release "Soul Makossa," a surprise hit in Europe and America that sold more copies worldwide than any prior African single.

With his band the Makossa Gang, Dibango finished out the '70s recording in New York, Lagos, Abidjan, Paris and in Kingston, Jamaica, where he worked with reggae's top rhythm section Sly and Robbie. Having toured much of the world and experimented with every pop style that interested him, Dibango reconnected with jazz in the '80s. In 1985, he brought an array of African stars together to record "Tam Tam pour L'Ethiopie," to raise money to fight famine in Ethiopia.

During the '90s, Dibango embraced hip-hop and rap, and in 1994, he released Wakafrika, guest-spotting a wide range of African star singers to create new interpretations of the continent's pop classics. A universalist not confined to any country or stylistic niche, Dibango's adventurism puts him beyond the tastes of most folks back home. In all these years, he's had very few dance hits in Cameroon. – Banning Eyre, Courtesy Afropop Worldwide: www.afropop.org