Congo (DRC)

The nation now officially named the Democratic Republic of Congo is a a vast and diverse nation—encompasing 905,000 square miles of Central Africa and containing nearly 50 million people speaking more than 200 languages—and one of the most musically fertile regions on earth.

The oldest Congolese music is made by the various aboriginal rainforest dwellers generally known as Batwa or Pygmies. Pygmies play a variety of makeshift instruments but above all they sing. Repetitive interlacing parts form lush choral polyphony, the ambient forest providing the "chapel" for this entrancing a cappella music. Drums are played everywhere in Congo. Slit log drums with two or more pitches have been used since time immemorial for entertainment and to send messages over long distances. Most traditional dance music is performed on a "family" of upright drums generally called bambonda or bangoma, played by clusters of men beating sticks on the wooden sides and their bare hands on the skin heads. Just about every ethnic group in Congo has its "thumb piano"—likembes sanzas, etc. In the southern part of the country the thumb piano is known as kalimba while further north that word applies to a wooden xylophone. Harps, zithers and lutes of all shapes and sizes have long abounded in Congo.

Modern Congolese music can be dated from the rise of cities in the early 20th century, particularly the capital of the Belgian Congo, Léopoldville. Jobs brought people of different ethnic groups together from around the country, their interaction created new sounds: local music performed on imported instruments; foreign songs and dances rendered in indigenous languages and improvised moves. When phonographs became available in the 1930s, young African urbanites were introduced to recorded music from as far away as India and Hawaii. The most popular records came from the country with the strongest Congolese culture outside of Africa: Cuba, whose sounds were at once familiar and new. Listening to contemporary Cuban music, Congolese musicians realized how to make their traditional music modern. Playing homemade instruments and whatever imported instruments they could get their hands on—trumpets, clarinets, accordions and especially guitars—they imitated Cuban forms and styling and called their music rumba. Yet they always retained distinctly Congolese characteristics: beats configured a little or a lot differently from Cuban rhythms; melodies that followed the tones and accents of Lingala and other local languages; the dazzling interplay of two or three guitars.

The first commercial recordings of modern Congolese music were made in the late 1940s, and in the following decade Léopoldville developed the biggest record industry between Cairo and Johannesburg. The early stars—Antoine Wendo, Henri Bowane, Adou Elenga and others—were singers and guitarists who usually performed with one or two accompanists, but before long most professional musicians in Léopoldville had formed themselves into larger groups. By the mid-'50s there were dozens of bands recording, touring the provinces and playing regular gigs in Léopoldville and across the Congo River in Brazzaville (the capital of the French Congo). The most successful of them were Orchestre African Jazz, led by Kallé Kabasele and featuring the great guitarist Dr. Nico Kassanda and the singer called Rochereau, and Orchestre Kinois Jazz or O.K. Jazz, led by the guitarist and singer known as Franco. They called themselves orchestras because they were composed of sections (electric guitars, saxophones, trumpets, percussion and voices), and by jazz they meant that they played for audiences' listening pleasure as well as for dancing. But in fact these were dance bands, and they earned their popularity by generating or skillfully responding to dance crazes.

After independence from Belgium in 1960, nightclubs and beer-gardens with capacious open-air dancefloors burgeoned in Kinshasa (as the capital was renamed), offering plenty of work for musicians. By the middle of the decade Kinshasa and Brazzaville were home to hundreds of bands. Dr. Nico's African Fiesta Sukisa and Rochereau's African Fiesta National vied with each other and with Franco's O.K. Jazz for preeminence, but Vox Africa, Négro Succès, Orchestre Vévé and many others gave them strong competition. In the early '70s (around the time that President Mobutu Sese-Seko changed the name of the country to Zaire)

Zaiko Langa Langa turned up the volume on their guitars and displayed the dancing on stage. The numerous singers and instrumentalists who passed through Zaiko Langa Langa went on to rule Kinshasa's bustling music scene in the '80s with such bands as Choc Stars and Papa Wemba's Viva la Musica. One erstwhile member of Viva la Musica, Koffi Olomidé, has been indisputably the biggest Zairean/Congolese star since the early '90s. His chief rivals are two veterans of the band Wenge Musica, J.B. Mpiana and Werrason. Mpiana and Werrason each claims to be the originator of ndombolo, a style that intersperses shouts with bursts of vocal melody and harmony over a frenetic din of electric guitars, synthesizers and drums. So pervasive is this style today that even Koffi Olomidé's current repertory is mostly ndombolo.

While Kinshasa has dominated Congolese music for nearly a century, other parts of the country have also fostered modern styles that have attracted national and even international audiences. In mining towns in the southeastern province of Katanga in the 1940s and '50s, Jean Bosco Mwenda, Losta Abelo and other singing guitarists invented a troubadour style out of local thumb-piano patterns, Cuban sones and American country music. This gentle Swahili sound spread from Katanga to Zambia, Tanzania and Kenya, where it was called "dry guitar." A much more vivacious style also comes from Katanga and the neighboring Kasai provinces: mutuashi, a traditional dance of the BaLuba people that Tshala Muana, one of Congo's few female stars, began popularizing 20 years ago. Tshala employs contemporary instruments and production, but some traditional styles have been revived with few concessions to current standards. Konono No. 1, which hails from southwestern Bandundu, has been playing likembe thumb pianos amplified by recycled car parts for three decades and apparently has no intention of upgrading its gear now that the band can afford it. Swédé Swédé, a Mongo group from Equateur province, caused a sensation nationwide in the early '90s with nothing more than voices, percussion, harmonicas and suggestive dancing.

Many of the best Congolese artists now live abroad. The trend started more than 40 years ago when bands began touring other parts of Africa. Records and short-wave radio had already made Congolese rumba popular and influential around the continent, so visiting musicians felt welcome in other countries and wound up staying. Their success encouraged others to join them, and eventually Congolese immigrants led many of the top bands in countries as far from home as Ivory Coast and Tanzania. By the '80s the favored destination was Paris. With its multicultural population, cosmopolitan esprit and good studios, Paris attracted musicians from around the Francophone world, and those from Congo/Zaire absorbed a wide range of new influences. They also made a strong impression on Europeans (soon joined by Americans and Asians) beginning to tune in to African sounds. By the end of the decade Sam Mangwana, Mbilia Bel, Kanda Bongo Man, Loketo and 4 Étoiles—exemplars of the genre widely known as soukous—had become early stars of world music. —Ken Braun