Nov
1
2024
David Byrne Radio Presents: Scintillating!
By Todomundo
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I’m almost finished with the 900-page world music tome “And the Roots of Rhythm Remain” by my friend Joe Boyd. Each long chapter covers a whole region. There’s an African chapter that covers Nigeria, Ghana, Congo, Senegal, Guinea, Mali, and more. He writes about the evolution of the music, of course, but importantly, he includes the political, economic, and global forces that allowed some music to evolve and flourish and others to wither.
I fell into a rabbit hole of Congo music in the mid- to late-80s, and Kanda Bongo Man was an act that always got my feet moving. The style was called soukous and was sometimes referred to as rhumba, though soukous is a very different groove than the fairly complex Cuban rumba, which of course itself has African roots. The influences crossed the Atlantic many times.
The Congo musicians heard Cuban music (Trio Matamoros, for example) and reinterpreted that and other Cuban grooves with electric guitars. The Franco tune, Nguni Nguni, shares its Cuban roots with songs that will be familiar to Anglo listeners—Twist and Shout, La Bamba, and a hundred others—you can sing Twist and Shout over Franco’s guitar and percussion groove.
Here’s a tutorial on a soukous guitar solo (they always play high up the guitar neck)
- David Byrne, NYC
Nov
1
2024
David Byrne Radio Presents: Scintillating!
By Todomundo