FRANCO et TPOK JAZZ !🇨🇩: (1950-1979) *EVOLUTION OF OK JAZZ (audio)*🎶🎸 !!

Hellloooo! Hollaaaa! Bonjourrrr! Welcome back to Sebenology, this time, featuring the late influential and significant Franco aka the "Sorcerer of the Guitar"!!!!

African Music | Congolese Music | Rumba | Afro Latin | World Music | Guitar Music

FRANCO LUAMBO MAKIADI BIO: Who is Franco??!! Born François Luambo Makiadi on July 6, 1938, in the village of Sona-Bata, in the Bas Zaire region. His father worked for the railroad while his mother sold bread at the local market. Franco learned to play guitar on a homemade instrument when he was seven. He was tutored by the guitarist and bandleader Paul Ebengo Dewayon. Franco caused a sensation with his professional debut, at the age of 12, in Dewayan’s band.

Starting in the late 1940s, Afro-Cuban music was the rage in many African big cities. Radio stations played 78s imported from Cuba, and the music was imitated by Congolese bands, incorporating their own distinctive sounds. Franco quickly found work as a session guitarist, helping to develop the Afro-Cuban music into the “rumba Congolaise,” later known as soukous. The songs were sung in Lingala, a hybrid language that emerged during the construction of cross-continental railroads that allowed workers from different tribal groups to communicate.

In 1953 Franco released his solo debut, entitled “Bolingo na ngai na Beatrice” (My love for Beatrice). In 1956 Franco, then 18 years old, helped form the sextet OK Jazz, along with Jean Serge Essous. By this time, the capital of Belgian Congo, Leopoldville (now Kinshasa,) was bustling with activity. Bars, dancehalls, and recording studios echoed with new musical sounds. OK Jazz wasted no time recording their debut album, whose title track (composed by Franco), “On entre OK, on sort KO” (“You enter OK and leave knocked out”),—soon became the group’s motto. When cofounders Essous and Vicky Longomba left the group to join rival Joseph Kabasselleh’s Africa Jazz, the most influential band in the Congo, Franco took over sole leadership of OK Jazz (later named TPOK Jazz, with the addition of tout puissant “all-powerful”). In 1960 the Belgian Congo became independent and, after a tumultuous start, the new country, renamed Zaire in 1971, settled into the relative stability of the Mobutu dictatorship. Kabassaelleh helped OK Jazz secure a recording deal in Europe. Throughout the next three decades Franco and TPOK Jazz were prolific, releasing dozens of records.

The music scene in Zaire flourished during this period and many of the musicians who had passed through OK/TPOK Jazz or Africa Jazz eventually struck out on their own. During this time President Mobutu helped establish the authenticité movement, which encouraged African artists and intellectuals to examine their roots and return to more traditional modes of expression. Franco accepted the challenge and, in the words of the Rough Guide “re-Africanized the Afro-Cuban rumba by introducing rhythmic, vocal and guitar elements from Congolese folklore.”

As his music continued to evolve, Franco used TPOK as a podium from which he could expound his views about changing African society, sometimes testing the limits of the freedoms allowed under the dictatorship. By the mid-1970s Franco was one of the richest men in Zaire and owned four of the capital city’s largest night-clubs. TPOK packed the house at the Un-Deux-Trois Club each weekend. From the late 1970s to early 1980s, TPOK dominated the African charts and saw their popularity spread to Europe.

Around this time Franco also converted to Islam and adopted the name Abubakkar Sidikki. During the early decades of the Mobutu dictatorship, the blossoming music scene was an integral part of the political scene. State’s authenticité program, which helped confer prestige and legitimacy on the autocratic government. Mobutu declared Franco a grand maîTre, a title normally reserved for judges, professors and sorcerers, and presented him with a medal from Zaire’s Grand Order of the Leopard.

Franco’s relationship to the Mobutu dictatorship was ambivalent and his outspokenness on issues sometimes brought censure and, on at least two occasions, jail sentences. In 1978 Franco was jailed on obscenity charges until daily protests won his release. This period focuses on his 1950's work until 1981. The guitar he played was the Fender Jaguar.

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#congo #rumba #70smusic #tpokjazz #60srumba
#africanrumba
#africanguitarmusic