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Last band standing
Life, John Clewley, Published on 19/11/2019
» I first heard Orchestre Les Mangelepa's seductive and sweet sound on one of their songs from the late 1970s, Embakasi, which was a nationwide hit in Kenya and beyond. Initially, I thought they had recorded the song in what was then Zaire but in fact they were expatriate Congolese musicians who had settled in Nairobi, Kenya, mainly to take advantage of the sophisticated recording industry that had developed around East Africa's biggest commercial centre.
Killer rhythms from the Congo
Life, John Clewley, Published on 06/03/2018
» The influence of Congolese rumba, sometimes called soukous in the Anglophonic world, on East and Southern African music is considerable. You can hear the influence of Congolese guitars on Kenyan, Zimbabwean and Tanzanian popular music. Indeed, in my last column I wrote about how this guitar-based sound had even influenced the music of Orchestra Marrabenta in Mozambique.