Fired-up, originary African pop, conjuring the Congolese rumba from imported Latin 78s — with thumb pianos, kazoos, banjos, bottles, violins, and irresistible little songs about pimps, dope, clubbing, sex, death.
This album uncovers the dizzy beginnings of the golden age of African music — zinging with the social and political ferment of the independence movement and anti-colonianalism, after the Second World War — and the daredevil origins of Congolese rumba, the entire continent's most popular music in the sixties and seventies.