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The Bantous are back!
Cooking up rumba with a touch of salsa
Paris
10/09/2007 -
Jean-Serge Essous, Célio Célestin Kouka, Edouard Ganga and Nino Malapet can pride themselves on being veritable rumba veterans - add up the individual ages of these four talented Congolese musicians and they are almost 300 collective years old! Now with a new album hitting record stores, the Bantous de la Capitale are still going strong - and gearing up to celebrate their half-century of existence in 2009!
Essous, aka “3S”, and his colleagues did hang up their instruments in 2003, but the group’s official retirement only lasted three years. As soon as someone evoked the idea of a possible reformation of the Bantous, the quartet - all well into their seventies by then - rushed to make a comeback. “Let me tell you, we all literally ran to get our places back in the Bantous de la Capitale”, admits Essous, the Bantous’ saxophonist, “At the end of the day, it was our mutual passion for music that led to us reforming.”
The collective ties that have bound the four musicians together over almost half a century are so tight that, despite a few breaks in their professional life, it is difficult to imagine Essous and his friends ever having spent time apart. Essous laughs at the idea, “Naturally, friendship that has lasted over fifty years really counts for something!” he says, “When we first met I must have been around 17 and Edo (Edouard Ganga) must have been about 19. So you can see we’ve been together for quite some time now! We all had children during our time with the group, too, and now my kids refer to my friends as 'Papa Nino' and 'Papa Edo.' The band’s just one big happy family these days!”
Rumba’s hurricane force
Back in the early ‘50s, Essous, Kouka, Ganga and Malapet began hanging out at a local football pitch. And from time to time, Essous remembers, they used to “have a bit of a sing-along together” as they kicked the ball around. They soon realised they had a certain talent to develop here and began thinking about music rather than sport as a future (sport being a more difficult career option for them). Being reasonable young men with their feet on the ground, Essous and his friends decided they would all finish their respective studies first, however. And all four of them went on to land good jobs, Essous working as an electrical engineer at IBM France, Kouka finding employment at the British Consulate and Ganga working as an accountant at Shell.
But Essous and his friends had been fatally bitten by the music bug. All four of them ended up abandoning their comfortable positions and plunging into the simmering hotbed of the music scene that was springing up on both sides of the river Congo, in Kinshasa and Brazzaville. The wind of rumba was soon blowing through that scene with increasing force. “Rumba was the sound everyone started dancing to in public places at New Year’s Eve parties and such”, Essous remembers, recounting how in 1944 he first heard the pioneering rumba singer Paul Kamba and his Victoria orchestra (when his own mother got them over to Brazzaville to mark the official end of mourning his father’s death).
Essous and his friends also started listening to records imported from Cuba (where a number of their ancestors had been shipped off as slaves) and these records not only struck a familiar chord, but proved to be an inspirational force. The Bantous de la Capitale went on to make their public debut on 15 August 1959, performing in a bar in Poto Poto, a neighbourhood in downtown Brazzaville. In the uncertain period leading up to independence the musicians, who had all been playing with different groups in Kinshasa (some with Franco and his OK Jazz) preferred to return home to their native land.
A polished repertoire
Drawing on the individual experiences they had had, the Bantous built up their own repertoire - one which was heavily influenced by salsa, patchanga and cha-cha. And these styles went down particularly well in many of the newly-formed African states such as Senegal where Essous and his friends were regularly invited to play. “Every time we got ready to go off and perform in Dakar, we polished up our repertoire till it shone!” recalls Essous with obvious delight. Thanks to their flamboyant brass section and their innovative arrangements which made them stand out from the crowd, the Bantous soon acquired a firm following of fans.
Now the Congolese veterans are back in the spotlight with Bakolo Mboka, a comeback album recorded with a little help from equally veteran musicians from the famous Cuban group, Orquestra Aragon. Dusting off their old classics and reviving them with aplomb, Essous and his friends treat fans to some brilliant renditions of Bantous Patchanga (written in 1960), Rosalie Diop (created in 1963) and, last but very much not least, Les Bantous de la Capitale. Cresting on the wave of success generated by this song, the group who had started out playing together as the Orchestre Bantou, relaunched themselves as the Bantous de la Capitale. And the name appears to have stuck!Bertrand Lavaine
Translation : Julie Street
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