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Papa Wemba plays musical godfather

The Congolese star promotes the next generation

Paris

25/06/2008 -

Papa Wemba, aware of his ongoing status as one of the Congolese music scene's most successful exports ever, has decided to share his decades of experience with his young compatriots. On his new album, Kaka Yo, the undisputed king of rumba has got together fifteen young Congolese music hopefuls and turned the spotlight on the next generation.

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Papa Wemba's name may figure prominently on the cover of his new album, Kaka Yo, but the Congolese star insists that he played a sideline role in the making of it. "This isn't really an album I did for myself," he explains, "It's a concept thing I started organising around a year and a half ago now. The idea was to get together a bunch of youngsters - most of them aged between 19 and 25 - and record an album based on them. I only appear every now and then to give things a bit of a Wemba touch."

In the process, the Congolese star has managed to inject new life and energy into his veteran group Viva la Musica (formed back in 1977). But the main aim of the "Wemba Academy" has been to allow Wemba to assume the role of "big boss" or "benign patriarch", guiding the younger generation who, to quote the great man himself, "say they are lost and in desperate need of reference points." Fifty young hopefuls were put through their paces in the studio before Papa Wemba whittled them down to the final fifteen who feature on Kaka Yo.

These fifteen young up-and-coming singers - including Archange, Cleaver, Echapée and the other "new recruits" who make up Papa Wemba's "Bana malongi" - were taken under Viva La Musica's collective wing while Professor Wemba dispensed the essence of his musical knowledge to them and shared insider tips on the record industry. And what was the main thing he taught his eager pupils? "That you have to enjoy yourself while you work hard on your art," he says, "And you have to have a goal - if you don't have some sort of goal in life you never know where you're going!"

Papa Wemba has already acted the role of musical mentor in the past. In 1976, when he had just left the band Zaïko Langa Langa, the singer found himself dishing out advice to a young student who regularly turned up to his concerts. Papa Wemba ended up becoming firm friends with this fan, encouraging him to write his own songs and helping him try out melodies. "He sang pretty badly at first," Wemba remembers fondly. But the budding young artist in question (Koffi Olomide) took Papa Wemba's advice and persevered - until he became a leading Congolese music star in his own right!

The new generation

Papa Wemba realises that his latest young prodigies have a long, hard road ahead of them yet. But he points to the fact that the music scene in Kinshasa has undergone profound changes since he started out in the music business himself. "Today's generation have come along and found everything neatly in place for them," he says, "There's at least a semblance of infrastructure in the music industry now and there's communication with radio and TV stations… That wasn't really the case back in my day!"

Wemba acknowledges that the economic downturn in the record industry will no doubt affect his protégés' future careers. "Singers and musicians aren't able to make a decent living from their music any more because of the problems associated with piracy," he says, "So I think we should try and compensate this lack of earnings through dedications. We should return to the old tradition of 'praise songs' - where money wasn't originally involved - where singers glorify a person, recounting his life story and the history of his parents and his grandparents, a bit like 'griots'."

The only problem is that the 'praise' phenomenon has now taken off to such an extent that songs tend to get lost beneath the weight of names the singer has to cite. And even when dedications are inserted outside the traditional verse-chorus structure there are so many of these that listeners inevitably get distracted from the song. Kaka Yo suffers from this problem to some extent, although Papa Wemba insists that the "essential message" of his songs can still be heard loud and clear amidst this avalanche of dedications.

Wemba, the undisputed king of the "Sapeurs" (Société des ambianceurs et personnes élégantes*) believes in moving with the times and this means adapting to new working methods, too. "When I started out we basically worked under live conditions in the studio," he says, "But these days musical programming has come to play an increasing role in the studio. I'm trying to adapt to the new technology - that's what's in fashion now and I can't afford to ignore it!"

The good old days of rumba

Despite this fashion-forward approach in the studio, Wemba admits that he is not immune to a certain nostalgia for the good old days of rumba, a nostalgia he shares with the rest of his generation. One of the outstanding tracks on Kaka Yo is the lilting Belle Inconnue, the accompanying video clip to which takes us right back to the piano-bar ambience of the 1950s. Back in 2006, Wemba used the very same formula when he recorded a live album at the legendary Parisian venue Le New Morning. (The idea for the piano-bar ambience came to him, he says, after serving three months in a French jail in 2003 for having arranged fraudulent musicians' visas for illegal immigrants).

While many of his compatriots favour a return to the authentic rumba of yesteryear, Wemba is more of a realist, seeing the interplay between past and present as “both a game of ping-pong and the old boomerang flying back again." "Let's face it," he says, "there's nothing new in anything we're doing now!" Wemba has nevertheless introduced his fair share of changes to Congolese music over the years, most notably doing away with the brass section at the heart of his old group Zaïko Langa Langa. These days, he says, he enjoys working with a purely acoustic sound because it affords him the pleasure of pitching his voice to perfection. "And at my age," quips the sprightly almost sixty-something, "I have to pay careful attention to what I do, pitching as well as everything else!"