RFI Musique - - Album review - The Franco compilation

Album review

The Franco compilation

Congolese rumba galore!

Paris

11/03/2009 -

Francophonic is a superb double CD serving up 28 carefully-chosen tracks marking the highlights of Franco's glittering career. The legendary guitar maestro François Luambo Makiadi and his big band OK Jazz championed the rise of African rumba and became a veritable institution in their day.

send

react

This double album is the first instalment of an ambitious retrospective which sets out to cover Franco's prodigious output - by one estimate, the guitar sorcerer and his band released as many as 150 albums in four decades! Volume I, which concentrates on 1953 - 1980, is accompanied by an in-depth booklet packed with rare photographs and insightful commentary recounting the life story of the monumental Congolese rumba hero who died in Belgium in 1989.

The opening track, Esengo y a mokili ("Pleasure in the world"), one of the first studio takes Franco ever recorded back in 1953, features backing vocals and guitar accompaniment from his street urchin friend Dewayon. The double album closes with Nalingaka yo yo te ("I don't like you"), a 1980 classic recorded in Brussels (where Franco was living by then) on which the legendary rumba idol performs quasi solo, single-handedly manning guitar, synthesiser and rhythm box.

"On entre OK, on sort KO!" ("You enter OK, you leave knocked out!") shouts Franco with a burst of infectious laughter at the end of the final track on the second album. And this is, perhaps, the best summing up of this extraordinary journey into the groove of Congolese rumba. Anyone listening to all 28 tracks in one go might well find themselves floored by Monsieur Franco's unstoppable energy!

Franchophonic also charts the history of Congolese rumba - a movement that emerged in Kinshasa and Brazzaville in the 1950s and went on to get the entire African continent and its diaspora sensually swinging their hips. We are now eagerly awaiting the arrival of Volume II which should include a number of other seminal Franco classics such as Mario, an ironic, tongue-in-cheek song about a young man earning his living as a gigolo.