RFI Musique - - Congolese music

Album review

Bumba Massa

Apostolo

23/07/2010 -

At 65, the Congolese champion of acoustic rumba, Bumba Massa, has returned to his first love with Apostolo, an album that revives some of Kinshasa’s best rumba years.

send

react

It would be hard to blame Bumba Massa for following the acoustic revival trend because he’s one of the musicians who started it all off! With the Parisian-Kinshasan group, Kekele, he helped put Congolese rumba back on the map in early 2000s, following the inspired advice of producer Ibrahim Sylla. Almost ten years ahead of the “retro music” wave at the time, Kekele inspired others to follow suit. Now Bumba Massa, the group’s lead singer, has returned to his first love with a new solo album.

In Apostolo, Bumba Massa sings Afro-Cuban salsa and Zairian rumba with a virtuoso respect for the Congolese vocal tradition. With his delicate, high-pitched voice, the singer lived the golden age of these music genres from the inside, and put a lot of himself into them.

In 1960, he composed Calinda mucho mucho, a wonderful chachacha, then three years later he founded Cubana Jazz. In 1976, he even did a brief stint with Franco’s Tout-Puissant OK Jazz, which he left of his own accord to discover West Africa and its multi-track studios.

In Togo, he recorded with Tabu Ley Rochereau’s well-known Congolese musicians and travelled between the explosive musical capitals of Lagos, Abidjan and Kinshasa. Later, he emigrated to Paris and Brussels in relative anonymity before getting back to rumba with Kekele.

Thankfully, at 65, Bumba Massa is once again sounding out his sense of rhythm and rediscovering his talent for composition – to the delight of salseros and rumberos in Kinshasa, Cuba and the rest of the world.