Menu

Album review


The Karindula Sessions

The Katanga trad-modern sound


Paris 

23/02/2011 - 

More than just a simple album accompanied by a DVD, The Karindula Sessions provides a pretty faithful documentary of music style trends over the last few decades in Lubumbashi, the main town in south-east Congo. It’s an album set to take you places.

print

send

react



Belgian producer-director Vincent Kenis set out to capture the spirit of the karindula (sometimes kalindula), a large kind of homemade banjo that has given its name to a musical genre. The contemporary explorer, who put together the Zap Mama 1991 album, and more recently the astonishing Konono n°1 and Staff Benda Bilili albums, set himself the challenge of showing the diversity of Congolese music, so often overshadowed by its heavyweight brother, rumba.

This time, he has set his sights on Lubumbashi, in the province of Katanga, which lies 1,600 kilometres from Kinshasa, but less than thirty from the Zambian border. The remote mining town and copper capital vibrates with the sound of these karindula groups that take part in all types of ceremonies. Vincent Kenis selected some of them and organized a mini festival to share with listeners of the Karindula Sessions. Playing on the bare ground in front of a house whose façade has seen much better days, the musicians play with a spontaneous authenticity that a studio recording would most probably have been unable to capture.

The idea of showing the event in images is also a good one, since the contents of the DVD and CD work together well. Seeing karindula makes it more real and brings it alive. It also makes it more spectacular. The musician’s arm seems to fly along the instrument’s long neck, and all kinds of dancers move into the centre to show the audience what they can do and receive a few notes in reward. It feeds your imagination when you listen to the CD, and makes the music more familiar even though it escapes from the music industry’s usual format and structure. After all, why shouldn’t a track last over half an hour?


Muriagombe

 
 

 

The Karindula Sessions (Crammed/Wagram) 2011


Bertrand  Lavaine

Translation : Anne-Marie  Harper