It's rumba time!

UNESCO Courier, April, 1998 by Isabelle Leymarie

Musiques caraibes, Isabelle Leymarie, Actes Sud-Cite de la Musique, Paris, 1996.

RELATED ARTICLE: A festival of rumba

In April 1998, the Congolese composer, band-leader and multi-instrumentalist Rido Bayonne is organizing a four-day music festival in the Paris suburb of Clichy la Garenne to commemorate the abolition of slavery in the French colonies in 1848. The event, entitled "Autour de la Rumba", will feature Cuban and Congolese music, zouk, Senegalese reggae, hip hop, the art of African griots, and rhythm and blues. There wilt also be a more surprising encounter between rumba and baroque and classical music.

Rido Bayonne's Big Band Afro-Jazz, the Saint-Chaffre du Monastier Band and a chamber orchestra will join forces for the first performance of Bayonne's latest composition, Memoires (Cause a effet) which is inspired by the transatlantic musical saga.

West-African chordophones, Arabic drums, fifty horns and some 20 Western string instruments - violins, cellos and basses - will all perform together. Five flautists perched in a baobob tree will then play "a hymn to life and to the spritual communion of the continents." Below them, female singers and dancers, accompanied by guitar, piano, keyboard, drums, and other percussion instruments will celebrate the latest forms of this creative blend of jazz, blues, sukuss, calypso, reggae and rumba.

The slave trade and the upheavals it caused thus give way to a euphoric musical marriage celebrated by effervescent rhythms. This heartfelt and highly personal tribute to African ancestors who were forced to make the journey to America is also a hymn to human brotherhood brought together on this occasion by the magic of art, and the artist's universal vision and creativity. I.L.

ISABELLE LEYMARIE is a Franco-American musicologist whose publications include La musique sud-americaine, Rythmes et danses d'un continent (Gallimard, Paris, 1997).