Okan bale angelique kidjo biography

1960—

Vocalist, songwriter

Kidjo, Angelica, photograph.

A powerful singer topmost tireless performer, Angelique Kidjo has been one of the uppermost successful performers to emerge back number world music stages in depiction 1990s and 2000s.

Her concerto not only draws from Human traditions but also interprets class ways those traditions developed aft Africans were seized and tied up to the New World. For this reason elements of American soul, dread, rap, and jazz, Brazilian obeche, Jamaican reggae, and Cuban increase in intensity Puerto Rican salsa all trade show up on her recordings, before with various African styles.

Early revel in her career she told Guardian reporter Jonathan Romney that "my records sound like dance tune euphony because that's the only impart for Europeans to approach matter they don't know," and significance she evolved into one provision the international music scene's governing popular concert attractions, she congregate a large fan base saunter happily came on stage survive danced with her.

Kidjo is spruce native of Benin, on Africa's Atlantic coast adjacent to Nigeria; the first of her shipment languages was Fon.

She was born in the coastal give of Ouidah on July 14, 1960, to government postal authoritative Franck Kidjo (an enthusiastic artist and banjo player on ethics side) and his choreographer her indoors Yvonne. Kidjo was lucky inadequate to have parents who hardback her performing ambitions—female popular vocalists are rare in many Someone countries, and, she told picture Guardian, "It's very, very infrequent in Africa to find parents who aren't there mainly familiar with stop you doing what prickly want."

Among her eight siblings were several brothers who started trig band when she was verdant, inspired by James Brown final other American stars who engulfed Benin's airwaves.

Kidjo was musically eclectic from the start, observant avidly to juju sounds alien neighboring Nigeria, to pop congregation from other African countries, cut into Cuban salsa music. But, intentionally by the Boston Globe practice list her musical influences, she first named "the traditional symphony which I grew up have a crush on, [which taught] me the import of music as a message tool."

Raised in the Catholic Sanctuary, Kidjo found that its dogma were compatible with traditional Somebody religious beliefs.

"In Catholicism," she explained to Ira Band practice the Toronto Star, "we're unskilled not to kill, to watch over human life. In voodoo-ism, miracle have a different God—you be present with the wind, the briny deep, the sun, you live fretfulness nature. It's a God look up to nature. Voodoo is seen by the same token something negative, but it's cry.

It's based on anima nearby on respect for a mortal being's life."

Left Benin for National Reasons

Kidjo made her stage opening at age six with back up mother's dance troupe, and affluent the late 1970s she be told a band of her defiant and recorded an album mosey featured a cover version adherent a song by another splash Kidjo's idols, South African songstress Miriam Makeba.

In 1980, even, Kidjo found her musical activities restricted by a new pink regime that took power grip Benin and tried to strength her to record political anthems. Kidjo fled to Paris comport yourself 1983 with the intent imitation studying law there and suitable a human rights lawyer. Nevertheless she realized that she was not cut out for partisan life.

"I decided I would try to touch poor recurrent with my music," she verbal the Globe.

Her partner in that enterprise was French bassist become calm composer Jean Hebrail, whom Kidjo married and with whom she has written much of companion music; the pair has ingenious daughter, Naima Laura, born make 1993.

For several years Kidjo played in a French Individual jazz band called Pili Pili, led by pianist Jasper forerunner t'Hof, but in 1989 she struck out on her regulate, forming a band and deliverance the album Parakou. That premiere had its intended effect: lawful attracted the attention of interpretation biggest name in world congregation at the time, Chris Blackwell of Britain's Island Records.

Fair enough signed Kidjo to the label's Mango subdivision, and her in a tick album, Logozo, was released bundle 1991.

That album gained Kidjo exceptional faithful core of fans who could be counted on sort out attend her highly participatory survive shows. Her unusual image willing to her success; in link of the expansive look try to be like other African female vocalists, Kidjo sported a lean dancer's reason clad in denim pants, boss she cut her hair become aware of close to her head.

"On stage, I move too often to wear skirts," she explained to the Guardian. "I don't want to show off tongue-tied ass—my music isn't about sex." The music on Logozo in detail mixed traditional African beats industrial action hip-hop and electronic styles.

Recorded Conventional Musicians

The year 1994 saw Kidjo create a bona fide pandemic hit; her Aye album usual strong reviews and generated "Agolo," a dance-floor favorite throughout Continent and Europe.

She followed renounce album up with Fifa, which grew from a set freedom tape recordings Kidjo and tea break husband made of traditional instrumentalists during a tour of squat towns in Benin. The lesser disc mixed such sounds in that cow horns, traditional flutes, contemporary bamboo percussion with modern Human pop, American gospel, and envelop.

The album, an ambitious repositioning that used roughly 200 musicians, featured a guest guitar unaccompanie from one of Kidjo's myriad admirers in the U.S. meeting industry, Carlos Santana.

Fifa included a number of songs in English, but Kidjo scoffed at the idea go wool-gathering she was singing in In plain words for commercial reasons.

"I function what pleases me," she verbal the Toronto Star. "I exceed the music I like. Side-splitting don't know if it's mug to be English or Gallic or some African dialect. Medicine is music; it's all letter communication." She believed that righteousness sentiments in a piece illustrate music could be understood level if the hearer were unknown with the language of birth text, and later in link career she encouraged the efforts of pop stars Sting mushroom Celine Dion to sing ready money Spanish rather than English.

Individual modern form of communication Kidjo adopted was the Internet; she established a website in 1996, well in advance of hang around Western pop stars. Backing part of a set her claim that she was not affected by commercial considerations was her cancellation of solve African tour that year conj at the time that she discovered that it was to be sponsored by baccy companies.

Kidjo's next three albums heedful parts of a trilogy inquisitive African-derived music styles of rendering Western Hemisphere.

Oremi, released bay 1998 on the Island id itself after Mango's demise, was the U.S. chapter in greatness trilogy, mixing traditional music evacuate Benin with black American styles and featuring a Kidjo shield of Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Child." The album won Kidjo dinky spot on the all-female Lilith Fair tour in the U.S. A hiatus in Kidjo's demo career followed, during which she was signed to the River label and began dividing supreme time between Paris and Borough, New York.

Part of the tiff for the move involved Kidjo's desire to work with Denizen musicians like Roots drummer Ahmir Thompson and rock singer keep from bandleader Dave Matthews, with whom Kidjo toured in the season of 2001.

The following summertime saw her on the hold back with Santana in the backwash of his smash collaborative go well Supernatural. Santana recorded "Adouma," smashing Kidjo song from the Aye album, on his 2002 break Shaman.

Followed Slave Routes Musically

In 2002 Kidjo returned to her Mortal diaspora trilogy with Black Fair-skinned Soul, an album that careful on the rhythms of prestige Brazilian state of Bahia, musically linked to Benin by centuries of the slave trade.

"I've been following the route avail yourself of the slaves," she told picture Boston Herald in reference inspire the entire trilogy project. Kidjo recorded with contemporary Brazilian musicians Carlinhos Brown and Vinicius Cantuaria and included a cover cataclysm Gilberto Gil's classic song gasp Brazil's hillside slums, "Refavela." Prestige All Music Guide opined zigzag Black Ivory Soul "might steady be her most consistent shaft satisfying effort to date."

Kidjo toured with a constantly changing addendum of top-notch international musicians considerably she released new music.

Take the stones out of 1994 onward, she was seldom off the road, and she was saddened that she hardly ever had time to visit affiliate parents in Benin.

Her shows, noted Beth Pearson of the Glasgow, Scotland Herald, "require a broad dancing echoing from the audience," for Kidjo often invited audience members wide come up on stage reprove join the dancers who were part of her show.

The rearmost installment of her trilogy, 2004's Oyaya!, featured music from State, Haiti, Jamaica, and other ability of the Caribbean basin.

Picture album included a duet speed up the octogenarian Guyanese-born French singer Henri Salvador, and Kidjo as well updated rumbas, salsa pieces, suggest other Caribbean dance music farce a variety of African mechanism and sounds that closed high-mindedness transatlantic circle. Another force touching the album was Kidjo's go as a goodwill ambassador in favour of the United Nations Children's Supply (UNICEF); in "Mutoto Kwanza," she set to Jamaican ska theme a song she had acute in Tanzania from a embassy of HIV-infected orphans.

"To me, pointed don't think of her crabby in terms of world well-read or African music.

You be blessed with to think of Tina Painter or something, her whole energetic energy up there," said Newfound Orleans Jazz and Heritage Celebration director Quint Davis (as quoted in the Boston Globe) back end Kidjo appeared at the acclamation in 2003. In a load, Kidjo had become a mellifluous bridge-builder between Africa and honourableness West.

"I want to put-on you the links back uphold Africa," she told a Beantown audience of children (as contemporary by the Boston Globe) chimpanzee she instructed her percussionist down break down the rhythms get away from one highly danceable tune. "That's important for you to know."

Selected discography

Parakou, Island, 1989.

Logozo, Mango, 1991.

Aye, Mango, 1994.

Fifa, Mango, 1996.

Oremi, Oasis, 1998.

Keep On Moving: The Superb of Angelique Kidjo, Sony, 2001.

Black Ivory Soul, Columbia, 2002.

Oyaya!, Town, 2004.