After Mulemba Xangola (in 2000) and Kaxexe (in 2003), Bonga’s third album for Lusafrica, Maiorais (The Greats), is scheduled for release at the start of April 2005. The album focuses on totally Angolan (in other words hybrid, but definitively African) music. Its thirteen songs murmur like streams and meander like sensual rivers. The singing is bleak, pleading in endlessly unanswered prayers, while the music is lascivious, an incitement to uncontrollable swaying and swinging of hips, fit to tempt a saint.
Bonga’s Angola 72 et Angola 74 albums made him one of the first founding fathers of world music, long before the expression was coined in the 80s. On Maiorais, he again gets straight to the point with beats of magical sobriety, the fruit of several years’ erratic experiments and confused trial and error. Over silken guitars, insistent dikanza, sighing accordion airs and strangely laid-back percussion, Bonga sings of frustrated love, persistent social ills and the humiliation that is killing Africa and has hardly changed since the fear of the colonial age.
Rising above the lighter songs and more sober themes, Bonga’s ubiquitous, trademark vocals reign supreme. His unique voice – at once hoarse, sensual and smooth – attracts an increasingly young, growing audience, as shown by his recent sell-out concert at the Paris Bataclan in January 2005.
Maiorais is the perfect album to play over and over again as you wait for summer to come.DISCOGRAPHY
“Bonga 72†(first release in 1972 / CD re-released in 1997 by Lusafrica)
“Bonga 74†(first release in 1974 / CD re-released in 1997 by Lusafrica)
“Mulemba Xangola†(CD Lusafrica – 2000)
“O’ Melhor de Bonga†(compilation CD Lusafrica / BMG – 2001)
“Kaxexe†(CD Lusafrica – 2003)
“Live†(CD Lusafrica – 2004)
"Maiorais" - CD Lusafrica 56725 462252 - 2005)
