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Artist List:
Amampondo
Amjad Ali Khan
Asad Qizilbash
Bembeya Jazz
Chico Cesar
Clave Y Guaguanco
Eliza Carthy Big Band
Ensemble Kaboul
Jimmy Cliff
Julien Jacob
LoJo
Manecas Costa
Manu Dibango and
Ray Lema
Nitin Sawhney
Ojos de Brujo
Oumou Sangare
Pape and Cheikh
Samba Sunda
Sevara Nazarkhan
Sierra Maestra
Super Rail Band
Temple of Sound
Teofilo Chantre
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Profile:
Manu Dibango and Ray Lema
 
'Unfortunately we do not have the whole concert available. The songs here are those which were agreed with the artist."
Two legends for the price of one! Manu Dibango left his homeland of Cameroon to cut his teeth in the steamy jazz world of 1950s Brussels and Paris, following the trail scouted by his musical heroes Duke Ellington, Lester Young and Charlie Parker. He then added his flighty sax licks to over forty records by the great Congolese band leader Kabasele, and toured Europe and Africa with his 'Africa Jazz' orchestra between sessions.
Pursuing a burning hunch that African jazz could be taken to a higher level, Dibango went solo and recorded the classic "Soul Makossa" in 1972 which went stratospheric and became the first Francophone single ever to hit the upper reaches of US charts.
Since then Dibango has released seminal Afro-jazz albums like "Negropolitaines" Vols 1 & 2 and "Wakafrica", performed with stars too numerous to mention, written an autobiography and generally mellowed into the role of an elder statesman of African music. Today at 70 he's still going strong and blowing a big horn.
Born on a train in what was then called The Congo, Ray Lema has become one the most innovative and open minded composers, arrangers, producers and performers in African music today. Nurtured on a mixture of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, traditional Congolese folk and African rumba, Lema became musical director of the Zaïre National Ballet in 1974.
In the early 1980s he was invited to work in the US by the Rockefeller Foundation and he launched on a peripatetic journey of new musical adventures and encounters that hasn't yet ended.
Lema has worked with musicians from Morocco, Bulgaria, France, America, Sweden, applying his immense skills as an instrumentalist and arranger to break down the barriers between seemingly irreconcilable styles. A duo with Dibango should be a doddle for him and a treat for the rest of us!
Biography by Andy Morgan, July 2003
Other links:
Biography on Ray Lema
Biography on Manu Dibango
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