Round Up of Blogs on Congolese Music

Need something to cheer you up? Here's an excellent round-up of blogs and radio podcasts on Congolese music. Among their suggestions:

Ambience Congo, which broadcasts every other Sunday out of Richmond Virginia.
NPR's top ten African albums of the year--headed by the Kasai Allstars.
Matsuli music, the place for Juju, dub and afro funk outernational.
ndule2kin, showcases Congolese hip-hop artists such as Al Resis.
Soukous Radio, the longest-running station playing African and Caribbean music online.
Tambour d'Afrique, a weekly radio show entirely devoted to Congolese music on Radio Triomphe in Haiti.
Africa Music Treasures, the venerable VOA program.

And don't forget about Chopteeth, the groovingest group of mzungus on the east coast.

Congratulations to VOA's African Music Treasures

Which celebrated its one-year anniversary on December 10. The blog is a labor of love by two lovers of African music, Leo Sarkisian and Matthew Lavoie. Sarkisian launched the radio show Music Time in Africa in 1965 (!) a weekly program that features traditional and contemporary music from all of Africa. Almost forty-three years later the program (now the longest running VOA program) is still on the air every weekend, and continues to reach millions of listeners throughout Africa.

Matthew LaVoie has been writing the blog Africa Music Treasures, which features genres, artists, and recordings from throughout Africa that don't get much attention in the music press, on blogs, or by record companies. He draws these from the Music Time archive, a room in the basement of the Cohen building in downtown Washington DC that is overflowing with audio reels (over 10,000), 45 rpm singles, 33 rpm lps, and cassettes from every country in Africa.

Lavoie says that "as I have spent more time going through the reels, vinyl, and cassettes in our archive I have stumbled (literally) on lots of wonderful recordings I had not heard; 45s from Algeria, the Central African Republic, and Mauritius, reels of Burundian Taarab groups from the 1980s, Tunisian Maalouf from the 1960s, or radio recordings from the Comoros, cassettes from Togo, Madagascar, Djibouti, and Chad."

Have a listen to one of the recordings he discovered on a trip to Kinshasa from L'Orchestre Yamba Yamba Beto Ba. The group was founded in Kinshasa by Makengo Makape, and has been together for several decades:

L'Orchestre Yamba Yamba Beto Ba