World Is Shaking: Cubanismo From The Congo 1954-55

World Is Shaking: Cubanismo From The Congo 1954-55

Honest Jons fifth offering in their series of vintage recordings from the EMI Archive in Hayes, this album uncovers the dizzy beginnings of the golden age of African music zinging with the social and political ferment of the independence movement and anti-colonianalism, after the Second World War and the daredevil origins of Congolese rumba, the entire continent's most popular music in the sixties and seventies. Fired-up, originary African pop, conjuring the Congolese rumba from imported Latin 78s with thumb pianos, kazoos, banjos, bottles, violins, and irresistible little songs about pimps, dope, clubbing, sex, death. It's as if the musicians, fired up by the times in their zeal for experimental self-expression, tossed into a bottle some new elements and some old, some from near and some far, and then shook it hard, to see what would happen. With notes by Gary Stewart, author of Rumba On The River; translations and rare photographs; sound restoration at Abbey Road.