Music of the Republic of the Congo

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Central African music
Cameroon
Central African Republic
Congo-Brazzaville
Congo-Kinshasha
Equatorial Guinea
Gabon
São Tomé and Príncipe

The Republic of the Congo (or Congo-Brazzaville) is an African nation with close musical ties to its neighbor, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC, or Congo-Kinshasa). DRC's homegrown pop music, soukous, are popular across the border, and musicians from both countries have fluidly travelled throughout the region playing similarly styled music, including Nino Malapet and Jean Serge Essous. Brazzaville had a major music scene until unrest in the late 1990s, and produced popular bands like Bantous de la Capitale that played an integral role in the development of soukous and other styles of Congolese popular music [1].

1 Folk music
2 Soukous
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Folk music

Folk instruments in the Republic of the Congo include the xylophone and mvet. The mvet is a kind of zither-harp, similar to styles found elsewhere in both Africa and Asia. The mvet is made of a long tube with one or two gourds acting as resonators [2].

[edit] Soukous

Though soukous has become much more closely associated with the popular music of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, early in the style's evolution both the local scenes of Kinshasa and Brazzaville played a very important role. In these cities, American style orchestras (called soukous, or kirikiri or kasongo) played rumba (a kind of Cuban music) influenced by traditional music and jazz. Soukous arose from this fusion of styles, popularized as dance music by a number of different orchestras in the 1950s and 60s [3].

[edit] References

Kubik, Gerhard: "Mvet", in: The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Ed. by Stanley Sadie). macmillan Publishers, London 1981
Bender, Wolfgang: "Sweet Mother - Moderne afrikanische Musik", 1985, Trickster Verlag, München. ISBN 3-923804-10-5 (in German language)