Angelique Kidjo - Oyaya!
Angélique Kidjo is a four-time Grammy nominated Beninese singer songwriter, noted for her diverse musical influences and creative music videos.
Kidjo was born in Ouidah, Benin. By the time she was six Kidjo was performing with her mother's theatre troupe, giving her an early appreciation for music and dance. Continuing political conflicts in Benin lead Kidjo to relocate to Paris around 1982. She started out as a backup singer in local bands, before establishing her own band, and by the end of the 1980s she had become one of the most popular live performers in Paris. She is married to musician and producer Jean Hebrail with whom she has daughter Naïma (born 1993), and is currently based in New York.
Kidjo is fluent in Fon, French, Yoruba, and English and sings in all four languages and also her own personal language which includes words that serve as songtitles such as Batonga. Malaika is a song sung in Swahili language. She often utilizes Benin's traditional Zilin vocal technique and jazz vocalese.
Her musical influences include the Afropop, Caribbean zouk, Congolese rumba, Jazz, Gospel, and Latin styles; as well as her childhood idols Bella Bellow, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, Miriam Makeba and Carlos Santana. She has made her own renditions of George Gershwin's Summertime and Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Child and has collaborated with the likes of Dave Matthews and the Dave Matthews Band, Kelly Price, Branford Marsalis, Robbie Nevil, Carlos Santana, and Cassandra Wilson. Kidjo's hits include the songs Agolo, Aye, and Batonga.
In February of 2003, she performed a cover of Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" at the famed Radio City Music Hall in New York City alongside Chicago blues guitar legend Buddy Guy and New York rock guitarist Vernon Reid (of Living Colour) in what would become part of Martin Scorsese's "Lightning In A Bottle: One Night In The History Of The Blues", a documentary about blues music that features live concert footage of other rock, rap and blue greats.
She is also a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.
Angelique Kidjo will be releasing a brand new album titled Djin Djin on May 1st, 2007. Many guests appear on the album including Josh Groban, Carlos Santana, Alicia Keys, Joss Stone, Peter Gabriel, Amadou and Mariam, Ziggy Marley, and Branford Marsalis. The title, Djin Djin, refers to the sound of a bell in Africa that greets each new day. The album is being produced by Tony Visconti, who is known for producing David Bowie, Morrissey, and T. Rex, among others -
wikipedia
another higly recommended album of course, and a pretty big name and speaking of big names, here's another one and wow is he good:
Hugh Masekala - Still Grazing
Hugh Masekela (born Johannesburg, April 4, 1939) is a South African flugelhorn and cornet player. In 1961, as part of the anti-apartheid campaign, he was exiled to the United States where he was befriended by Harry Belafonte. He has played primarily in jazz ensembles, with guest appearances on albums by The Byrds and Paul Simon. In 1987, he had a hit single with "Bring Him Back Home" which became an anthem for the movement to free Nelson Mandela. After apartheid ended, Masekela returned to South Africa where he now lives.
Hugh Masekela was an old collaborator of Abdullah Ibrahim. He is reported to have been initially inspired in his musical growth by Trevor Huddleston, a British priest working in the South African townships who financed Masekela's first trumpet. Masekela played his way through the vibrant Sophiatown scene with The Jazz Epistles and to Britain with King Kong, to find himself in New York in the early 1960s. He had hits in the United States with the pop jazz tunes "Up, Up and Away" and the number one smash "Grazin' in the Grass".
A renewed interest in his African roots led him to collaborate with West and Central African musicians, and finally to reconnect with South African players when he set up a mobile studio in Botswana, just over the South African border, in the 1980s. Here he re-absorbed and re-used mbaqanga strains, a style he has continued to use since his return to South Africa in the early 1990s.
In the 1980s, he toured with Paul Simon in support of Simon's then controversial, but highly critically acclaimed, album Graceland, which featured other South African artists such as Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Miriam Makeba, Ray Phiri, and other elements of the band Kalahari, which Masekela recorded with in the 1980s. He also collaborated in the musical development for the Broadway play, Sarafina! He previously recorded with the band Kalahari.
In 2003, he was featured in the documentary film Amandla!, about how the music of South Africa aided in the struggle against apartheid. In 2004, he released his autobiography, Grazin' in The Grass: The Musical Journey of Hugh Masekela, which thoughtfully details his struggles against apartheid in his homeland, as well as his personal struggles against alcohol addiction from the late 1970s through to the 1990s, a period when he migrated, in his personal recording career, to mbaqanga, jazz/funk, and the blending of South African sounds to an adult contemporary sound through two albums he recorded with Herb Alpert, and notable solo recordings, Techno-Bush (recorded in his studio in Botswana), Tomorrow (featuring the anthem "Bring Him Back Home"), Uptownship (a lush-sounding ode to American R&B), Beatin' Aroun' de Bush, Sixty, Time, and most recently, "Revival".
review of still grazing:
Released to coincide with Hugh Masekela's autobiography of the same name, Still Grazing picks up the Masekela story from Verve's summary of the best of the MGM albums, The Lasting Impression of Ooga-Booga, and runs through the Uni and Blue Thumb material. The 1966 tracks are from The Emancipation of Hugh Masekela, where the trumpeter mixes his florid horn calls and vocals with variations of the boogaloo, township jive, soul-jazz, and in Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Felicidade," a slight pinch of bossa nova into a hip, brightly colored cuisine that no one else was attempting at the time. As in the MGM days, Masekela is obliged to cover the hit tunes of the day, although "Up, Up, and Away" has more life and jazz licks than those earlier attempts. 1968's "The Promise of a Future" was the real commercial breakthrough -- thanks to the out-of-the-blue success of the cowbell-beating "Grazing in the Grass," which improbably rose to the number one slot on Top 40 radio in those enlightened times. That triumphant track would be Masekela's last trip to the Top 40, whereupon he promptly used the exposure to shine a harsh light on what was going on in his homeland ("Gold") and America in 1968 ("Mace and Grenades"). The CD then jumps to a percolating, Echoplexed "Languta" from a 1973 session in Lagos, Nigeria, before concluding with a withering account of the South African coal-mining trains ("Stimela"). The package is given extra credibility by the original producer of these tracks, Stewart Levine, who compiled the album and also wrote a fond set of reminiscences. Many of these premonitions of today's world music scene have been gone for decades, and it's good to have at least some of them back in circulation again. ~
Richard S. Ginell, All Music Guide