Staff Benda Bilili
When I met these musicians in the lobby of their Hamburg hotel, they should have been tired after driving up all the way from Frankfurt. Instead, over a glass of whisky, they greeted me with an acapella piece of ‘Marguerite,’ a piece of Congolese Rumba.
Most of the musicians are crippled by polio and spent a good part of their lives in the streets of Kinshasa. No strangers to improvisation, they play with everything that is at hand. Spoons and sugar bowls as percussion instruments, self-made guitars or, the invention of the youngster in the band, a tin with a string attached. It’s hard to classify this music: while ‘Marguerite’ is Congolese Rumba at its finest, other songs are funky, more modern without ever losing sight of its Congolese roots. Check out their website here. The German version of this report can be found here. Foto by Dimitrij Leltschuk.
