Join Donut Monoxide on Wednesday, March 27th @ 3:30pm when she hosts a visit from writer, book artist, teacher, bon vivant, and creator of music Muzikifan.com, Alastair Johnston.
Alastair will talk about and play tracks from the recently released compilation The Soul of Congo – Treasures of the Ngoma Label on Ilunga Records. He will also fill us in on the fascinating story of the Singers and players who came to Congo’s capital Léopoldville from all over Central Africa to record music for Ngoma Records. While Ngoma was not the only record label in Léopoldville during Congo’s emergence from Belgian colonial rule; it was the label that best captured the energy, spirit, and variety of the music at the time and place – the meeting of African Rhythms with Caribbean, Cuban and European tunes then popular in the capital.
The Soul of Congo was the result of dedicated record collectors coming together to pool their collections, which were then assembled and annotated by Johnston. Tremendous effort went into tracking down long lost musical gems- to the point where some songs were located in dead stock from a forgotten Tanzanian record store. Great care was taken to select songs for the CD and LP versions of the compilation.
Tune in to learn all about it!
