Toyeba Yo by Franco & L’TPKO Jazz (1975)
Play Toyeba Yo {Video} [DRC]
The Toyeba Yo clip we see here was played to a live audience on Tele Zaire, in Kinshasa, in 1975; and that is the year of ‘release’ we assign it here. Even as its tunes course through the cosmos still, in their cocoons of radio waves, we have reason to pause and remember.
Thanks to the invaluable work of curator Aboubacar Siddikh, we have the following technical details of the role played by each band member in that fine, fine song:
“Vocals: Michèl Boyibanda, Josky Kiambukuta, Wuta Mayi, Sam Mangwana, Franco. Bass guitar: Mpudi Decca, rhythm guitar: Gégé Mangaya, solo guitar: Thierry Mantuika, mi-solo:Franco. Percussion: DuPoole, drums: Ntoya. Soloist on the alto sax: Dele Pedro” (Source: Aboubacar Siddikh).
Michèl Boyibanda sang, his name as musical as his voice. Josky Kiambukuta sang, too. His passing on March 7th, 2021 -- there in Kinshasa, the capital city of his beloved DRC -- is the reason for this recollection. Wuta Mayi sang as well. Sam Mangwana, the foot-loose Angolan, sang in that memorable voice, and song, as well. So did maestro Franco -- filling the entire screen with a presence that none of the others had. It was an all-star cast – a stellar system. They are all unforgettable names, names remembered for a reason – for many reasons – for over four decades now (and soon five). And if the quality of the audio in the video version referenced above is below par, we are, thanks again to Aboubacar Siddikh, directed to a superior “studio version” of the audio – which surprisingly exists.
The televised version of Toyeba Yo, as of other outstanding songs of that era, is of great cinematic and historical significance, as it is probably the only extant video. This significance is undiminished by the graininess of the images or by the fact that the dancers’ motions noticeably frayed at the end, ‘distracted’ by a sudden and seemingly off-script jocularity[1].
Harmony, rhythm, beat, melody – all of that the Toyeba Yo band knew how to handle and blend and create unheard-of tunes from. But the idea of on-stage choreography of body-texts was palpably alien to them. Perhaps this was because where and when they had launched their ‘gig enterprise’ did not require it. Their ‘founding’ (or earliest) fans, it seems, had from the very beginning suffered a similar failing, having only one agenda: to come hear their heroes sing and tease magical sounds out of their vaunted instruments – and to themselves dance, whichever fancied way, as their heroes played.
In the early days, then, there was no time and no need in anyone’s mind to watch them, the musicians, dance. That was something that they, the fans, could and should and wanted to do. That was their space, so to speak, which they populated with bold self-assurance, and self-reliance. That was their side of the bargain. It was as if the band dancing would somehow be, would have been, a sacrilege; for how does it dance rumba on the stage, with all its members facing the same way and with things to do? Dance, Rumba, was for the fans and for the floor.
With an obviously undernourished motivation to dance, the bands’ conception of a stage-act, such as was suddenly expected of them when they began to appear in the early Seventies on Tele Zaire (the national TV monopoly), remained visibly stunted. Their dance moves in the early days were akin to organized, spastic, chaos – a veritable cultural lag. It was as though the rhythm of the dancing body was an alien notion that did not matter to them at all, once they had fixed the melody of voice and the symphony of musical instruments played with such hidden feeling and multiplier effect – and handled with so much tender-loving care. It was bewildering and even painful to watch their ‘discordant’ motions on TV.
But music TV clips are,
historically, the foundations of music video, which are now ever-present. And so
how the transition was successfully made from TV clips to clear-cut video clips
is something worth pondering. There has most certainly been much improvement in
recent years – if only, or mainly, because the “jazz band” and its look-alikes
have generally disappeared from the stage, together with their instruments, or
dutifully receded from view. This has left an increasingly virtual space to the
triumphant singer-dancer (bare-handed and in fine ‘threads’), probably with one
or two or a handful of other stars “featuring”, and in addition an anonymous
supporting-cast of dancers, often (if female) scantily clad and posing.
[1] The visual offering was, as all can probably see now, patently ‘unschooled’. But the eyes of live audiences of the Tele Zaire era probably cancelled out the flaws, being themselves ‘unschooled’ in seeing what motions there were to see beyond the singing and instrument-playing heroes. Band members sang and played their instruments with so much fluency and synchronicity and authenticity, and infectious verve, that they ‘blocked’ all other views – even though they danced on the same stage as though it was all an afterthought and a distraction; as if, moreover, everyone was left to his own devices. Still, the grainy visuals and the poorly choreographed moves that we, equipped with a different way of seeing, have to bear with in the video version, are a distinctly valuable part of “the history” of African pop, broadly speaking, and #LingalaPop more specifically.
