This is the first in a series of experimental posts about pieces of music that are personally important to me.
I’ve wanted to write about music for a long time. Not as a musician (because I’m not one) but as a discerning listener, endlessly fascinated by the evolving soundtrack of his life.
I’m not up with the latest developments. Indeed, my approach to music is much like my approach to literature: in each case, while I strive to be eclectic in my tastes, most of what I consume was created in a specific time period. With novels, it is roughly 1840-1970; with music it is more like 1920-2000.
I was considering a series of posts that would spontaneously evolve as a game of musical ping pong, with me as one of two or more players. But the people I most wanted to play with were reluctant, indeed flatly refused to do so.
So I’m experimenting with a series I’m calling Ouroboros – the snake with its tail in its mouth – because I’m going to see whether it’s possible for me to end exactly where I begin.
That would be fairly straightforward with careful planning, but I want to be rather more spontaneous.
So, each month (if possible), I hope to choose and write about a piece of music inspired by my choice the previous month. I will always explain the connection between the new piece and its predecessor.
As we come closer to the end of the year, I aim to bend my musical choices back in the direction from which I started. I hope to make a meaningful and relatively uncontrived connection between my final selection, in December, and this, my first.
My choice for January is ‘Ya Jean (Remix)’ by Madilu System, recorded in 1993.
I don’t quite know why I’ve chosen it, but one has to start somewhere.
Madilu System
Madilu System is a nickname of course, allegedly bestowed by the legendary Franco (Francois Luambo Luanzo Makiadi) of whom much more below.
Madilu’s real name was Jean de Dieu Bialu Makiese and he was born in Kisantu, Belgian Congo, on 28 May 1950.
The family soon moved to Leopoldville, the capital city.
Nowadays, Leopoldville has become Kinshasa, formerly capital of Zaire, now capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It is the fourth most populous capital city in the world, after Beijing, Tokyo and Moscow.
By 1969, the teenage vocalist was performing with a band called Orchestre Symba, soon graduating to the better-known Orchestre Bamboula (Papa Noel, Pepe Kalle, Bopol et al) Festival des Maquisards (Mangwana, Dalienst) and Fiesta Populaire.
In the mid-1970s, he formed bands with various musical contemporaries, but neither Bakuba Mayopi nor Orchestre Pamba-Pamba (named after its predecessor’s only hit) made the big time.
So Madilu joined Tabu Ley’s Afrisa but – and this may well be apocryphal – he was unceremoniously dumped: left behind at the airport when the rest of the band departed Kinshasa for a date in Paris.
That left the way open for Madilu to join Franco’s TPOK Jazz in 1980.
For the first few years he was little more than an understudy, reputedly impressing Franco even less than he had impressed Tabu Ley.
But Madilu came to the fore in 1983, when Franco was composing ‘Non’, one of his more controversial songs, beautiful, but saturated with misogyny.
It is said that the more established singers with TPOK Jazz feared a repeat of 1978 when, after hearing a particularly scandalous song, the Attorney General had thrown Franco and several of his musicians into Kinshasa’s infamous prison.
While the band was touring Europe in 1983, Franco asked Madilu to test for the role of lead vocalist on ‘Non’. At which point, no-one – least of all Franco – could quite believe how they had overlooked his amazing talent.
And, as an added bonus, everyone stayed out of gaol!
These were the glory days for Franco and Madilu, who featured on many of the band’s biggest hits, most notably: ‘Mamou’ (1984) and ‘Mario’ (1985).
Madilu developed his trademark style, especially that ‘tremulous vibrato’ which is distinctively his own.
After Franco died in 1989 – allegedly from an AIDS-related illness – TPOK Jazz was never quite the same force and, after three further years with the band, Madilu resolved on a solo career.
He was now based in Geneva, having married a Swiss national in 1985, but travelled frequently to Paris, where so many of the Congolese musical diaspora were to be found, or else home to Kinshasa.
Ya Jean
Madilu’s first solo album, called Sans Commentaire, was released in France by Syllart Records in 1993, and in England by Stern’s Africa in 1994.
‘Ya Jean’ was the opening track.
I can’t tell you how the remix is different from the original – I can no longer find an original version: the remix is ubiquitous.
Madilu had assembled a group of star musicians to back him on this album. As far as I can tell from the listings on Discogs, the rhythm guitar work on Ya Jean is by Rigo Star (Rigobert Bamundele Ifoli), while the amazing lead guitar parts were played and arranged by Syran M’Benza.
M’Benza is an exact contemporary of Madilu’s, born in Kinshasa in 1950. He began to play at the age of 11 and, in these formative years, was heavily influenced by Franco, learning how to play guitar in his style.
Andy Kershaw once famously said that Eric Clapton wasn’t fit to tune M’Benza’s guitar strings.
The song is written and performed in Lingala, the creole language that has become the vernacular in Kinshasa and much of the DRC. I understand next to no Lingala, but there are several translations available.
Jean is Madilu’s own Christian name, so does the song describe his personal experience? Well, maybe, at one remove.
For he appears to be voicing the lamentations of Jean’s female partner: she complains that her husband, having dreamed that she has been unfaithful with another lover, has decided their relationship is over.
On waking in the morning, he sticks stubbornly to this subconscious decision, refusing to check the facts by questioning her.
She doesn’t know what to do. She can’t leave him because she is too much in love – all she can do is cry. She bemoans her bad fortune.
There is a seemingly unrelated interlude in which Madilu complains about funerals. They used to be serious, sad affairs, but now they have become a joke – opportunities for gossip and assignations.
Then he indulges his nostalgia, remembering when Franco asked him to sing ‘Makimbo Ezali’ and Simaro (Franco’s deputy in TPOK Jazz) requested he sing something else. Now younger musicians, their successors, have taken their place.
Musically, this is ‘90s soukous, derived from traditional Congolese rumba, further refined in Paris by the diaspora of Congolese session musicians who were based there.
After a relatively sedate opening, at some point the guitars take over, opening the ‘sebene’ by setting down a riff, then improvising upon it while the dancers strut their stuff.
In this case, M’Benza channels his inner Franco, playing in a manner heavily redolent of the great man, but also subtly different.
Because M’Benza smoothes out Franco’s rough edges, substituting his more rounded, melodious tone for Franco’s cruder, muscular metallic twang. It is a Parisian take on the Kinshasa sound.
Personal relevance
‘Ya Jean’ is important to me for several reasons.
Firstly, it is hard not to love Madilu’s honeyed voice, especially when he deploys that heartrending ‘tremulous vibrato’.
The rhythm is also particularly infectious, even for soukous (check out the charmingly naïve dance steps on the contemporary promotional video – while also ignoring the hopeless lip synch).
Third, Mbenza’s guitar work is outstanding in its own right, while also paying tribute to the Grand Maitre, Franco, himself. There is huge nostalgia here for the TPOK Jazz of the mid-80s.
And it was in the mid-80s that I first began to get serious about soukous, listening, rapt, to DJ Charlie Gillett’s Sunday evening shows on Capital Radio. I still have cassette tapes of most of them, up in the loft
As the great man said when he was interviewed in 2000:
‘Then in 1983 the new head of the station fired me – the only time I’ve been fired in my life. The head of music called me up a few weeks later, saying they’d had a lot of complaints about me being gone. A few weeks later, he said he could get me back on, but it would have to be doing something different – did I have any ideas? I said that a lot of people had liked the ‘tropical’ music I was playing, and I was quite happy to dive in with both feet and launch a show called ‘A Foreign Affair’ and play what I know. What I didn’t know I’d learn from the audience. So as far as he’s concerned, I invented world music. But you surf a wave, if there is one. WOMAD had started, Stern’s had just begun, Earthworks had started. And Island put out King Sunny Ade. In 1983 it all happened, and it 1984 it came to the surface with a number of incredible gigs in London. The rest of my life has flowed from those two years.’
I was newly arrived in London, living initially in a sordid, cockroach-and-rodent-infested flat on the ‘Harringay ladder’, before splitting in 1985 to an attic room in a far more salubrious Highgate villa. I remember that my rent in Highgate was initially £75 per month!
Gillett was the soundtrack to those early London years, especially the mid-80s in Highgate. At times I was very lonely, but I still remember them fondly.
I recall Jules and Buzzy who lived on the ground floor, and a young Kiwi called Janna who moved into a room on the first. I still have the descendants of the plant Buzzy gave me when I left.
I grew to love Waterlow Park, adjacent to Highgate Cemetery, and I spent many weekend afternoons exploring Hampstead Heath.
From the outset, I was intrigued by Franco, the kind of music he played and the way that he played it. I began to frequent Stern’s record shop, buying up all the vinyl albums I could afford.
But, by the time Madilu released Sans Commentaire, I was living in Surbiton, in a ground floor maisonette belonging to Kate, my-soon-to-be wife.
She’d been an old university friend, and lived with me and others for a time in the Harringay flat, but we had parted ways when I left for Highgate, feeling that I no longer had much in common with my fellow former UEA students.
We met again one evening in 1990, or maybe it was 1991. I was drinking in a Waterloo pub near work when she came in with friends. She looked skinny, pale, fragile, ill – still getting over a devastating break-up with her fiancé.
At the time I had an amazing girlfriend who was the antithesis of Kate – big, black and beautiful. But we arranged a drink in the Hole in the Wall and a couple of years later were living together.
When Charlie Gillett returned to BBC London in 1995, we listened to his programmes together.
Now Gillett, Franco, Madilu and Kate are all dead, but this song lives on.
Nostalgia is powerful.
TD
January 2025
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