Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells A Story
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6:00 AM GMT 22/06/2011
Features Disc of the day
Les Troubadours Du Roi Baudouin
Missa Luba
(Philips, 1963; reissue on El, 2008)
Gorgeous, timeless vocal thrills from the Congo. Namechecked in the Clash's Car Jamming!
The Belgians brought little but misery to the Congo. Misery and Franciscan priest Guido Haazen, whose mission at Kamina in the far south east of what is now the Democratic Republic Of The Congo became the birthplace of the Missa Luba. Shakers and drums echo in a chamber of what feels like cathedral size, a choir of Congolese kids and their teachers unite on a collection of local folk songs, and, even more stunningly, a version of the Catholic mass scored with Congolese melodies. Considered a propaganda coup by the Belgian imperialists, the Kamina ensemble were paraded at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair as an example of their "civilising" influence on the Dark Continent. Yet the Missa Luba does not feel like a Eurocentric straitjacket imposed on Africa, but rather the opposite: a triumphant indigenous culture kicking over the traces of their political overlords as they take the words of the Latin mass to an ancient, ecstatic place. It's not an outrageous stretch to hear in it a prelude to the January 1959 riots in Léopoldville/Kinshasa that spelt the beginning of the end for Belgium in Africa.
As unrest brewed at home, the Kamina kids toured Europe, sang with the Vienna Boys' Choir and sold bucketloads of this, their only album, and were still in cultural currency when Lindsay Anderson added extracts to the soundtrack of his 1969 movie, If... And no wonder. It's unspeakably beautiful music, with the eccentricities of the recording - notably the distortion and overtones that kick in when the choir approach, um... critical mass - actually adding to the impression of passions unbounded and turning the whole thing into a spine-tingling sonic narco-soup. There aren't that many records with roots in the '50s that sound as 2009 as Missa Luba; that's got a lot to do with the current vogue for choral, ecstatic rock, and perhaps most of all what Animal Collective and their drummer Noah "Panda Bear" Lennox have pioneered, or perhaps rediscovered, of late. The connection struck me with revelatory force, shortly before I saw that it had occurred to a lot of other people, too . But there it is, most vividly in Panda Bear's Bros, from his 2007 album Person Pitch, a piece which seems to operate within exactly the same resonant co-ordinates as Missa Luba's wondrous Banana, to which the available YouTube bootlegs barely do justice. You can buy the Él release on Amazon for a tenner and not waste a penny.
Danny Eccleston
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 24/07/2009
Further Listening
Panda Bear – Person Pitch (Paw Tracks, 2007)
London Sinfonia – Fauré: Requiem (Collegium, 1997)
David Fanshawe – African Sanctus (Philips, 1989)
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