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Learn African Guitar Online | Congolese Guitar Lessons Online,Learn African Guitar Online

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World Music Method

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Congolese Music?

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, musicians in the Congo wove together a rainbow of influences – Cuban music, jazz, French variété, American pop, traditional tribal music – and created Congolese rumba.

 

Guitarists like Nicolas ‘Dr. Nico’ Kasanda, Antoine ‘Tino Baroza’ Tshilumba, and the great ‘Franco’ Luambo Makiadi created a whole new guitar language – rhythmic, melodic, hypnotic – that gradually began spreading across the country and beyond.

Congolese Guitar Lessons Online

Then, in 1969, a radical new group called Zaiko Langa Langa arrived on the scene: they tied a rock to the rumba style and revolutionized Congolese pop, putting the guitar at the centre of the long, extended dance break that bought their songs a climax. They called this part of the song the ‘serene.

the magic of serene

A Masterclass In Congolese Guitar

Learn African Guitar Online

Throughout the course, Niwel Tsumbu takes some famous lines by Congolese guitar heroes like Roxy Tshimpaka and Beniko Popolipo from Zaiko Langa Langa, and Alain Makaba from Wenge Musica, and breaks them down into digestible chunks, explaining the basic 1-5-4-5 chord progression and key intervals on which the sebene style is built.

Whereas most African guitar styles are based on riffs and a limited range of notes, the Congolese sebene style uses the entire fretboard, revelling in complex chromatic leaps and octave runs. This sophistication is partly due to the influence of certain US jazz guitar greats, most notably Wes Montgomery, whose octave style made a huge impression on young Congolese guitarists in the late 1960s and 1970s. But it also stems from the work of a few enlightened Belgian missionaries and guitarists who promoted and taught the instrument in the 1950s and early 1960s, especially Bill Alexandre, a jazz guitarist who was once in Django Reinhardt’s band.

Niwel boils this complexity down to some key principles and techniques, slowing things down and using simultaneous notation to set you on your way to Congolese guitar mastery.

Zaiko’s youthful, hi-energy style was called sebene at home and soukous in other parts of the world. It turned the top guitarists of the day, men like Roxy Tshimpaka, Beniko Popolipo and Pépé Felly Manuaku into musical gods. Sebene conquered Africa and spawned a hundred imitations.

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