The Mother's Day Case of the Night at Club Safari

Longtime listeners know that I always try to do something special for the moms on Mother's Day...

Today we follow up on last year's Mom's Day episode with a batch of sultry Afro-Latin tracks from Angola, Cabo Verde, and Senegal. Moms of all ages can find their happy dance place in this set of sweetly sad slowjams.

Before we do that, however, we are spending an hour with some of the earliest recorded popular music from sub-Saharan Africa. The first hour is devoted to rumba, chanson, and calypso from the Congolese scene in the 1950s. This set includes some very early work from Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango, probably the most influential figure in early African pop music. In the early 60s he lived in The Congo, working with popular band African Jazz. By the mid-60s Manu moved to Paris, where he recorded with Western musicians and experimented fusing African musical forms with popular Western styles. He invited African musicians to record in Paris, resulting in some of the most popular (and well-recorded) early African pop hits. You may know Manu for his song Soul Makossa recorded in 1972; it became one of the earliest African hits to cross over in the US market.

Happy Mother's Day moms!!