Until now, it has not been possible to listen to any single CD and get a fair overall impression of Franco, undoubtedly one of--if not the--greatest African band leaders of the 20th century. When the upstart session guitarist launched his band, OK Jazz, in Kinshasa (Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1956, it was a small guitar-based combo playing Cuban derived son and rumba with a central African twist. When Franco died in 1989, TPOK Jazz, as it was then known, had become an on-stage army, with as many as five guitars, and seeming legions of horns, singers, dancers and percussionists. By then, Franco's songs were more like plays, dramatizing social issues and shifting musical moods, all intensely orchestrated by the master. These 12 tracks, compiled and--for once on a Franco CD--explained by Franco biographer Graeme Ewans amount to a crash course on one of the most classy band catalogues in all of pop music.

It's all here, from the saucy twang on Franco's scarcely electrified guitar on the 1956 "Merengue" to the gorgeous melancholy of male vocal harmonies and nimble double-stop guitar picking on the 1971 "Infidelite Mado," to the full-force band assault of Franco's immortal 1985 rant against an indolent gigolo, "Mario." Ewans' notes identify players, give dates, and explain lyrics, as well as social and historical contexts that make the experience of great music that much richer. Even if you own many of these songs on any of the numberless, sleeve-note-free Sonodisc releases that appeared during the 1990s, this collection is worth it for the notes alone. The set ends with what Ewans' calls "Franco's last great song," "Attention na Sida" ("Beware of AIDS"), recorded in Brussels in 1987. Given that Franco would die in that city, likely from that disease, two years later, the song takes on a certain poignancy. But the main feeling this compilation leaves you with is gratefulness for 35 years of utterly brilliant music.

Contributed by: Banning Eyre for www.afropop.org