Given his extensive legacy of recordings, and the host of careers he launched and nurtured, Luambo Makiadi--a.k.a. Franco--can justly be called the Duke Ellington of Congolese music. Franco died in 1989 at the age of 51. He left a legacy of social commentary that his biographer Graeme Ewens compares with Balzac's Comedie Humaine. Franco also left a stable of musicians who have continued his work both in Europe and throughout Africa, and a massive catalogue of often brilliant recordings.

At seven, Franco made his first guitar from a cooking oil tin and used it to entertain at the sidelines of soccer matches. In 1953, when he got his first work as a session guitarist at the Greek-owned Loningisa studio, the country was still the Belgian Congo, and the world had no clue that the Congolese "rumba" sound would soon sweep much of Africa and grow into the international pop phenomenon now called soukous. But by 1956, when Franco officially launched OK Jazz as a six-piece unit, Kinshasa supported over 150 bars, many with bandstands and open-air dance floors, and recording studios had begun to crank out classic records. Later on the band became TPOK Jazz--adding TP for tout puissant or "all powerful."

OK Jazz had a motto: "On Entre O.K. On Sort K.O." (one enters OK, one leaves KO'd). Like other bands of the time, OK Jazz played cha-chas, biguines, boleros, and rumbas. The sound they settled on was in fact closest to Cuban son, but they called it rumba and the name stuck. In early OK Jazz recordings, percussionists work around the click pattern of the Cuban clave, and singers affect the nasal quality of Cuban crooners. But the singing language, Lingala, has a flowing cadence and tonality that instantly marks the music as Congolese.

Intent on creating a personal sound, Franco incorporated rhythms and themes from his village in the Congolese interior. Accordingly, Franco's guitar playing was rough, aggressive, and loaded with rhythmic twists. Against the fluttering and cooing of Jean Serge Essous's playful clarinet, Franco clawed out brisk, cyclic rhythms and ineffable leads whose echoes resound throughout modern African pop. By the 1970s, OK Jazz had expanded to include three guitars, a hefty horn section, and a front line of four or five male singers, many of whom composed songs for the band and commanded cults of their own. Recordings from that era reveal the mature band's complex, sensual grooves, and Franco's dramatically developed guitar style, which by this time had earned him the title "Sorcerer of the Guitar."

In President Mobutu's coalescing dictatorship, Franco ruled a blossoming music scene. His lyrics on subjects like tribalism, corruption, poverty, sorcery, infidelity, the deceitfulness of women, and the crudeness of men amused and annoyed listeners, but always held their attention. Testing the limits of his freedom, Franco patronized the regime but also ran afoul of it both with sly criticism and obscenity, a charge that landed him and much of the band in jail in 1978. A few years earlier, Mobutu's government had awarded Franco the medal for the Order of the Leopard. Now, in a sign of its fickleness, that same government took it away. During the 80s, Zaire's declining economy seriously undermined its glorious music scene sending many musicians to Europe. Though Franco too spent time in Belgium, he continued to base himself at home and made no stylistic concessions to Western aesthetics or to the new "world music" market. Years after his death--which many believe was caused by AIDS--Franco still towers over the story of Congo music.

Contributed by: Banning Eyre