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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. ">
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