 There’s a photo of Angelique Kidjo visiting a school in Ethiopia in which she’s surrounded by children, all of whom are purely magnetized to the singer, and eagerly showing off notebooks charting their progress in learning the English language. If you know Kidjo from her spellbinding performances, you’ll notice something different about her in the snapshot. Her normally fiery eyes are sad and almost drooping.
“I was beaten down, man,” she says, looking at the shot. “It was too much. All the children in that school had HIV or AIDS, and they were trying to cheer me up, showing me how well they were learning to write in English, and I was correcting their grammar. They were just being kids, and I had to leave my grief aside, because they have a lot of dignity and courage, and a lot of strength.”
In recent years, the African star and goodwill ambassador for UNICEF has traveled throughout her home continent, meeting child soldiers, adolescents dying from AIDS and young girls who’ve been raped on long walks to fetch drinkable water. And they’ve all beaten her up emotionally.
But with her latest disc, Djin Djin, instead of recounting chilling or heartbreaking stories, she has again decided to put her grief aside, in favor of celebrating the preciousness of life and love. For Kidjo, it’s a way of giving these downtrodden souls a voice. “All my life,” she says, “I’ve been congratulated for my voice, but I didn’t do anything to deserve it, I was born with it. But I know now that it comes with responsibility.”
In addition to UNICEF, Kidjo has toured Africa alongside Alicia Keys, in support of the latter’s chosen cause, the Keep A Child Alive campaign, which benefits HIV- and AIDS-infected orphans. So it’s no surprise that Keys is among the stars making cameos on Djin Djin, which also features Peter Gabriel, Josh Groban, Ziggy Marley, Carlos Santana, Amadou & Mariam, Branford Marsalis and Joss Stone.
If it ended up becoming something else, the album was originally intended to be a celebration of the rhythms of Kidjo’s Western African homeland, Benin. After delving into the music of Brazil, Cuba and the greater Caribbean on her recent releases, Djin Djin uses as its bedrock the region-specific rhythms of Benin, but veers westward toward Senegal, and even further west, delving into rock (she covers “Gimme Shelter” with Stone), pop and even country territories (Dylan alumnus Larry Campbell adds weeping pedal steel to one track).
The disc, whose visibility is being ballooned through a deal with Starbucks’ Hear Music label, was produced by Bowie/T. Rex studio wiz Tony Visconti, who notes that the experience throttled him back in time some 30 years: The making of the record recalled his time producing breakout records for the world-music collective Osibisa, while also marking the first time since the ‘70s that he cut almost an entire album live in the studio, including some 75 percent of Kidjo’s vocals.
And it was the recording of those vocals that also brought him new experiences: “When she sings in the studio, Angelique has to move, and she has to see people playing. She starts dancing, and gets all pumped up. At the end of the song, when she’s finished singing, she’ll just go from behind the microphone and dance in the middle of the room for the musicians to watch her, which I’ve never seen anyone do in my entire life.”
For more on Angelique Kidjo, check out the cover story in the June ‘07 issue of Global Rhythm magazine or visit www.globalrhythm.com
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