WORLD CUP SOUTH AFRICA 2010 WORLD CUP SOUTH AFRICA
"The Leopards" are the national team of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 1974 when Congo DR was known as Zaire between (1971-1997) they were the first black African team to qualify for the World Cup. This song, sung in Lingala by the legendary Trio Madjesi and played in the scintillating Congolese Rhumba style, is in honor of that team.
This song heats up at 2:50, where the band moves into the "sebene". The sebene, from the english word seven, is an instrumental bridge on which one or two musicians develop arpeggios in circular progressions while another improvises around them. The sebene has forever been common to music for Congolese harps, lutes, thumb pianos and xylophones. Congolese rhumba pioneers adapted traditional structures to two or three guitars and borrowed some ideas from the interplay of the Spanish guitar and the trés in Cuban sones and guajiras.
Guitarists such as Franco, Papa Noel, Nico Kassanda and Nico's brother Dechaud—picked up electric guitars and a few tricks from rock 'n' roll, Western swing and Hawaiian music, and heated up and stretched out their sebenes. The typical rumba congo of the '60s and '70s tended to start at a moderate tempo, shift up for the chorus and then hit cruising speed for the sebene.
The contrasting rhythms gave rise to dances like boucher, mossaka, kiri-kiri (which actually slowed down for the sebene) and, in 1968, soukous, which was defined by a particularly emphatic midsong rhythmic change, when the dancers started shaking and the guitarists rocked out. Though three-minute singles still dominated the Congolese record market in the late '60s, bands playing live could extend the sebene indefinitely. In the '70s bands like Franco's T.P.O.K. Jazz and new-school Zaiko Langa Langa brought as many as five guitar parts (basse, accompagnement, mi-composé, mi-solo and solo) into sebenes that sometimes went on for 15 or 20 increasingly exciting minutes, creating what was called beau désordre—"beautiful chaos."
Braun, Ken. Soukous. National Geographic. http://worldmusic.nationalgeographic.com/view/page.basic/genre/content.genre/soukous_790/en_US
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Brasil vs. Zaire in the 1974 World Cup, West Germany.
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