Sam Mangwana - Rumba Music (1994)

Sam Mangwana, a star vocalist with Congo's greatest big bands, re-recorded this classic selection of songs from his celebrated career in 1993. Includes the massive rumba hit, Suzana.
Sam Mangwana will certainly enter the pantheon of soukous’ greatest vocalists, which already honors Tabu Ley Rochereau and Franco. But unlike his mentors, he embraced a soukous style that imbibed the gentle, rollicking rumba rhythms of the Caribbean (especially Cuba). Perhaps, his affinity for Angolan music and its Portugese inflections also caused Mangwana to embrace European and New World influences. Unlike his soukous predecessors, his arrangements tend toward a softer, more acoustic and less electronic sound.
Born in Kinshasa in 1945 of Angolan parents, his father was a shopkeeper and his mother sang at a social club for Angolan women. He attended a boarding school run by Salvation Army missionaries and sang in the school’s choir. Almost by accident, he met Tabu Ley on the street one day and before long he joined Tabu Ley’s Africa Fiesta. After singing with Tabu Ley for ten years, he branched out and performed with Franco and other prominent Kinshasa bands. In the 1970s, he moved to the Ivory Coast and teamed up with the musicians who later went on to form another seminal African ensemble, Les Quatres Etoiles. Because of his musical “wanderings,” he is known as La Pigeon Voyageur.