Spotlight: Angélique Kidjo

How best to describe the uncategorisable phenomenon that is Angélique Kidjo?

That she is the recipient of five Grammy Awards – music’s Oscars – and the first Black African performer to receive a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, a winner of the Polar Music Prize, and named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine says much about the esteem she is held in.

But those achievements merely gloss the remarkable and trailblazing career – now in its fifth decade – of a charismatic, supremely talented performer whose reach has extended to all four corners of the world and well beyond music.

Born in then French Dahomey, now Benin, in West Africa, she inherited her musician-father and choreographer mother’s taste for performing. By the age of six she was appearing with her mother’s theatre troupe. As a teenager she sang with her brothers’ rock and R&B band.

With rising political tensions at home, in 1983 she moved to Paris, immersing herself in the city’s vibrant, multicultural music scene. The experience left an indelible impression. Kidjo’s breakthrough album, 1991’s Logos, featured American jazz saxophone icon Branford Marsalis and African artists Manu Dibango and Ray Lema to set the genre-colliding template for all that followed.

Nearly 20 albums later, Kidjo is an international superstar who has been variously hailed as ‘Africa’s premier Diva’ and, tributing her inheritance of the late and legendary Miriam Makeba’s mantle, the ‘New Mama Africa’.

Fluent in five languages, she sings in all of them. She’s just as eloquent musically, effortlessly blending traditional West African sounds and contemporary Afropop and Afrobeat with American R&B, funk, jazz, Latin and myriad other influences.

It’s in her native Yoruba language that Kidjo sings the three Ifè Songs based on African creation myths set by Philip Glass to her own lyrics. What results is a compelling, multi-cultural fusion of time-honoured African heritage, primal universal themes, and one of the most iconoclastic composers of our age.

Hearing Kidjo perform the songs for the first time, Glass sent an appreciative message to her: ‘Angélique, together we have built a bridge that no one has walked on before’.

Kidjo is an inveterate bridge builder. An active campaigner advocating for women’s rights, children’s education, and social justice, she is also a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, OXFAM Ambassador, and founder of the Batonga Foundation which supports the education of young girls in Africa.

So, how best to describe Angélique Kidjo? The truth is that she simply defies description.