Bantü Salsa

The Bantü Salsa show is a happy mix of African salsa with groove and jazz. Latin rhythms on the piano are mixed with the poetry of the kora, a thousand-year-old West African instrument that comes from a griot tradition. All this is supported by three delicately orchestrated brass instruments, as well as two sets of percussion beyond which emerges the voice of Just Wôan with its incredible capacity to go in the highs as much as in the lows and endowed with an incredible vocal ease of which he alone holds the secret. Their first album pays tribute to the common history between Africa and Latin America and proposes a mixed music that perfectly blends the rhythms and instruments of these two continents.

Bantü Salsa takes the audience on a journey into the deep history of salsa, and immediately makes them want to do a few dance steps to celebrate this musical encounter. The collective draws its inspiration from the discovery of new musical universes, with musicians with diverse influences from Cameroon, Mali and Mexico, among others. Although the melodies are meant to be festive, the themes are serious and the songs remind us that more than 400 years after the slave trade that brought millions of African slaves to America, modern slavery still persists today in many forms.

LIVE: RACINE

Behind the scenes of the new album

LIVE: DOUMA

Racine, the new album of Bantü Salsa, is a live album mixing afro-beat with salsa and Bantu rhythms from Central Africa. Recorded on the Iro-Valaskakis-Tembeck stage of the Maison de la culture Notre-Dame-de-Grâce at the end of an artistic residency in April 2021, this album is the culmination of a perfect alchemy between the sounds of the kora which are perfectly suited to the harmonies of the piano, with punctuations of brass and percussion that the group has matured over the past year.

Like Kessaï, their first album, Racine builds bridges between Africa and the Americas, but above all allows the collective to revisit Afro-beat, a rhythm that shook up the musical world in the 1970s. Created by the virtuoso Nigerian saxophonist Fela Kuti on the rhythms of his drummer Tony Allen, Afro-beat inspired a whole generation of American jazz musicians by reminding them of the rhythmic essence and ancestral heritage they carry.