SXSWorld
Issue link: https://sxsw.uberflip.com/i/631812
1 4 S X S W o r l d | F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6 | S X S W. C O M rammy-winning singer Angelique Kidjo proves the adage that music is a universal language. The Beninese musician speaks four languages fluently and sings in five: Yoruba, Fon, Swahili, English and French. She has collaborated with musicians from around the world, readily covers artists ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Miriam Makeba, and recorded her most recent album with the Luxembourg Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. In her world-spanning, polyglot career of three decades and counting, one idea has stayed constant: music is shared by everyone. "I've done projects in northern Europe where not two people in the room spoke the same language," Kidjo says. "That's where it's really apparent to me that music is the only language that's universal, one that we speak no matter what skin color we have, what religion we have, or which part of the world we come from." For Kidjo, music is also communal. Since 2002, she has insisted on recording in full-band setting, with as little separate tracking as pos- sible. Given the number of musicians involved, this was a challenge for her most recent album, Angelique Kidjo SINGS with The Orchestre Philharmonique Du Luxembourg. The album came about when the Luxembourger composer Gast Waltzing approached Kidjo about arranging some of her songs for an orchestra. Live performances, and then the album, were the results. "Throughout my years working with [the philharmonic], I realized that in order to sing with an orchestra, you have to, in your mind and your body and your voice, be an instrument in the orchestra," Kidjo says. "It's not like when I'm with my band, where I'm the boss … in the orchestra, mess up and you're on your own, baby." Kidjo likes the interaction of having her bandmates all playing together at once in the studio. Tracking separately was hard for her to get used to after having grown up in West Africa's culture of group music-making. "The studio was the hardest thing for me to adapt to when I left Africa," Kidjo remembers. "For me in the '80s, standing in front of a wall [in a recording booth] and singing to a wall seemed so absurd. There's no people in front of you. Who are you singing to?" Kidjo might not be a musician at all today if it hadn't been for her strongly supportive family. There is a stigma in West Africa against women getting involved in music professionally because a "sex, drugs and rock and roll" image lingers. Also, African musicians (like fledgling musicians worldwide these days) are having trouble making money, and without income, it's hard for the traditionally-minded to view music as a legitimate job, Kidjo said. She was attacked by young men and called a prostitute just for singing onstage, but her family encouraged her to continue. "Because both of my parents had been educated and had passions in their childhoods for music and theater, they wanted us [Kidjo and her siblings] to be exposed to music, sports and theater," she explains. "They wanted to share the joy of what made them the people that they are … there are endless possibilities when you expose your kid to music at an early age." For Kidjo, this exposure came in the form of her father's record collection. At age 11, she fell hard for Miriam Makeba, James Brown, Carlos Santana and Nina Simone. She started singing and never stopped. Today, she wants to make sure that children have the same access to education and the right to choose their own future that she had. Kidjo had to start her burgeoning music career over again from scratch in 1983 when she fled to Paris from Benin, where the Marxist- Stalinist government did not take kindly to free artistic expression. In Paris, she went to music school, met her husband and songwriting collaborator Jean Hebrail, and signed a record contract. Kidjo stayed away from her home country for six years until the communist regime fell, and a multi-party democracy emerged. Today, Kidjo is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and founder of the Batonga Foundation charity. In both of these pursuits she is focused on increasing educational opportunity for African women and girls, for whom such opportunities are particularly lacking. Expanding them, Kidjo says, will have a ripple effect to uplift the entire continent culturally and economically and put a dent in what she sees as the world's growing economic unfairness. "When you travel around as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador thinking that you're helping people, you're not. They're helping you, too," Kidjo says. "They're helping you see that the world in which we are living is absolutely unfair, and it's been like that forever. And we are reaching a tipping point. Either we decide that every single human being on this planet … has a right to shelter, to education and health care, or we don't. If we don't agree to that, then we have a problem." In her humanitarian work, Kidjo is following advice she got from her mother: "Every time I faced injustice, I would come home and cry about it, and my mother said, 'you ain't helping nobody if you get yourself sick. Don't be silent about it, do something about it.' " T Angelique Kidjo will be a featured speaker at the 2016 SXSW Music Confer- ence. For more information, see sxsw.com/music. Angelique Kidjo: For Singer and Humanitarian, Music is Universal by RobeRt PReliASco G G I L L E S M A R I E Z I M M E R M A N