African Fiesta

IN MY 25 years as a professional guitarist, music teacher and journalist, there isn’t much in the realm of popular music and the electric guitar that I haven’t come across. Recently, however, I was left scratching my head and perplexed when my diligent student Ben enlisted me to help him decode the DNA of his new six-stringed obsession: the Congolese popular music of the early 1960s and, in particular, the guitar style of one of its main architects, Nicolas Kasanda, who was often referred to by his professional stage name, Docteur Nico.

Kasanda was born in the Belgian Congo region in 1939 and as a teenager joined Joseph “Grande Kalle” Kabasele Tshamala’s group, l’African Jazz. It was with l’African Jazz that Kasanda seems to have honed his signature style: a fingerpicked kaleidoscope of high-register, a name derived from the French word , meaning “to shake.”