Jupiter & Okwess (DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO)

Na Kozonga: I’m going home. That is Jupiter’s main wish, and the title of his third album. Since the release of their two previous recordings, Hotel Univers and Kin Sonic, ‘the Rebel General’ and his band Okwess have been around the globe, making their presence felt across its four corners – the rockiest sound ever to emerge from the Democratic Republic of Congo! That vast country, scandalously wealthy in geological and musical terms, possesses an inexhaustible reservoir of sonic majesty that Jupiter and Okwess can draw upon to generate energy for the feet and nourishment (‘okwess’) for the soul.

Jupiter was born in Kinshasa in December 1963, three years after the Congo achieved its independence. He spent a large part of his formative years living in Dar-es-Salam, Tanzania and East Germany, where his father worked as an attaché at the Congolese embassy. But in 1979, he left East Germany, returned to Kinshasa and chose a life in music. Growing up in Germany, Jupiter listened to some of the best American pop/soul of the ‘70s. Then, back in the Congo, he discovered the ultra-dominant Congolese rumba style, but also a multitude of other cool rhythms and styles that grow in its shadows. With the spark provided by this apparent complicity between Congolese traditions and Western music, the band leader with the elongated silhouette and allusive speech decided to create his own popular mode of expression