Soul Bangs
This year’s edition of an event dubbed ‘Fête de la Musique’, a worldwide event, will on Wednesday, June 21 take place at the Alliance Française in Accra.
The event will witness live musical performances from a number of artistes, including Guinean star Soul Bangs.
Born Souleymane Bangoura, he started rapping at age 11 and later won the RFI 2016 award for discovery of the year for his fusion of traditional rhythms with an urban feel of R n B, and has since being creating waves in Guinea and beyond.
In 2014, Soul Bang’s featured in a project dubbed ‘Break The Silence’, a call for the safe return of the Chibok girls by Now Musik, the label of 2face Idibia from Nigeria featuring 2Baba’s and his Million Voices for Peace (MVP), as well as Sound Sultan, Samini, K.Slim, Ferre Gola and Machel Montano.
His first single, ‘Fare M’Bai Bombo’, and the upcoming album ‘Cosmopolite’ fuses languages such as Susu, Malinke and Fulani while mixing rap with R n B alongside traditional instruments such as ‘kora’, ‘balafon’, talking drums and ‘tama’.
The all-day event will be divided into two parts where various artistes will perform different genres of music such as Afrobeat, hip-life, highlife, raggae, dancehall, Afro-soul, among others. Performers expected for the day include Wakili, Lamisi, Topboi, Stevielash, Bol3ro, Divinity, Nketia, Kwasi Klutse, Denkills and Obouka, who will delight and enchant fans with their recent artistic creations.
‘Fête de la Musique’ was created in 1982 at the initiative of Jack Lang, then French Minister of Culture.
The idea of organising a free music festival was concretised by Maurice Fleuret, a director of music and dance who observed that one child out of two in France played a musical instrument.
Since its creation, ‘Fête de la Musique’ has become an international phenomenon, and it is celebrated on June 21 in over 340 cities all over the world, including Australia, Chile, Germany, Italy, Japan, Morocco, Vietnam and the United States.