African Jazz

Joseph "Le Grand Kalle" Kabasele launched African Jazz in 1953, establishing the nation’s first full-time professional orchestra. The group attained its peak with the 1960 appearance of “Independence Cha Cha Cha,” a recording that saluted the close of colonial administration in the Belgian Congo. African Jazz’s chief musical legacy lay in reclaiming Latin American dance rhythms whose earlier journey across the Atlantic had begun in Africa. After an extraordinarily fertile string of recordings, the ensemble dissolved in the mid-1960s.