Manu Dibango passes the torch at Montreal’s Nuits D’Afrique

Nuits D’Afrique in downtown Montreal is the biggest African music festival in North America. This year, it’s celebrating its 30th anniversary. As with every year, there are dozens of free outdoor shows through Sunday.

To commemorate the milestone, the festival wanted to do something special. It brought back one of its first guests, world music superstar Manu Dibango, to give a new generation of young Montreal musicians a chance to share the stage with him.

Dibango is best known for his mega-hit, ‘Soul Makossa’ (or from Michael Jackson ‘sampling’ it in “Wanna Be Startin’ Something”).

But in his home country, Cameroon, everyone listens to Manu Dibango. “I always listened to his music,” says Veeby, a Cameroonian up and coming soul singer in Montreal with an electric smile. “Every Sunday, we used to clean the house, and we’d open all the windows, all the doors and [Dibango’s] music was playing.”

“Meeting him for real – like, for real – is crazy”

Veeby moved to Montreal when she was 16, “so I am really mixed right now. I have 50% of my life here, 50% of my life back in my country.” Her performance on the same stage as Manu Dibango brings those two worlds together. And she confesses, she’s nervous, “really nervous! Meeting him for real – like, for real – it’s crazy.” She laughs and rolls her eyes.

Three young artists from Montreal each do a mini-set, closing with a cover of a Manu Dibango song. Veeby chose to sing his rock-reggae-African jam, ‘Bolingo City’, because it was her father’s favorite.

“It was always on his playlist,” she says. “When they told me I was doing this, I said I have to play this song, because my father died last year. I thought it would be a good tribute, to make a connection with him, and with Manu Dibango and with Cameroon. It’s like, everything is linked.”

For 30 years, the Nuits D’Afrique festival and its home base, Club Balattou, have been making that link for people in Montreal with African and Afro-Caribbean roots. The festival is also crucial to give rising artists outside the mainstream a platform to spread their music.

“They give the time and the chance to the musicians in the community to express themselves,” says Oscar Fuentes, lead singer and co-drector for Afro-Cuban group Proyecto Ire, which won the festival’s Syli D’Or, an annual world music battle of the bands.

“We were considered crazy people”

A few hours before the show, Proyecto Ire is soundchecking to serve as backup band for Dibango. As they noodle with their instruments while the sound engineer sets levels, the sound of saxophone wafts from backstage. All alone in a cramped dressing room, an empty Styrofoam coffee cup on the counter, Dibango softly plays to himself.

He says, in a mix of French and English, that it’s hard to remember exactly when he first appeared on the Nuits D’Afrique stage, but it was “definitely one of the first years.”

It’s interesting, he recalls, almost three decades ago, few people in North America knew anything about African music, let alone the dizzying musical rhythmic differences by country and region. “We were considered crazy people,” he chuckles with a deep laugh. Today, Dibango says, the most important African music festival “isn’t in New York or Paris or London, it’s here in Montreal.”

Dibango says he feels honored and lucky to be here to pass the torch to the next generation of Nuits D’Afrique musicians. “A lot of people in my age be gone already. So I’m lucky to see the young who continue what we start some decades ago.”

From Montreal to Africa, in a couple hours of live music

That night, it’s a packed house at Theatre Fairmount, an intimate Mile-End club. It’s a crazy mixed crowd, young and old, black and brown and white and yellow and whatever, dancing, cell phones in the air recording for their own memories.

Veeby nails her cover of ‘Bolingo City’. Then, finally, to the salsa beat of Proyecto Ire, Manu Dibango emerges with a swell of saxophone and a roar from the audience. After an extended greeting to his fans, in French, Dibango plays a mellow sax and piano set, people swaying, enthralled.

Nuits D’Afrique has made these moments happen for 30 years, when you feel transported from Montreal to Africa. “It’s the closest I feel to home,” says Abu Toure, who moved here from Ivory Coast 15 years ago.

Manu Dibango left the stage without playing his biggest hit. But it didn’t seem to matter because the younger generation did, bringing new life to a classic.