Occidental Brothers

Chicago’s Occidental Brothers Dance Band Int’l are pleased to announce a new collaboration with Congolese music legend, the great Samba Mapangala! Playing the best-loved songs from both artists’ repertoires, the group is now also playing new songs that fuse together all their strengths.



The Occidental Brothers’ blend of high-energy soukous, rootsy Ghananian Highlife and African Jazz conjures sounds of the golden age of the African guitar band and has made them favorites of of music critics and devotees of the style, but it’s a sound that has also seduced an audience of listeners as diverse as the members of this multi-racial band. The group is led by guitarist Nathaniel Braddock, an instructor at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music and twice profiled in Guitar Player Magazine. Braddock is joined by jazz phenom Greg Ward on alto, Joshua Ramos on bass and Makaya McCraven on drums. After playing the Pitchfork festival in 2008 and GlobalFest in January 2009, the OBDBI experienced a meteoric rise–graduating from Chicago street festivals to the stages of Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Montreal and Vancouver Jazz Festivals in the course of a year.



Congolese singer Samba Mapangala is one of the true legends of African music. In the 1970’s he traveled from Kinshasa with his group Les Kinois to the Kenyan capital of Nairobi where he rebuilt the group as Virunga. For twenty years Mapangala and Virunga were the kings of the East African music scene, recording countless hits, many included on the cd “Virunga Volcano”, recognized in the book “World Music: 100 Essential CDs” by Simon Broughton. He sings in the mellifluous, but rhythmically complex style of the Congolese singers, but sings in Swahili as much as his native Lingala.



The first OBDBI/Mapangala collaboration was the greatly-applauded tribute song “Obama Ubarikiwe” in celebration of the aspiring presidential candidate, and a favorite son of Chicagoans and Africans alike. Mapangala and the OBDBI began performing together in the fall of 2009, and have recently begun recording music for release in 2010.



The band is currently booking 2010 performances in North America, Africa, and Europe.



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