Exuberance and Passion Angélique

Kidjo makes a lot of music

BY STEVE HOCHMAN

Angélique Kidjo is rapturously, ravenously eating crawfish, stuffing her mouth from her hands, making ecstatic noises, then rubbing the top of her shaved head in the throes of pure elation, never mind the residue and spices she’s getting all over.

Except the crawfish are imaginary. So are the seasonings on her hands. She’s in her Brooklyn home on Zoom, bereft of crawfish. But her excitement of coming to New Orleans for her Jazz Fest performance on the first Saturday is very, very real, as she pantomimes a feast-to-come with great anticipation.

“I’m going to eat my crawfish!” she says, coming in close to the screen. “I tell my husband, ‘Don’t stand next to me. Don’t come close to me.’ He doesn’t like seafood. Take him to eat something else and give me room to eat my crawfish!”

She laughs uproariously.

But then this is how she talks about anything. Whether it’s silly or serious, she brings an exuberance and passion, manifest in voice and manner. That’s true whether the native of the West African country Benin is talking about recording with Dr. John or about her work as a UNICEF ambassador and heading her Batonga Foundation, which she started in 2006 to provide education opportunities to adolescent girls in sub-Saharan Africa.

And, as anyone who has seen her in concert knows, including at two previous Fest appearances, it’s true when she makes her music—her body and spirit given completely to the performance. And she makes a lot of music. She starts rattling off her recent run of projects: “I had a show with the 12th Symphony of Philip Glass, the premiere in New York,” she starts, talking about the February date at Carnegie Hall of the composer’s work that draws on themes from David Bowie’s Lodger album, with Kidjo as featured solo vocalist.

Next it was Hamburg, Germany’s Elbphilharmonie, where she was curator and star of a four-day festival called Reflektor Angelique Kidjo. Her own concerts there included a full performance of her 2022 Queen of Sheba album collaboration with trumpeter-composer Ibrahim Maalouf and a night of her leading an African Women All-Stars group she assembled, other members of which were among the spotlighted artists in other programs of the festival. She also be hosted a panel discussion of a new generation of artists—musical, visual, even culinary—of African descent in Germany as part of the series.

“All those arts are coming together,” she says. “We talked about the challenge with not only being from another culture, but what you bring through your culture to the country.”

And there was a show with classical pianist Alexandre Tharaud.

“It’s called ‘Les Mots d’Amour,’ which means words of love,” she says of the program of classics, all sung by her in French. “We started this project at the end of the pandemic. The world needs love, so we chose songs that talk about love.”

After Hamburg, she and Tharaud took that show to Belgium, Luxembourg and France for a few dates, before she headed to Aberdeen and Amsterdam for concerts built around her 2022 Grammy Global Music Award-winning album, Mother Nature—her fifth Grammy Award. (She also sang the title song of the album recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos to highlight the impacts of climate change.)

Then it was back to the U.S. with Jazz Fest on the horizon. And a little further out, she’ll be in Stockholm on May 23 to receive the highly prestigious Polar Music Prize in recognition both of her musical achievements and her tireless work with her Batonga Foundation.

It’s amazing she can keep track.

And this all came on the heels of a remarkable run of acclaimed, groundbreaking recordings that saw her taking on new challenges and adding to the already-vast expanse of her creative accomplishments. Her 2018 Remain in Light reconsidered the 1980 Talking Heads album, with a highly personal take on its African-influenced elements, while 2019’s Celia (also a Grammy-winner) paid tribute to Afro-Cuban icon Celia Cruz, again bringing Kidjo’s personality and perspectives to the fore.

Those two, along with Mother Nature, on which she collaborated with both veteran and rising African performers, including Burna Boy and

Sampa the Great among the latter, will provide the core of her Jazz Fest set. And perhaps, she says, there will be some surprises to honor her love for the city.

Her introduction to New Orleans, in fact, came in Paris when she was just about to start her international career and he was a young hotshot on tour.

“It was in the ’90s,” she says. “I had just signed my contract with Island Records. And a friend of mine, a journalist, introduced me to Branford [Marsalis]. We were going to see a concert by the [Senegalese] band Touré Kunda. I didn’t even know who he was. And we were talking and then it was just like we clicked. We were talking about music and then suddenly realized that we were not walking on the sidewalk. We were walking on the street. I said, ‘That’s what we did in Africa.’ And he said, ‘That’s what we do in New Orleans!’ And we start talking about music and we go to a restaurant and eat gumbo. And I’m enjoying this. He’s so great. And I said, ‘I’m going to record my album.’ And I said, ‘What do you play?’ That’s what I asked him. And then he said, ‘I play saxophone.’ I say, ‘Are you good at playing saxophone?’”

Big laugh at this as she recalls the journalist friend looking at her like she’s crazy.

“And then [Marsalis] goes, ‘I play some.’ I say, ‘Okay, if you play some, will you be willing to play on my album?’ He said, of course.’ And I said, ‘But I don’t have much money. I don’t have a big budget.’”

Marsalis told her not to worry, just send him the music—and in the course he became her ambassador to New Orleans.

“The first time I visited Branford in his house, and he opened his music room to me, I’m like, ‘Come on! This can’t be? Where did you get this from? Where did you get that from?’”

She gestures as if pointing to albums on his shelves. “He said, ‘I listen to everything!’”

It became the model for other encounters with New Orleans greats.

“I’ve had the luck of meeting Zigaboo [Modeliste, the Meters drummer],” she says. “If we sit down and start talking about drums, we’ll spend the whole day! And when I met Dr. John, it was another level again. He came to play on my album [2014’s Eve], and we would be talking, and he would just play, and we would get into a trance of singing and it’s just crazy. It’s so intense that the distance, the history disappeared.”

The connection is just part of the shared musical DNA, she says, something she understood innately, even in her youth in Benin, hearing American rock and R&B.

“Music that comes from New Orleans, for me when I was growing up, I didn’t even ask the question. For me, it was obvious that it came from Africa.”

It goes well beyond the music for her, though.

“Sometimes I arrive and just the smell of the city brings me back home,” she says. “The beignets in New Orleans—we have them in Africa. It comes from the slaves. The food that we eat in New Orleans is the world we eat. Every plate, we are taking a bite of the world. And that’s what is interesting to me. When I first arrived in New Orleans, the humidity, it’s like ‘Oh crap!’ On a hot day, the humidity is so high that everything you wear just sticks to your skin. And I feel welcome in the New World!” O

Sunday April 30 at 1:35 p.m.

Festival Stage