Angélique Kidjo

Angélique Kidjo

Angélique Kidjo is a Beninese singer, songwriter and performer from Cotonou, with work spanning afrobeats, jazz and world fusion. She is known for drawing on a wide range of musical traditions and for using music video as part of her creative output. She wins a Grammy Award and works as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.

Early life and musical beginnings

Kidjo is born in 1960 in Benin. She grows up in Ouidah in a family with Fon and Yoruba roots. As a child, she listens to James Brown, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder and Santana, alongside singers such as Bella Bellow, Aretha Franklin and Miriam Makeba. By the age of six, she is already performing with her mother’s theatre troupe, which gives her an early grounding in traditional music and dance.

She starts singing in her school band, Les Sphinx, and gains attention as a teenager with her version of Miriam Makeba’s “Les Trois Z”, which plays on national radio. She later records Pretty with Cameroonian producer Ekambi Brilliant and her brother Oscar. The album includes “Ninive”, “Gbe Agossi” and a tribute to Bella Bellow. Its success leads to touring across West Africa.

Move to Paris and early professional work

Political conflict in Benin makes it difficult for her to work independently in her home country, so she moves to Paris in 1982. While paying for her studies with a series of day jobs, she studies music at the CIM jazz school in Paris. There she meets musician and producer Jean Hebrail, who becomes her husband and with whom she composes most of her music.

She begins her professional career as a backing singer in local bands. In 1985, she becomes the lead singer of Jasper van’t Hof’s Euro-African jazz-rock group Pili Pili. The group records three studio albums: Jakko (1987), Be In Two Minds (1988), produced by Marlon Klein, and Hotel Babo (1990).

Solo recording career

By the end of the 1980s, Kidjo is one of the most popular live performers in Paris. She records a solo album, Parakou, for the Open Jazz label. She is then discovered in Paris by Island Records founder Chris Blackwell and signs to the label in 1991. She records four albums for Island before Blackwell leaves the company.

In 2000, she signs in New York to Columbia Records, for which she records two albums. Her music draws on afropop, Caribbean zouk, Congolese rumba, jazz, gospel and Latin styles, and she continues to be associated with those wider influences in addition to afrobeats, jazz and world fusion.

Campaigning and other work

Kidjo becomes a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 2002 and travels with UNICEF to many countries in Africa. She also founds the Batonga Foundation, which supports girls’ secondary and higher education through scholarships, school building, increased enrolment, improved teaching standards, school supplies, mentoring, alternative education models and community advocacy.

She campaigns for Oxfam at the 2005 Hong Kong WTO meeting, works on its Fair Trade Campaign, and travels with Oxfam in north Kenya and at the border of Darfur and Chad with a group of women leaders in 2007. She also contributes to the video for the In My Name Campaign with will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas and hosts the Mo Ibrahim Foundation’s Prize for Achievement in African Leadership in Alexandria, Egypt.

Collaborations and affiliations

Her recorded and performance history includes work with Jean Hebrail, Ekambi Brilliant, Jasper van’t Hof and Marlon Klein. She is also associated with Band Aid 30 and the We Are Family Collective.