Le Tout-Puissant Orchestre Poly-Rythmo is a difficult ensemble to follow. For one thing, they have functioned under the names Poly Rythmo de Cotonou, TP Orchestre Poly-Rythmo and L'International ...

Last September Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou played to a packed house at the Barbican Centre in London. There's nothing unusual about a sold-out gig, but what was unusual was that this was ...

Séance of the ancient and urban, conjured by a spidery, hypnotic rhythm derived from spirit possession ceremonies, the Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou owes its black magic to the Vodoun Effect. That ...

Overnight success can take years. For the members of Benin's Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou, it has taken more than 40 of them. Just as Cuba's Buena Vista Social Club found before them, even the ...

For all that we’re living through desperate times, it can be sobering to consider the challenges facing creative people in eras and places by no means unimaginably distant from our own. Take, for ...

When I walk into the Orchestre's Paris hotel on the day of their European debut, Vincent Ahehehinnou greets me. He is the James Brown fan recruited in 1968 to "heat up" gigs with the unhinged screams ...

It’s almost a miracle that, tomorrow night, Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou will play the London Scala, and that just weeks ago they released their first album proper in decades, Cotonou Club. And, ...

Benin is little known for its influence on African popular music. It is better known as the home of vodun, an ancient religion native to West Africa and the root of the syncretic religion voodoo found ...

It isn’t long since the pop past felt truly remote: old video footage was impossible to access, and you could only dream of having seen the great bands of the Sixties and Seventies. Now everything can ...

Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou, from Benin, belongs on the very short list of the world’s greatest funk bands. More than four decades into its career, most of them spent touring Benin and nearby ...