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 ...

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 ...

Two decades after breaking up, this versatile unit from West Africa's Benin returns with some new members and a good deal of their initial creative spark. Save this story Save this story It's been ...

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 ...

Benin's prolific, eclectic funk band Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou will release their first studio album in more than 20 years on March 29 via Strut /Sons D'Ailleurs. The record is called Cotonou ...

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 ...

From the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, the Benin big band were indeed all-powerful. Then, like so many of the post-Independence orchestras, they fell out of fashion for many years. They reunited in ...