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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

‘Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou’. An orchestra, trading in densely layered rhythms, from the Benin costal town of Cotonou. Lacking a little something in the way of pizzazz, non? Call-and-response ...

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 ...

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’s been 20 years since Vincent Ahehehinnou and his bandmates in the Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou could afford to spend their days playing music. Back then, the band from Benin — formed in the ...

The magnificent Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou are to release their first album in over 20 years next March, the Quietus is pleased to report. Cotonou Club will be out on March 29th via the always ...

Orchestre Poly-Rythmo has been around in some form since the 1960s, but its exposure outside Africa — for both live performances and recordings — has been severely limited. But that's finally changed, ...

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 ...