Franco Luambo Makiadi

François Luambo Luanzo Makiadi was born on the sixth of July 1938 at Sona-Bata in the Bas-Congo Province of the Belgian Congo, the son of Joseph Emongo Luambo — a railway worker on the Matadi-Léopoldville line — and Hélène Mbongo Makiesse, a market trader who sold beignets at the Sona-Bata station. The family moved to Léopoldville in 1944. His mother began to support the family's six children alone after his father left the household around 1946. He sold his mother's beignets at the Léopoldville Far East market through his eighth and ninth years and used the change he kept for himself to buy a small acoustic guitar.

He was taught the guitar at twelve by the older Léopoldville guitarist Albert Luampasi at the Funa neighbourhood of the city. He played from thirteen at the Watam Bar at the Léopoldville's Kinshasa Ngiri-Ngiri quarter — the founding venue of post-war Congolese rumba — and at fourteen made his first studio recordings with the Watam ensemble at the Loningisa studios of the Greek producer Papadimitriou.

He co-founded with the saxophonist Vicky Longomba and the singer Daniel Loubelo De La Lune the OK Jazz orchestra at the OK Bar in the Kinshasa Bandalungwa quarter on the sixth of June 1956. He was eighteen. The orchestra would across the following thirty-three years record over a hundred and fifty long-playing albums and become the most consequential single ensemble of Congolese rumba and the principal francophone African band of the post-war period.

His decisive musical innovation was the second-guitar voice he developed across the late 1950s and early 1960s — the polyphonic interlocking accompaniment style that placed two guitars in continuous melodic dialogue against the underlying rumba pulse. The technique became the foundation of Congolese soukous and, through soukous, of much of subsequent francophone African popular music.

He died of complications of AIDS at the University Hospital of Mont-Godinne in Yvoir, Belgium, on the twelfth of October 1989, at fifty-one.

He is honored here as the founder of OK Jazz.