Madilu System

Jean de Dieu Makiese Bialu was born on the twenty-eighth of May 1950 at Kinshasa, the son of Anatole Makiese — a Catholic primary-school teacher of Kongo descent — and Mathilde Bialu, a homemaker. The family lived at the Kinshasa Kintambo district. He was educated at the Saint Augustin Primary School at Kintambo and at the College Saint Pierre at the Kinshasa Limete district through his fifteenth year. He left secondary school in 1965 to pursue music professionally — a decision his father opposed but ultimately accepted.

He sang from his sixteenth year in the small Kintambo neighbourhood ensembles of the late 1960s — the Bavon Marie-Marie Orchestre Negro Succès, the Kebo Negros, the Orchestre Ngoyarto — and supported himself across the same period as a tailor's apprentice at the Kinshasa Matonge market. He took the stage name Madilu — Lingala for the Suffering One — around 1969 and added the suffix System in 1975 in reference to the broadcasting-and-recording system on which he had decided his career would be built.

He joined the OK Jazz orchestra of Franco Luambo Makiadi (placed in this archive) in May 1979 at twenty-eight. He sang as principal solo voice of the orchestra for the following ten years. The Madilu-Franco recordings of the years 1979 to 1989 — including Tata-Mata, Mario, Mamou, Très Impoli, and Pesa Position Na Yo — constitute the principal continuous recorded canon of mature soukous as a genre. Madilu's vocal style — the calm, low-tenor seunfo phrasing that placed the lyric narrative ahead of the rhythm — was the distinctive feature of the late OK Jazz sound.

He left OK Jazz at Franco's death in October 1989 (placed in this archive) and conducted thereafter a solo recording career from his own Madilu System Productions label. He released across the following eighteen years thirteen solo studio albums.

He died of complications of diabetes and high blood pressure at Kinshasa on the eleventh of August 2007, at fifty-seven.

He is honored here as the voice of late OK Jazz.