50 Global Guitar Greats
By Nigel Williamson
50 guitarists who have made an impact outside of the usual rock’n’roll axis of axes
Rodrigo y Gabriela
Forget about Hendrix, Beck, Clapton, Page and Van Halen; we want to highlight the guitarists who have made an impact outside of the usual rock’n’roll axis of axes. It’s a list full of invention, customs passed down through generations and a focus on rhythm as much as volume. These are the musicians who defined soukous, bossa nova and Touareg desert blues, who soundtracked revolutions and revelations, and made their traditions that little more recognisable to a global audience. These are our guitar heroes...
Franco Luambo was the towering figure of 20th-century Congolese music. Known as the ‘Grand Maître of Zairean Music’ and ‘Sorcerer of the Guitar,’ he led OK Jazz, the most popular and significant African band of its era, for more than 30 years. Growing up on the streets of Kinshasa, his first guitar was made from a tin can with electrical wire for strings. After graduating to a real instrument, he swiftly developed a fancy finger-picking style and, at 18, became a founder member of OK Jazz. The group really took off when independence came to the Belgian Congo in 1960 and went on to enjoy huge popularity across the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. Playing with a hard, metallic urgency, the rumba style he patented subsequently mutated into soukous. On his death in 1989, Zaire (as it then was) declared four days of national mourning with radio stations playing classic OK Jazz recordings non-stop.
