The Toronto Star
May 18, 2000

Sound-transplant operation a success
Mighty Popo finds his African voice in The Great White North

By John Goddard, Special to the Star

The longer he lives in Canada, the more African he sounds.

On his latest album Mighty Popo fully embraces his African heritage after years of playing mostly blues, reggae and R & B with a series of Ottawa bands, including his own.

On Saturday, he brings his new, cheerful, energizing sound to the Bamboo Club in his first ever Toronto appearance.

"It’s really what’s inside of me," he says of the new disc, Dunia Yote, meaning "the whole world."

"All the songs reflect the times that I’m living right now."

Mighty Popo, 33, grew up as Jacques Murigande in troubled Burundi after his parents fled neighbouring Rwanda as refugees in 1961.

He took to music "from day one," he says by phone from his Ottawa home. Growing up in Burundi’s capital, Bujumbura, he absorbed a mix of popular styles that included Nigerian highlife, Congolese soukous, Caribbean reggae and calypso, American blues and R&B, and South African township jive.

His first instrument was a wrap-around harmonica, or "banana harp," he says, and he was always playing various kinds of home-made stringed instruments that eventually led him to the guitar.

"Strings (were) hard to come by so you learn on anything," he says.

As a refugee in Burundi, he encountered constant prejudice. He paid higher school fees than other children and felt cut off from opportunity, motivating him at 19 to immigrate to Canada - "the first country to grant me citizenship."

In Ottawa, his point of entry, he established himself as a versatile guitarist. He recorded with an American blues band in New Orleans, and toured Canada playing reggae and R&B. At one point, he worked with an Ottawa band leader who introduced all the members with the prefix, "The Mighty," which for him, when combined with his childhood nickname, became "The Mighty Popo."

In 1997, he released his first album, Tamba, backed by friends of mixed backgrounds. It included a range of styles he had been playing separately in individual bands - from delta blues and Louisiana zydeco, to R&B and various African genres. The move to a more exclusively African sound came in 1998.

To promote peace in Rwanda in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi people, the Rwandan government and the Organization for African Unity sponsored an African Dance Festival in the Rwandan capital of Kigali. Mighty Popo, whose parents were Tutsi, was invited to play.

"I got a call and I said, 'Yes, I'm going,' " he recalls enthusiastically. "For the first time I am going to the birth country of my parents."

He spent 15 days in Rwanda, met his grandmother for the first time and wrote a song for her, "Grand-mere," which appears on the new album.

"I saw things I didn't see or TV," he says. "I saw people smiling. People were poor but they were giving me things. I saw where my morn and dad were born and where my relatives were buried, the ones killed in the genocide."

The Mighty Popo says he now keeps in touch with many of the family members and other people he met on the trip and that the contact is nourishing his sense of himself."

"As a musician, as an artist, you are always trying to improve, to find your way, to find your direction musically and artistically," he says. "You're trying to find your sound.

"And by learning about your own country and your own history, you not only get to find out who you are, you also get to like yourself more, and then you like the whole human race even better. You get to a level of understanding where you see one, one, one, one people."

Trouble continues to flare in both Rwanda and Burundi but as soon as it looks safe to take a band there again, Popo says he wants to tour the countries.

In the meantime, he looks forward to a busy summer schedule that brings him back to Toronto for a Harbourfront performance on Aug. 5 and appearance at Nathan Philips Square later the same month.