Yakir Arbib & Conti Bilong ‘Afro Baroque’ : Album Launch

‘Afro Baroque’ is a new, exciting multicultural duo collaboration between international award winning pianist and composer Yakir Arbib and Manu Dibango’s Cameroonian virtuoso drummer and vocalist, Conti Bilong.

Yakir and Conti will be performing music from their new album ‘Afro Baroque’.

Coming from two of the most unrelated musical backgrounds that you could imagine, the two musicians found an instant connection after meeting for the first time in Paris in July 2023.

“I was looking for a new drummer for my jazz trio”, says Yakir. “A friend suggested I take a listen to this incredible drummer, Conti Bilong. But as soon as I heard the first notes from a video on YouTube, I immediately realised that here was a musician with such a strong and natural force of rhythm and movement, such as I’ve never heard anywhere before.”

As soon as the two met in a small rehearsal room in Paris and started playing “Caravan” by Duke Ellington, something inexplicable happened. An instantaneous musical connection resulting from the alchemy of this unlikely encounter.

The two musicians explore traditional rhythms from Central Africa and the Middle East and fuse them into a unique musical language, combining Baroque-style counterpoint with dynamic jazz interplay.

We believe that now more than ever, we need connections, bridges, and strands of colour and beauty that connect opposite cultures, traditions, languages and religions together from across the world. Afro Baroque’s music is exactly that! We connect seemingly diametrically opposed worlds: the studious European counterpoint on one side, and the unstoppable force of joy, rhythm and dance coming from Africa on the other.