An extremely talented dancer and choreographer, Radja Kula had established his music band Station Japana. It was through this band that he went on to unleash his creative and introduced some of the most captivating dance moves that came to popularised Congolese music.
While Radja's dance invention were rocking in clubs and other entertainment venues, especially in the mid nineties when Congolese music captured the heart of global audience, the name Radja Kula was seldom heard of in the music circle.
It happened that his work was being exported by his band members who would ditch him for popular and more lucrative music groups. As these members left so too did they take with them some of the dance moves they had learned from Radja.
In an interview conducted to pay tribute to Radja Kula, one of his former dancers Nono Ba Diamant recalled how her performance of Radja Kula's dance moves during a test session, secured her a spot in the country's most famous and lucrative band , Quartier Latin, owned by singer and composer Koffi Olomide.
According to Nono, during the test performance she would echo lyrics sung by one of the other members from Raja Kula's Station Japan band, so much that Koffi was left impressed and ended up recruiting the band member, known as Sonomo.
The presence of Nono Ba Diamant and Sonomo in Quartier Latin went on to showcased and popularise many of Radja Kula's dance creations
According to Nono Ba Diamant, the success of Koffi's 1996 album V12 (which included the famous hit Andrada) and the album that followed after that "Ultimatum" ought to be credited to Rodja Kula, as majority of the dance moves and some lyrics in those albums were taken from him.
Rodja Kula later made this known after he blasted Koffi Olomide during a television interview. He claimed that the Ndombolo hit maker had promised him some kind of compensation after he had personally confronted him about producing and making money from his creative work. But even in his last hours on earth Koffi Olomide failed to fulfill such promise.
What had further angered Radja Kula about Koffi is that the singer had benefited the most from his talent yet could not offer him even a minimum, while other artists such as Werrason and JB Mpiana had reached out to Radja. There were also among the artists who had made great hits by coping dance steps and lyrics from Station Japana.
Radja Kula died on the 19th of August 2020 in Nairobi Kenya, where he had recently joined his son Evala Mbuta, who also happens to be an artist.
No comments:
Post a Comment