Woman of the world

“I was frozen with emotion,” says Kidjo, recalling the day she watched America’s first black president take the oath of office. “I couldn’t believe it. I can’t describe the atmosphere. It was the first time ever for me to be in that kind of event because I don’t go to political things. But I was invited and I said, ‘I have to witness this.’ It was so ­beautiful. Just talking about it I have tears in my eyes.”

Home since 1983 has been Paris, but there are few places in the world Kidjo’s blend of Afro-Latin rhythms can’t find some common ground – and fewer still that she hasn’t reached with her endless touring. Glasgow, where she appears on January 22 as part of the Celtic Connections festival, falls into neither camp.

Just days before the Scottish date, Kidjo releases Oyo, the follow-up to her Grammy Award-winning 2007 album Djin Djin. The new album is a selection of the songs that have inspired her over the course of her four decades as a singer. Some she first heard growing up in the Beninoise port city of Cotonou, others she came across later. Among them are Curtis Mayfield’s Move On Up, Samba Pa It by Carlos Santana, Otis Redding’s I Got Dreams and the Aretha Franklin ballad Baby I Love You.

There are some curios too: Petite Fleur, for instance, a classical jazz piece written by Sidney Bechet, John Barry’s theme music from the film Out Of Africa, and Bollywood show tune Dil Main Chuppa Ke Pyar Ka, taken from Mehboob Khan’s epic 1952 film Aan. That last song took some tracking down as Kidjo had only a snatch of melody and her childhood recollections of a cinema visit to go on. Her brother, a regular visitor to India, sourced the original song.

Among the collaborators who took part in Oyo’s frenetic four-day recording schedule were fellow Grammy Award winner John Legend, jazz trumpeter Roy Hargrove, jazz singer Dianne Reeves, guitarist Lionel Loueke – a veteran of Celtic Connections and a fellow Beninoise – and members of Brooklyn-based Afrofunk outfit, Antibalas. For Kidjo, Oyo is a tribute of sorts to her father, a musician himself who died of liver cancer in 2008.

“The couple of hours I spent with him before he passed away was very intense,” she says. “I was in the middle of a tour and I was still in denial about the fact he was dying because just a month before we were goofing around, having fun. I couldn’t believe his health had deteriorated that much. He was diagnosed with liver cancer at the end of March and he died at the end of April.” From her father’s death came Kidjo’s conviction that she should remember him “through the thing he gave me, which is music. Music has been my shelter and my backbone.”

Growing up as one of 10 children in a west African family in the early 1970s, Kidjo heard plenty of American soul and funk on the radio and from her brothers’ own record collections. Her mother, a choreographer who set up Benin’s first theatre company, also played clarinet. But in her early years Kidjo’s musical education came mostly from her father.

“There was classical music and traditional music from all sorts of places,” she says. “My father always travelled around and brought stuff home because he was a believer in exposing his kids to different types of culture. So when I started this album, things started pouring out of my memory. I didn’t hold anything back. I let them come out.”

Like fellow African music stars Baaba Maal and Youssou N’Dour, Kidjo is heavily involved in advocacy for organisations such as Unicef and Oxfam. In 2006 she also founded The Batonga Foundation, which aims to provide African girls with secondary and tertiary education, and now works in five African countries. So with the passing of Miriam Makeba in 2008, it’s Kidjo who looks the most likely inheritor of the South African’s Mama Afrika mantle.

But unlike Baaba Maal and Youssou N’Dour, who both live and work in the relatively stable Senegal, most of Kidjo’s career has been undertaken in exile. She started singing aged six – the closing track on Oyo, the traditional Atcha Houn, is the first song she ever performed – but when she was 12, in 1972, Benin became a dictatorship based on Marxist-Leninist ideology. Freedom of expression for artists and musicians became impossible, and in 1983 Kidjo left her homeland for good, heading to Paris where her brother was studying. There she met her husband, Jean Hebrail, and began the career that would eventually lead her to Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, who signed her to his label in 1991.

“It was 1989 before I was even able to speak to my parents on the phone and it was nine years before I was able to go back,” she says, recalling the years of exile. “I suffered a lot from the fact I couldn’t speak to my father because he was my counsellor. [As an exile] you lose a great part of yourself because you have to adapt – not only to different customs but to different time and weather. You’re like a boat in the ocean and you don’t know where to go. All you have is the horizon in front of you. Every day I woke up and missed my parents so much I would cry.”

Today, the old regime has gone and Benin enjoys multi-party elections, but Paris remains Kidjo’s base of operations. The availability of flights is just one reason. There are others, such as the family she has with Hebrail and the not insignificant fact that she’s now spent the greater part of her life in France. Still, she says, “If I could have had the career I have today by staying in my country, believe me, I would have stayed there.” Instead she makes near annual trips back to Benin in her guise as a Unicef Goodwill Ambassador or simply as a returning Beninoise visiting relatives. That, at least, she will always make time for.

Angelique Kidjo is at the Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, on January 22, 9pm. Oyo is released on January 18 by Proper Records.