Celebrated Caribbean band, Kassav’ are expected to arrive in the country this Wednesday, ahead of the much-anticipated ‘Kassav’ Live’, organisers have said. The show is slated for Valentine’s Day, on February 14, at the Kigali Convention Center. “They will arrive Wednesday and will address a press conference on Thursday as they prepare for the show on Friday,” Remmy Lubega, the RG Consult chief executive said. The show will be Kassav’s first gig in Rwanda and is expected to include a wide array of the group’s biggest hits, including “Zouk la se sel medikaman nou ni”, “Mwen di ou awa”, “Oh Madiana”, “Doméyis”, “Siwo” and “Pa bizwen pale” among others. After Kigali, the band will be heading to Berlin and New York, where they will be performing. The show will also feature Rwandan R&B singer, Christopher Muneza, who has been organising the Valentine’s Day Show and will be celebrating a decade in music. Tickets are already on sale via www.rgtickets.com. Early-bird tickets go for Rwf10, 000 in regular seats, while VIP and VVIP tickets are at Rwf20, 000 and Rwf30, 000 respectively. Besides the show, the concert will feature a dinner at Raddison Blu Hotel and organisers are partnering with Gameville Entertainment, a reservation based company that offers leisure, recreation, team building activities, which will host a full valentine’s promotion like a city tour, games, movie night and masquerade salsa party all the following day, February 15, for people who registered. About Kassav’ Kassav’ was formed in 1979 by Pierre-Edouard Décimus and Paris studio musician Jacob F. Desvarieux. Together, the duo decided to make Guadeloupian carnival music and record it in a more fully-orchestrated yet modern and polished style (as electronics had begun to infiltrate recorded popular music in that decade). In the 1980s they would take Caribbean music to another level by recording in the newly-developed purely digital format available in Paris at the time and hence became the leading band to emerge from the formative years of Zouk. The band gave the genre a pan-Caribbean touch by taking elements from Haitian kompa, Dominica Cadence-lypso, Dominican merengue, Nuevo Rican salsa, Trinidadian calypso, Republic of Cameroon’s music Makossa and the result became world-famous. The band gained great popularity by performing in different countries around the world.
