Angélique Kidjo will be performing a free show in Rockefeller Park on June 25
Rockefeller Park, Battery Park City
Tuesday, June 25, free, 7:00
www.rivertorivernyc.com
kidjo.com
Describing the music of prodigiously talented and world-acclaimed singer-songwriter and activist Angélique Kidjo involves such an astonishing list of styles, collaborators, and influences that it may be best to just go hear her at River to River and let your jaw drop. The Benin-born Kidjo attained renown in West Africa while still a teenager with a Miriam Makeba cover (“Les Trois Z”); she then moved to Paris in her early twenties and was soon signed to Chris Blackwell’s Island Records, where she recorded four highly successful albums with collaborators as varied as the Miami Sound Machine’s Joe Galdo, Branford Marsalis, Cassandra Wilson, and Carlos Santana. Fluent in four languages and numerous musical genres, Kidjo incorporates Brazilian, African American, African, Caribbean, and Latin American musical traditions in her work. She won a Grammy for Best Contemporary World Music Album for 2007’s Djin Djin, to which Ziggy Marley, Alicia Keys, Amadou and Mariam, and a host of additional artists contributed; was nominated for the same award for 2010’s Õÿö; and released a live album in February 2012, Spirit Rising, of her PBS special that included appearances by Josh Groban, Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig, Marsalis, and Dianne Reeves. A UNICEF goodwill ambassador for more than ten years who has spoken out about climate change, education for girls in developing nations, and basic human rights around the world, Kidjo, who lives in New York City, has sold out Carnegie Hall, but you can catch her for free on June 25 when she performs in Rockefeller Park at 7:00. The term “world music” can seem like a fuzzy catch-all for coffee-shop background buzz, but Kidjo truly is a world musician in a whole other sense of the word.