Bembeya Jazz National (originally known as Orchestre de Beyla) is a Guinean music group that gained fame in the 1960s for their Afropop rhythms.
[1] Featuring guitarist Sekou "Diamond Fingers" Diabaté, who grew up in a traditional griot musical family, the band won over fans in Conakry, Guinea's capital city, during the heady days of that country's newfound independence.
Bembeya Jazz fell onto harder times in the 1980s and disbanded for a number of years, but reformed in the late 1990s and toured Europe and North America in the early 2000s.
Orchestre de Beyla and included the songs "Présentation", "Yarabi", "Lele", "Din ye kassila", "Wonkaha douba", "Seneiro", "Wassoulou" and "Maniamba".
[8] Initially an acoustic group, featuring a Latin-flavored horn section of saxophone, trumpet, and clarinet, Bembeya Jazz National reached its apex with the addition of lead singer Aboubacar Demba Camara.
Bembeya Jazz National’s most ambitious album, Regard Sur Le Passe, released in 1968, was a musical tribute to the memory of Samory Touré, who founded a Mande conquest state in much of what is now northern Guinea in 1870, and who became a nationalist emblem following 1958.
[12] Graeme Counsel, an Honorary Fellow in the Faculty of Music at the University of Melbourne, Australia[13] has published a complete discography for Bembeya Jazz.