Jean Serge Essous (1935–2009) was born in Mossendjo, in what was then French Equatorial Africa and is now the Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville). His father was a nurse in the colonial service. When Essous was about 12, his father brought home a gramophone and records, including those by Latin American artists and Louis Armstrong.
Living in Brazzaville in the early 1950s, Essous had to leave school to work as an electrician to support his mother after his father left. He had learned to play the pipeau (a reed pipe) as a boy and first worked semi-professionally in a pipeau group called the Ballet Diaboua, accompanying dancers from different ethnic groups.
After the band broke up, Essous got a job at IBM in Brazzaville and began learning the clarinet. He practiced with other musicians, including saxophonist Nino Malapet, Edo Ganga, and Celestin Kouka. In 1955, they launched their band, Negro Jazz, which played in nightclubs in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Essous and Malapet were later asked to join Franco Luambo's band as studio session musicians, which launched as OK Jazz at the OK Bar in 1956. This band, later TPOK Jazz, became one of the most successful Congolese bands, blending Congolese rhythms with the popular rumba style.
While still with OK Jazz, Essous formed another studio band in 1957, the Orchestre Rock-a-Mambo, to explore his interest in Afro-Cuban music. From 1959 to 1966, he led the Bantous Orchestra, which secured a profitable year-long residency in Senegal. Essous left the Bantous Orchestra after becoming frustrated with the Congolese government's demand that the band return to Brazzaville for independence day celebrations and moved to Paris.
In Paris, he collaborated with Manu Dibango and Le Grand Kallé (Joseph Kabasele) to form L'African Team De Paris, producing several all-star Afro-Latin-Jazz records. During this time, he also joined Ry-Co Jazz, which toured the Caribbean and had a residency in Martinique, where Essous met his wife.
Essous and his family returned to Brazzaville in 1970, and he reformed Les Bantous, touring them in Cuba multiple times and performing in Nigeria at the Pan-African Cultural Festival in 1977. Essous also served as a cultural advisor to Congo's first democratically elected president, Lissouba (1992-1997). In 2006, he was designated a UNESCO Artist for Peace.
Jean Serge Essous, a skilled improvisor and a significant figure in African music, passed away on November 25, 2009, in Brazzaville.