A powerful singer and tireless performer, Angelique Kidjo has been one of the most successful performers to emerge on world music stages in the 1990s and 2000s. Her music not only draws from African traditions but also interprets the ways those traditions developed after Africans were seized and taken to the New World. Thus elements of American soul, funk, rap, and jazz, Brazilian samba, Jamaican reggae, and Cuban and Puerto Rican salsa all show up on her recordings, along with various African styles.

As mixed as her music is her religious beliefs. Raised in the Catholic Church, and still a practicing catholic, Kidjo found that catholic tenets are compatible with traditional African religious beliefs. "In Catholicism," she explained to Ira Band of the Toronto Star, "we’re taught not to kill, to preserve human life. In voodoo-ism, we have a different God—you live with the wind, the sea, the sun, you live with nature. It’s a God of nature. Voodoo is seen as something negative, but it’s not. It’s based on anima and on respect for a human being’s life."

Kidjo made her stage debut at age six with her mother’s dance troupe, and in the late 1970s she formed a band of her own and recorded an album that featured a cover version of a song by another of Kidjo’s idols, South African singer Miriam Makeba. In 1980, however, Kidjo found her musical activities restricted by a new leftist regime that took power in Benin and tried to force her to record political anthems. Kidjo fled to Paris in 1983 with the intent of studying law there and becoming a human rights lawyer. But she realized that she was not cut out for political life. "I decided I would try to touch poor people with my music," she told the Boston Globe.

Her partner in this enterprise was French bassist and composer Jean Hebrail, whom Kidjo married and with whom she has written much of her music; the pair has a daughter, Naima Laura, born in 1993. For several years Kidjo played in a French African jazz band called Pili Pili, led by pianist Jasper van t'Hof, but in 1989 she struck out on her own, forming a band and releasing the album Parakou. That debut had its intended effect: it attracted the attention of the biggest name in world music at the time, Chris Blackwell of Britain’s Island Records. He signed Kidjo to the label’s Mango subdivision, and her second album, Logozo, was released in 1991.

That album gained Kidjo a faithful core of fans who could be counted on to attend her highly participatory live shows. Her unusual image contributed to her success; in place of the expansive look of other African female vocalists, Kidjo sported a lean dancer’s body clad in denim pants, and she cut her hair very close to her head. "On stage, I move too much to wear skirts," she explained to the Guardian. "I don’t want to show off my ass-my music isn’t about sex." The music on Logozo skillfully mixed traditional African beats with hip-hop and electronic styles.

The year 1994 saw Kidjo create a bona fide international hit; her Aye album received strong reviews and generated "Agolo," a dance-floor favorite throughout Africa and Europe. She followed that album up with Fifa, which grew from a set of tape recordings Kidjo and her husband made of traditional instrumentalists during a tour of small towns in Benin. The resulting disc mixed such sounds as cow horns, traditional flutes, and bamboo percussion with modern African pop, American gospel, and rap. The album, an ambitious effort that used roughly 200 musicians, featured a guest guitar solo from one of Kidjo’s many admirers in the U.S. music industry, Carlos Santana.

Fifa included several songs in English, but Kidjo scoffed at the idea that she was singing in English for commercial reasons. "I do what pleases me," she told the Toronto Star. "I do the music I like. I don’t know if it’s going to be English or French or some African dialect. Music is music; it’s all about communication."

As a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF); Kidjo included in her 2004 album Oyaya a song "Mutoto Kwanza," set to Jamaican ska music. She learned the song in Tanzania from a group of HIV-infected orphans.

In a way, Kidjo has become a musical bridge-builder between Africa and the West. "I want to show you the links back to Africa," she once told a Boston audience of children.