Biography
Jorge Da Silva Bidinte was a composer, singer and guitarist from Guinea-Bissau, an important musicians in West Africa. He was born in 1959 in Boloma, a small port town in the Bijagó Islands and when he was about to start high school, his family moved to Bissau where they happened to settle in the Ajada neighborhood, the meeting point for musicians from all over the city. In 1978, Bidinte took part in the Havana Youth Festival and a decade later he traveled to Lisbon where he met a group of musicians with whom he formed a band, Docolma and made three records.
In 1992 he was invited by a nightclub entertainment center to give concerts in Madrid where he came into contact with flamenco music, and finally lived for a while there and collaborated with several artists. Having created his personal style, with the mixture of Afro-Portuguese rhythms and flamenco, he started recording his own songs which met with great success.
In the following years he lived in Spain and Guinea-Bissau, where he also ran music workshops for children. He died suddenly in 2015 of a heart attack.