Nyttu Chongo

Nyttu Chongo is a musician and composer from Maputo, Mozambique, now residing in Fridley. He builds, repairs, and plays a wide range of traditional Mozambican and Rwandan instruments, including the Chopi Timbila, Xipendane, Xitende, Xizambe, Mbira Dzava Dzira, Mbira Nyunga Nyunga, Dju Dju, Timbila, Bombo, Ligoma, Hudo, Xocalhos, Djembe, Pwangue, Kora, and Inanga. A 2020 Minnesota State Arts Board Initiative grantee, Nyttu Chongo’s mission in life is to make the voices of his ancestors heard through these instruments so that the world does not lose this essential musical and cultural heritage.
Since moving to Minnesota in 2016, Nyttu Chongo has made a local name for himself on both large stages and in community settings across the Midwest: opening for the production of Familiar at the Guthrie Theater in 2018, leading workshops at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Spurlock Museum in 2020, and performing at numerous festivals, libraries, and schools independently and through MPR Class Notes as the duo Heliopsis from 2020 to present. In 2021, he released his first full-length album, Libandzuwa (“The Power of the Sun”), with the music’s debut at the Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts in Fridley, Minnesota (now the North Suburban Center for the Arts). In early 2022, Nyttu performed a 45-minute original work for the 2022 Cedar Commissions (through the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis) called Nkovu Wa Xivavu (“A Celebration of Pain”). Nyttu Chongo weds the voices of Central, Southern, and West Africa by featuring iconic and disappearing string instruments together (inanga-Rwanda/Burundi, xitende-Mozambique, and kora-Senegal). Chongo will perform his newest work Phulani on the Ordway stage with the support of the Knight Foundation in July 2024. Chongo was also a MacPhail Global Music Initiative Artist in Residence for 2022 and is a current member of the Recording Academy.