Samba Ngo: He’s Been Around and Heard It All : Pop music: The guitarist, who plays in O.C. Saturday, says even ‘cutting-edge’ sounds echo those from Africa. But more vital than innovation, he believes, is spirit.

Samba Ngo--African-born musician, musicologist and something of a musical philosopher--might find resonance in a passage from Ecclesiastes: There is no new thing under the sun.

So it seemed for Ngo, now a resident of Santa Cruz, when he attended the Monterey Jazz Festival recently. While the visit offered some transcendent musical moments--that “special note that vibrates in that certain way”--he heard nothing, not even from artists billed as cutting edge, that did not conjure echoes of music he had heard before.

What he did hear was the “secret music of the Congo” and other parts of Africa, more technologically polished variations of “what [Americans] call primitive music.”

“These forms of music were existing already,” Ngo said by phone from his home this week. “I study the traditional music of all Africa, not just Congo. That is why I’m sure with the proof of the things I’m saying.”

For Ngo, who brings his infectious melding of musical styles to the San Juan Capistrano Regional Library on Saturday, innovation is not the most important aspect of music. More vital is the way it connects with an audience spiritually.

Sometimes, in commercial music, “it’s like the spirit is gone, it’s only the technique now,” Ngo said. “Me, I believe you are music, everyone is music. . . . So, if I play good, I can communicate with you. Music is pure spirit.”

Ngo, 45, began his musical education in the village where he grew up in the Belgian Congo--now Zaire. “I play music since [I was] very young, because my father is an herbalist,” and music was an integral part of his father’s healing work. Ngo joined his first band when he was 6, playing percussion at weddings and festivals.

“It was pure tradition. My first learning of music was tradition,” said Ngo, who played percussion first and gradually learned the likembe , a Congolese thumb piano.

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In 1964, political trouble between Zaire and the neighboring nation of Congo led Zaire to expel all Congolese nationals--including Ngo’s parents. Ngo, who was 14 at the time, remembers that schools and hospitals in Brazzaville, Congo, were packed with repatriated Congolese who had nowhere else to go. Ngo and his family were lucky enough to have an uncle in Brazzaville, who gave the family a room.

It was in Congo that Ngo first picked up an acoustic guitar and began to play some of the Latin-influenced pop sounds that were sweeping Congo and Zaire. He later joined a band, Echo Noire, that won a contest in 1968 in which the prize was a three-month tour of France.

He moved to Paris that year and embarked on the next stage of his musical evolution, learning the electric guitar. Rather than emulate the rock sounds popular in Europe at the time, however, he turned back to his village youth for inspiration.

“I was so attracted to the sound I grew up with,” Ngo said. “I wanted to make the guitar sound like a traditional instrument.”

Ngo honed his musical sensibilities in Paris, playing in the band Mbamina (a Lingala word for energy ) and submerging himself in a community of expatriate African musicians living and recording in the French capital. In 1986, he was ready to move out on his own, and he came all the way to the United States to do so.

“Here, I see more [creativity] in music,” Ngo said. “Americans have a better understanding of music. . . . I love it here, because the music has its place.”

He says he does not miss the inspiration of working with the community of African musicians in Paris. “For me, the community is inside of me. In terms of creation, you create alone,” he said.

The music he is creating has been described in a wide range of terms. Elements of Zairian guitar pop-- soukous --blend with jazz, funk and, always, traditional folk elements to create a high-energy hybrid that inevitably gets audiences up and dancing.

In concert, Ngo typically starts on the likembe and eventually switches to guitar, creating with his band mates the spiraling, interlocking guitar lines that are a hallmark of Central African pop.

Ngo says he has found his niche in the United States, and though he is not getting wealthy by any means, he is able to attract top-notch players who join “because they love the music,” he said, laughing. “I think that is saving me.” His current band is an international ensemble: white and black Americans, along with Africans.

Some listeners have had trouble labeling his music, and Ngo says that is for good reason: “The music is not African, American or European.” But while Ngo’s globe-trotting career has given him a taste of many different styles, his musical philosophy remains rooted in Africa.

“In Africa, the music is part of life. It is life,” he said. “The first function of the music in our country is therapeutic. Some sound it talks to the head, some sound it talks to the feet, some to the stomach or to the heart.”

While his shows can be freewheeling rave-ups, Ngo’s own connection to the muse is largely spiritual.

“Music is my religion,” he explained. “Music is best medicine, it’s my best doctor, it’s my father, my everything. If I did not have music, I don’t know what I would be doing.”

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Samba Ngo plays Saturday at San Juan Capistrano Regional Library, 31495 El Camino Real, San Juan Capistrano. 7 and 9 p.m., $3-$5. (714) 248-7469.