twice in New York's Manhattan Center. In his thirty-three years with the band, Franco and TPOK Jazz released hundreds of singles and over 100 albums. Politics Luambo was a vocal supporter of Zaire's ruler Mobutu Sese Seko. However, they soon became enemies. Personal life Franco was married twice. He reportedly fathered eighteen children (seventeen of them girls) with fourteen women. Death Franco died on 12 October 1989, at Namur in Belgium, of AIDS. (He never publicly acknowledged having AIDS, and while many sources flatly report it as the cause of death, others report this as unconfirmed, e.g., The New Yorker uses "of an illness believed to be AIDS.") Upon his death, President Mobutu declared four days of national mourning in Zaire. Recorded output It is difficult to summarize the enormous volume of recordings issued by Franco (virtually all of them with TPOK Jazz), and work remains to be done in this area. The range of estimates suggest both the size of, and the uncertainties about, his output. An often-cited number is that Graeme Ewens listed eighty-four albums in the thoroughly researched discography (based on the work of Ronnie Graham) in Ewens' 1994 biography of Franco; this list does not include compilation albums that also have other performers, or O.K. Jazz tribute albums and compilations issued after Franco's death (Ewens noted about this number that "it falls short of the 150 albums which Franco claimed back in the mid-1980s, but no doubt some of those were collections of singles for the African market"). Ten albums on the list were issued in 1983 alone. Other statements include: "he released roughly 150 albums and three thousand songs, of which Franco himself wrote about one thousand;" "Franco’s prolific output amounted to T.P.O.K releasing two songs a week over his nearly 40-year career, which ultimately comprised a catalogue of some 1000 songs;" "With his band OK Jazz he released at least 400 singles (more than half later compiled onto LP or CD) . . . . Ewens list 36 CDs; Asahi-net has 83;" and "from June 1956 to August 1961 the band recorded 320 tracks for the 78 rpm music label Loningisa." As a rough explanation of its nature, in the 1950s and 1960s Franco and TPOK Jazz issued singles, either 78rpm (1950s) or 45rpm (1960s), as well as some albums that were compilations of singles, and in the 1970s and 1980s they issued longer