Christian Habekost

Christian Habekost, on stage simply Chako, reached German cabaret by an unusual route. He wrote a doctorate on Caribbean performance and music poetry, and he first made a name as a calypso singer in Trinidad and Tobago, where his song Whitey turned into a surprise hit and he took third place in the Soca Monarch of the World Competition in 1994.

Back home he turned the same tools on Pfälzer Mundart, setting dialect verse to the pulse of dub poetry. His solo programmes carry the dialect in their very titles, from De MundArtischt and Rischdisch.falsch.gebabbelt to Der Palatinator and De Edle Wilde, and most of them also came out as recordings. In 2005 he formed his own band for the Chako Music Show, a long-planned project that joins German comic lyrics with Caribbean and Latin American rhythms; PaLatinos was its first album.

Appearances in Ottis Schlachthof and Wat is? made him known beyond the region, and from 1998 to 2003 he worked as writer and performer on Hallervordens Spott-Light for ARD alongside Dieter Hallervorden. He also writes books, among them Gebrauchsanweisung für die Pfalz and the Elwenfels novels written with Britta Habekost. The Kleinkunstpreis Baden-Württemberg gave him its Förderpreis in 1996, and in 2017 he received the Saumagen-Orden.