Throughout Africa old seven-inch singles lie in dusty boxes and crates, the music on them long forgotten. Thankfully this year is shaping up to be the year of the African crate digger.
As you are reading this, audiophiles with a healthy obsession for funky African tunes from the Sixties and Seventies are scouring the continent collecting rare singles.
They are tracking down the musicians responsible for these long-lost gems, conducting interviews, collecting rare photographs and recording the almost forgotten history of Africa’s golden era of highlife, funk, disco and psychedelic rock.
As the records are collected they are remastered and reissued on boutique record labels, as beautifully crafted packages with booklets containing the history of the music.
These audiophiles are intent on sharing their long-lost gems with a wider audience and here are just some of 2008’s best releases.
Analog Africa
Analog Africa’s Samy Ben Redjeb’s latest offering is the African Scream Contest compilation — a selection of raw and psychedelic Afro sounds from Benin and Togo. Redjeb says the 14-track compilation was whittled down from more than 3 000 singles that he collected on his scavenging expeditions in Benin and Togo. Once he returned to his native Germany he selected the tracks for remastering and began to piece together this labour of love. And what a treat it is. From the addictive funky jive of Gabo Brown & Orchestre Poly-Rythmo to the organ-driven funk of Napo de Mi Amor Et Ses Black Devils, this is party music of the highest order. If you ain’t dancing you must be dead.
“It’s music that I loved and that needed to be released,” Redjeb recently told the Chicago Reader newspaper. African Scream Contest follows last year’s reissues of Zimbabwe’s Hallelujah Chicken Run Band and The Green Arrows. The Hallelujah Chicken Run Band’s reissue, Take One, represents the early Seventies recording debut of one of Zimbabwe’s musical giants, Thomas Mapfumo.
The band was formed under colonial Rhodesia and came together when they were hired by the Mangura copper mine as entertainment for exhausted miners at the end of their shifts. For an early insight into the development of Mapfumo’s chimurenga music, which sound-tracked the Zimbabwean revolution, these recordings are priceless.
The Green Arrows’s 4-Track Recording Sessions is a selection from their limited discography. The band originally formed in 1968, but rose to prominence only in the mid-Seventies when they were discovered by South African saxophonist West Nkosi, who dragged them into the studio to record what would become classic Zimbabwean pop music that mixed Shona traditions with rock.
Soundways
Audiophile and DJ Miles Cleret was inspired to start up his record label Soundway after a visit to Ghana in 2001, where a DJ friend dragged him around the capital Accra looking for rare singles. The result was the Ghana Soundz compilations, which collected rare Afrobeat, funk and fusion tracks from Seventies Ghana.
Calypso, disco and funk releases from Panama and Colombia followed, before Cleret again turned to West Africa, Nigeria in particular. Two of the latest releases on Soundway focus on Seventies Nigeria. The first is titled Nigeria Rock Special: Psychedelic Afro-Rock and Fuzz Funk in 1970s Nigeria and that’s exactly what you can expect. Whether it’s the acid-guitar freak outs of The Wings or BLO’s heady mix of blues and funk, this album is an absolute must for any serious music fan. With song titles such as Acid Rock and Freaking Out, it’s quite clear what the listener is in store for. Welcome to Nigeria’s glorious psychedelic rock era.
“These were young kids playing pop music, university kids doing their own thing,” Cleret told the Chicago Reader recently. “It’s as important historically as anything. These are the cultural reference points of the future.” The second release on Soundway is Nigeria Disco Funk Special and it is probably the greatest party album released this year.
It collects pure Nigerian funk music, with tinges of disco thrown in for good measure. If you’ve ever wanted to know what a Lagos nightclub in the mid-Seventies sounded like, this is as close as you are going to get. Highlights include the Asiko Rock Group with their party anthem Lagos City and the straight-up disco-funk closing track Motya Ginya by The Voices of Darkness.
Strut
Formed by Quinton Scott, Strut made its name releasing everything from African dance music to Italian disco. Club Africa and Nigeria 70: The definitive story of 1970s funky Lagos were the two most famous African compilations it released before it went into liquidation in 2003. Thankfully it has returned in 2008 and one of its new reissues is Nigeria 70: Lagos Jump.
Continuing where its predecessor left off, Nigeria 70 is jam-packed with funky dance tracks from Nigeria’s capital such as Ify Jerry Krusade’s Everybody Likes Something Good and Bola Johnson & His Easy Life Top Beats’s cracker Ezuku Buzo. But this not all funk; there are some great Nigerian soul and rock tracks too, as well as a great reggae stomper called Ire Africa by Chief Checker. Fans of James Brown or the Brian Eno-produced Talking Heads albums should track this fantastic collection down, it’s a winner.
Vampisoul
Vampisoul is another label to have ventured into the West African music legacy of late. It first reissued early recordings by Afrobeat pioneers Fela Kuti and Tony Allen, as well as an anthology of music by their contemporary, Orlando Julius, the king of Afro-soul in Nigeria.
These have been followed by a double-disc collection of highlife recorded in Nigeria and Ghana in the Sixties and early Seventies. The highlife anthology is a good place to start as it was from these roots that Kuti and Allen birthed the now infamous Afrobeat sound.
As the liner notes to the Vampisoul’s collection state: “The story of West African highlife is partly the story of West African independence itself.”
In 1957 when Ghana gained independence a new style of music with roots in the music of West Africa’s churches and military brass bands sprung up. Musicians in Lagos were quick to follow and the golden age of West African pop was born. Highlife Time features groundbreaking legends, such as ET Mensah, Rex Lawson and Victor Uwaifo, as well as three selections from the work of Victor Olaiya whose early band featured Uwaifo, Kuti and Allen. Of particular interest to South African listeners would be the highlife interpretation of Hugh Masekela’s smash hit, Grazing In The Grass, by Ghanian Stan Plange and the Uhuruh Dance Band.
In 1966 Nigerian musician Orlando Julius fused the highlife sound with American soul music by the likes of Otis Redding, James Brown and Wilson Pickett, which was dominating the airwaves at the time.
Julius’s Afro-soul sound was a huge success, catapulting him to the front of the pack. His best work can be sampled on Super Afro Soul, a double-disc collection from Vampisoul.
Meanwhile, Kuti, a few years off his visionary Africa 70 period, was trying to blend highlife with jazz. This period can be sampled on Lagos Baby 1963-1969, which includes all the singles released with his bands Koola Lobitos and the Fela Ransome Kuti Quintet. In 1969 Kuti and Koola Lobitos left for a two-month tour of the United States, where he would soak up the proto-funk of James Brown and the politics of the Black Panthers, before returning to Nigeria to redefine African music with the all-powerful Afrobeat sound.
Although Kuti may be acknowledged as the king of Afrobeat, his powerhouse drummer Allen was crucial to the sound that the Africa 70 band pioneered. It’s fitting then that in 1975 Kuti handed over the reins of his band to Allen, who recorded some solo albums with it.
Afro Disco Beat collects all of these early recordings plus the 1979 album No Discrimination, which Allen recorded with his own band The Afro Messengers.
In case all of this was a little too daunting for the new adventurer dipping his toes into the vast Afrobeat pool, Vampisoul has designed a fantastic introductory compilation dubbed Afrobeat Nirvana, which features samples from all the abovementioned reissues, as well as some future releases such as Afro Psychedeliques and the Fred Fischer and Bola Johnson anthologies.