The Portuguese had a word for it. (Part 2)

Before I moved to the US to continue with university college in the early 90s, my grandmother actually said to me, all serious-like, "Now you must go back to your country, where you can be happy." I said nothing and nodded sagely, but in my mind I was kinda like, "Damn, is it that serious?" I mean, don't trip: I completely considered Nigeria to be "my country," but it was pretty clear to me and most people around me that I just never seemed to completely fit in there. The idea that America was "my country" ultimately was based less on the fact that I happened to have been born there than on the perception that America was a country full of oddballs and eccentrics, so I'd probably feel right at home there.

Of course, it didn't work out that way. When I got to America, I found that regardless of whatever my birth certificate may have claimed, I was definitely a foreigner, and most people never let me forget that. Like I said before, you never really know or appreciate your country until you leave it; it seemed like I became more Nigerian with each day I lived in the US. (Actually, more than that, I found myself becoming more African, which was a bit of a new experience altogether.)

Still, my existence felt somewhat clouded by alienation: I was an outsider in the mainstream society, and while there was a pretty sizable Nigerian community in Boston, I really didn't feel welcome among that crowd either. I'm pretty sure most of them thought I was gay. At this point, the only two groups I felt fully embraced by were Latinos and Haitians. (Do I repeat myself? Yes, technically, Haitians are Latinos, but you know what I mean.)

So I'm not particularly surprised one night, about a year and a half after my arrival, when I'm on the bus going home from work and some middle-aged Haitian guy steps up and casually strikes up a conversation with me in Kreyol like we're Port-au-Prince pallies or something. He prattles on a mile a minute for about a half a minute, before I cut him off mid-mile with a helpless shake of the head and a polite "M'pa pale kreyol."

Undeterred, he switches to English: "You fwom Afwica."

Pause: I kinda hate it when people start conversations like that because it's usually a prelude to all kinds of annoying assumptions. "Yeah," I sigh.

"I know dat! I know dat!" he exclaims. "You know how I know?"

He's obviously quite pleased with his successful deduction and wants to celebrate by verbally illuminating his logical process like Sherlock Holmes explaining the trail of clues to his dimwitted audience stand-in Watson. Why deny him the pleasure? I figure. "How?" I ask.

Basking in satisfaction, he leans in to whisper in my ear. "You wea'ing shoes." he says.

Huh?

Now, based on prevailing stereotypes, I guess I'd've understood if he assumed I were African if I wasn't wearing shoes, but how does wearing shoes...?

"You wea'ing shoes," he repeats, sensing my confusion. "Not sneakers. And you wea'ing pantalon, not jeans. So I know you either Haitian or Afwican."

"How do you know I'm not just a professional?" Of course, I'm not a professional; I work in a record store. But I am a bit bothered by his stereotyping and also concerned about the degree to which my mode of dress allows me to be so easily profiled. Yes, I don't usually wear sneakers, but I don't think it has anything to do with where I'm from--I just happen to find a lot of the sneaker styles of the 90s to be immensely ugly. As for the trousers, well, I just didn't have any clean jeans to wear that day. I notice that he is similarly attired, in slacks and casual shoes, with a button-up shirt.

"Also," he continues, ignoring my question. "If you was fwom Amewica, your pants would be down here."

He gestures to a latitude just south of his buttcheeks and laughs. I laugh, too.

"You a musician?" he asks, nodding towards the big, battered hardshell guitar case sitting next to me. I just started taking lessons and I had one before work that evening.

"No, I'm just learning."

"You playing Afwican music?" he ventures excitedly.

"Nah, mostly soul like... Curtis Mayfield? And reggae." Pause. Grimace. "But my teacher keeps making learn Eagles songs."

"'Hotel California'?"

"More like 'Lyin' Eyes' and 'Take It Easy.'"

"I am a musician," he declares. "I used to be a musician. I play bass." He pronounces it like the fish. "I used to play Afwican music."

"Oh really? What kind of African music?"

"Mewengue and salsa," he proclaims proudly.

"That's not African music," I offer delicately, trying to keep the "duh" out of my voice.

"Yes, it is!" he insists. "Spanish music is Afwican music!"

Okay, thinks I. This conversation got ludicrous real quick, didn't it?

"You don't know?" he laughs, not bothering keep the "duh" out of his voice. "Spanish music come fwom Afwica. It's all the same widdim, you know? The widdim."

I thought about this exchange a few weeks later when I started hearing dance band highlife in my sleep. For several nights, voluptuous basslines scored my dreams, peppered with skeletal, off-kilter percussion patterns. One night, I woke up and was surprised to find that I still heard the music: the deep, loping bassline and lopsided percussion was actually seeping through the thin walls of my apartment. Still half asleep, I opened the door and stepped out to ascertain the source of the music--the rhythm emerged, fully dressed up with horns, flutes and guitars and it became clear that what I was hearing wasn't highlife at all, just the Puerto Ricans next door blasting salsa in the middle of the night.

Spanish music is African music, the Haitian dude had said. What did that really mean? Well, obviously I knew that the transatlantic slave trade had extended to the Caribbean and South America and as a result there was some African lineage present in the people and, by extension, the music of those regions, but I never thought too deeply about how (and why) it manifested itself. Suddenly, I was wondering why the basslines in salsa sounded like highlife and why the basic organizing rhythm pattern in much Afro-Latin music, the clave, was just about identical to a Calabar rhythm called tinkoriko and most all, why I was so damned disappointed that the sound I'd heard was not highlife?

I was homesick, I had to admit. I missed Calabar. And while I'd never considered myself a fan of it before, I missed that damn highlife music. Like it or not, it was a part of my consciousness, triggering comforting memories of rainy Calabar mornings, listening to those easygoing clave rhythms and tart, coppery horns while getting ready for school. Or hanging out on the fringes of "grownup" parties with friends, trying to get loaded on free drinks and talk to girls while the heavy-of-foot old folks shuffled to languorous rhythms, singing along to the choruses with a mix of pleasure and sadness for the good old days that seemed to get gooder the older they got. I wanted a little bit of that feeling, but I didn't have any highlife music on hand. And it was quite rare to find highlife CDs in American stores back then. The closest I could get to that feeling was through Latin music: Fania Records, new-wave salsa, old-school Cuban son... I just immersed myself in it.

(Some people found this odd, though; during one of my National Guard weekends, my squad sergeant--an African-American gentleman in his late 30s with whom I had bonded over regular discussions of early-80s R&B and "boogie" music--found some Arsenio Rodriguez and Ruben Blades tapes in my bag and sat me down for a lecture.

"Look, son," he said. "I know you wanna fuck some of these fine-ass Puerto Rican girls out here, and if I was young and single, I'd probably wanna do the same. But you gotta be yourself, man. You ain't gotta start listening to this 'La Cucaracha' shit to make these Latin girls like you. Just be yourself. You ain't gotta go to them. Let them come to you." )

So I listened to a lot of Afro-Cuban music. And I read books like Robert Farris Thompson's Flash of the Spirit and Black Music of Two Worlds and The Latin Tinge (both by John Storm Roberts). I learned about how the traditional music of African slaves survived south of the US and developed into various forms of Latin American music, then was imported back home in the 1930s to inspire the creation of modern African music. Learning about the legacy of African art in the New World imbued me with a renewed understanding of African culture back home.

Not long thereafter, while re-stocking the shelves in the World Music department, I came across a CD called Money No Be Sand. My attention arrested by the pidgin title, I took a closer look: 1960s Afro-lypso, Pidgin Highlife, Afro-Soul, Afro-Rock is what the sub-title read. And it boasted liner notes by John Storm Roberts! Intrigued, I took the CD home with me.

Now, remember that the World Music establishment at this time was fairly ignorant about highlife. Most of them didn't even know what it was. If you ever heard mention of highlife, it was usually in reference to Fela, because it was generally known that his music was "a fusion of James Brown's funk, Miles Davis's jazz and traditional Nigerian highlife music (whatever that is)." I remember the trade mags struggling to find the vocabulary to even describe this compilation. Most of them settled on "nutty" and "weird and wonderful," and perhaps predictably, they gravitated towards its more familiar aspects ie the awkward but endearing attempts at Western styles: Jimi Solanke & The Junkers' Yoruba garage rock on "E Je Ka Jo," The Ramblers Dance Band's spirited take on The Tennors' reggae classic "Ride Yu Donkey," Charlotte Dada's cool and haunting Latin-inflected interpretation of The Beatles' "Don't Let Me Down."

It was the more straight-ahead highlife numbers that seized my imagination, though: I think part of the reason I never fully got highlife before was because I just didn't understand the context it was coming from. Maybe because of the festering wounds of the Civil War and the crash of the initial optimism that followed independence, our parents never talked in too much detail about the Sixties. Sure, we read books that were written during that era, but I really don't think people from my generation came close to understanding the excitement of being the first generation of Africans to live fully in a world of modernity and glamour, in which they were free to shape their own destinies. Most of my age-mates thought of highlife as dusty old "traditional" music; what we didn't understand was that highlife was anything but. As the German African art scholar Ulli Beier put it in 1966:

"'Highlife' is a reaction against the austerity of traditional African life. It is a way of life that believes in pleasure, music, drinking, free love, and ostentatious spending of money. The Onitsha writers speak about this new generation: schoolboys, teachers, drivers, clerks--people who have not yet gone very far in being 'westernized', but who already find themselves in sharp opposition to traditional ways of life."

Listening to the songs on Money No Be Sand, I finally got that, and I could see for the first time how this music reflected the aspirations, the sensuality, the passion of a young generation navigating a brave new world and looking forward to the future with nothing but hope.

One thing I still couldn't put a finger on, though, was why that inherent wistfulness. That undercurrent of sadness I always heard in the music. That frayed feeling to its harmony. But once again, Latin America helped me develop the conceptual vocabulary by which to think and talk about African music.

Back when I used to watch Fantástico, I was always mesmerized by the bittersweet flavor that seemed to characterize much Brazilian music. The melodies were so pretty and lilting, but they also had a strange... incompleteness to them. Like something that was perpetually missing, creating an instability that was never fully resolved: a lingering sense of longing or sadness even when the music was upbeat (such as in this discofied Gal Costa number I used to love):



Years later, I would learn that there was a name for this wistful tension between sorrow and joy: saudade, a uniquely Lusophone concept that was famously untranslatable into English. My Cape Verdean roommate tried, though; he told me it was "homesickness... but not really." A Brazilian coworker described it as "like sadness where you're happy to be sad." Probably the most succinct definition I've come across is the one by writer A.F.G. Bell from his book, In Portugal:

The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness.

Is there a word for that in any African language? There should be, because I hear it in many different musics all along the West African coast and even as far down as in Congo. Is it the legacy of the Portuguese explorers and traders who, by virtue of being the first Europeans to set foot in these areas, set Africa on course to modernity (a journey that has seemed like a boon and a curse, often at the same time)? Or is it more likely some deeper, older impulse in the African psyche that recognizes pleasure and pain as two sides of the same coin, that renders songs of joy in gloomy minor keys and dirges as celebratory frolicks?

Aaaaahhh... Questions, questions. What do I know? Just listen to this music, people.



> DOWNLOAD DIVSHARE! (i hope*) <

> MEGAUPLOAD <

> ZSHARE <


*I know DivShare's been "acting like bra and pant" lately, but I tested this link and it downloaded at a decent rate; it came through in less than a minute.

Moving on...

And then the next morning you really feel sore.

Over the past week, I've been pretty bummed out (to say the very least) about the whole hard drive thing. I mean, I had braced myself for the worst the moment I heard the drive emitting that ominous clicking sound the weekend before last, and by last Saturday, when the body was officially committed to the ground, I thought I had already pretty much gotten all my mourning out of the way. But then when I woke up on Sunday morning, it really started to pain me. I lost all my gotdamned music, man!

Fortunately, I had backed up a lot of my data... But then, a whole lot more of it I had not. And sure enough, most of the stuff I didn't back up was the stuff that's probably hardest to find. For some reason, I tended to back up albums more than individual tracks, so the rare, random mp3s I found in odd places, the custom mixes, the exclusive tracks... Gone, baby, gone.

And then there's the hundreds of personal photos, like a thousand reference photos for TOO MUCH BEAUTIFUL WOMAN and other projects, notes, drafts, randomly recorded ideas, sketches, bookmarks, journal entries, pricey applications obtained via fortuitous or dubious means that now have to be re-acquired...

On the more immediate level, a lot of the music and pics I wanted to put up here in posts I had lined up for the near future is also gone. But what are ya gonna do? *sigh* Really, I have nobody to blame but myself... So I might as well just man up, take the L, and move on.

There. Manned up. Moving on. Moaning about it no more.

One thing, though: Please forgive if I occasionally have to bum some music from y'all... Including stuff you might have originally gotten from me. For instance, those of you with whom I traded music at that other place where we were sharing Brazilian, Congolese, Latin and Highlife music a few months ago? If you have that Giants of Danceband Highlife compilation I put up back then, hooketh thy boy up.

Moving on.

Sir Victor Uwaifo & His TitiBitis of Africa - Jackpot

Yes, I finally got my computer back today (Woo-hoo!). Yes, all my data really is gone (D'OH!).

Such is life. I no fit die.

Anyway, here's a nice album that Jon and I were discussing in the comments of the "Portuguese" post. I was able to find it somewhere while trying to re-plant the seeds of my digital music collection. I apologize in advance for the DivShare... I know it's been acting up of late but it's kinda the best I can do for now. Just to make things a little easier, I throw in supplementary Megaupload link, 'ey?





> DOWNLOAD IT FROM DIVSHARE! (I HOPE!) <

or

> DOWNLOAD IT FROM MEGAUPLOAD! <

> OR ZSHARE EVEN! <

EDIT: Just realized that the tracks are mislabeled on the album sleeve and also in this file... The one that says "Ewere Noyoyo" is actually "Sakpaide Special," and vice versa. I don't want to have to re-upload these (though I probably will end up doing so later anyway because that's how obsessive I am) so please, correct that error when you download, please!

Status: Involuntary hiatus

Well, I didn't expect to still be computerless at this point in the week, but alas, I am and probably will remain so for the next few days. Nevertheless, I will try to get the second part of "The Portuguese Had a Word For It" up by tomorrow (had hoped to do it today but I couldn't squeeze in the time at work).

What really sucks is that I wanted to add some music and photos to the post but all that stuff is stuck on my hard drive (I mean, I hope it's still stuck on my hard drive! hahahaha whimper)... Thankfully I managed to upload some stuff before the crash and I have enough posts in the vault to last a few days.

In the meantime, though, I'd recommend that you check out something much cooler: John Beadle's new African music blog, Likembe.

I can remember a time not too long ago--I'm talking about maybe the mid-to-late 1990s--when there were hardly any authoritative resources or even reasonably trustworthy reference materials on African popular music. And what little there was usually was oriented mostly towards music of the "grioty" variety that was pretty big amongst the world music set back then. I can understand why, mind you... That stuff does present a rather attractive image of African music: Heroically tasteful, sufficiently exotic and un-westernized, part of a tradition stretching back several centuries, exuding an aura of dignity and regal austerity.

Next to such noble notions, my knowledge of loudly, proudly tawdry Nigerian pop music from the 1960s, 70s and 80s seemed pretty inconsequential, if not even slightly embarrassing. Frankly, I didn't even really think of it as "knowledge" per se... It was more like nostalgic trivia: hazy childhood memories of songs that very few people seemed to remember and certainly nobody I knew remotely cared about. So yeah, I didn't talk about it that much.

All that changed when I discovered the African Music Homepage.

The African pop discographies that Mr. Beadle and Prof. Endo assembled completely floored me, and at the same time validated me in a weird way. Before then, I don't recall ever having seen African popular music--and Nigerian pop in particular--documented with such painstaking attention to detail. It was a revelation to see these seemingly insignificant records that even people back home viewed as gaudy trash catalogued with the rigor and esteem one observes only amongst moldy figs and the curators Northern Soul.

All of a sudden, I felt that I was in my own way a keeper of a tradition, and that I should do what I could to preserve this legacy before it disappeared completely.

I reckoned that maybe I should write a book. Then I reckoned that maybe John should write a book, as he knows much, much more than I do.

While no plans for such a volume have been announced as yet, I'm really excited to see that he's doing the next best thing in the form of a blog. He's already been quite an encouraging presence in the African music blogosphere, chipping in at Benn Loxo and Matsuli Music, not to mention helping out round hereabouts when I've been too lazy busy to digitize records to share with you, my dear friends. So I'm pretty excited to see what he does over in his own storefront.

So run on over to Likembe and get yourself schooled. I know that's what I'm about to do (before my allotted hour on this library computer runs out!).





*John Collins' West African Pop Roots and Music Makers of West Africa are notable exceptions (hey, does anybody know what's up with his new Highlife Time, by the way? I need to get a copy of that!) and Ronnie Graham's The Da Capo Guide to Contemporary African Music was a very noble effort, as well.

The Portuguese had a word for it. (Part 1)

Don't know if y'all know this, but today is Vinyl Record Day, celebrating the 130th anniversary of the Phonograph (even though technically, Edison's invention originally played wax cylinders and then shellac plates before the vinyl record came into vogue in the 1940s... but you get the idea). As a result, a lot of music blogs are running shamelessly fetishistic tributes to vinyl today and I originally intended to do the same, but alas, it looks like my hard drive seems to have imploded yesterday, taking with it my collection of vinyl cover art and label scans (not to mention like 30 gigs of music and countless photos), so while I struggle to hold back the tears over here, I'll just throw up this rambling-ass entry I wrote a few weeks ago but never posted.

(Edit: I just realized that this posted up as a Saturday, August 11 entry, so I guess I should confirm that Vinyl Record Day was actually on Sunday, August 12. I guess because I posted very early on Sunday morning, Blogger's clock interpreted it as still being Saturday. *shrug*)

**********************************

I've mentioned before that Latin American music has often served as a conduit and template for my understanding of African music, and to be honest, it's always bothered me a little bit. I mean, what does that say about me? Is my mind really so colonized by The West that I can't even think about and take pride in my own cultural heritage without relating it in some way to forms that are "exotic" and even "neo-African," but still fundamentally western?

I don't think I'm really alone in this, though... After all, didn't Fela say that he never really appreciate African culture until he saw Black Americans wearing dashikis on 125th Street in Harlem? And who was the wise man who said that in order to truly understand one's country, one must leave it? I really do believe that: you need to take a few steps away in order to see the forest and not just the trees. Plus, it can exceedingly difficult to actually concentrate and get a decent perspective on African culture while actually in modern Africa; one interesting thing about living in so-called "Third World" countries is the way you're so often deluged by avalanches of cultural detritus dumped from every other corner of the globe. For instance, I'm sure that many Nigerians d'un certain age will remember when one of the most popular shows on television was a very strange German game show called Telematch:



Yes, it was just as inane as it looks from the intro, kinda like a live-action Laff-a-Lympics (which was, by the way, another pretty popular program, along with other forgettable, low-rent Hanna-Barbera fare like Clue Club).

Probably my favorite of all these bizarre imports, though, was an over-the-top variety show from Brazil called Fantástico - O Show Da Vida:



Watching Fantástico was a bit like falling through a looking-glass into a wonderland where it was always carnaval, exploding with riotous color, light and movement, somewhat frightening imagery, broad humor and probably a little more stark sexuality than most would be comfortable with in a family program. Above all that, though, the show sticks out in my mind for igniting my lifelong passion for Brazilian music via the performances by MPB icons like Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa and Maria Bethania:



or former Mutante Rita Lee (who kinda scared me back in the day):



(Fantástico is actually still on TV in Brazil; I caught it a couple of times last year during the brief period that I had TV Globo in my cable package, but it was a crushing disappointment. Everything I had loved about it was gone: the freewheeling whimsy, the glorious rococo, the camp stylings, the freaky production numbers. What was left was vacuous showbiz junket interviews and "news" stories about UFOs and the face of the Blessed Virgin Mary appearing in a bowl of oatmeal. Turns out that sometime in the early 1990s, the format had been changed from variety show to Hard Copy-like newsmagazine. It was like having bamboo shoots shoved up under my childhood. You really can't go home again, I guess.)

It's not like we spent all day rotting our brains in front of the boob tube, though... Back then, most TV stations didn't even start their daily broadcast until four in the evening. The constant distraction of crappy homegrown digital movies was as yet undreamed of and only a few folks had VCRs anyway, so to amuse ourselves, we kids spent a lot of time reading.

Crazy shit, I know... But this really happened.

Now I'm not gonna bullshit you and make like we were working our way through The Great Books in our free time; mostly it was pulpy trash like James Hadley Chase (hardboiled American crime stories as written by an ex-Royal Air Force pilot who had never even been to America) or Enid Blyton's polite and painfully English young adventurer yarns (Hullo! Well-scrubbed middle-class children foil dastardly smugglers and make it home in time for tea and sandwiches? Good old Julian, Dick and Anne, George and Timmy the dog! Hurrah!) or, for starter readers, the lightweight juvenilia of the African Reader's series.

The African Reader's Library was conceived by African Universities Press in the early 1960s to serve as, I guess, a junior broda to the groundbreaking Heinemann African Writers Series. Several of its popular titles, like Onuora Nzekwu and Michael Crowder's Eze Goes To School, or The Village School and One Week, One Trouble (both by Anezi Okoro) were typically Horatio Alger tales or picaresque stories built around the exploits of young boys (always young boys) on their rocky quest for education.

By the time I was reading them in the early 80s, these novels were around 20 years old, but I never really noticed. After all, most seven-year-olds don't really think to read the publication info on the copyright page, and aside from the occasional curious monetary references (pounds and shillings rather than naira and kobo), there wasn't much in the actual texts that made them come off as particularly dated.

I still remember the first time I encountered a scene in one of those stories that was so anachronistic and jarring to my sensibilities as to make me acutely aware that the book in my hands was a relic of distant (and bizarre) times past: It was in Nkem Nwankwo's Tales Out Of School (or maybe it was the sequel, More Tales Out Of School, I forget). In this scene, a classroom full of secondary school students in Form One or Form Two--that is, eleven and twelve-year-olds--are fooling around in class, celebrating their defiance of some evil authoritarian prefect or teacher by drumming on their desks, playing invisible horns and singing highlife songs. This scene was so shocking that I actually put the book down in bewilderment.

Highlife? I wondered. Why on earth are these kids playing "old man music"?

Yes, I really did call it that. Before I learned the proper name "highlife," I--along with my sisters and many of our peers--generally referred to it as "old man music" and associated it with two broad, sometimes overlapping images:

1) the sour, leather-skinned old coot on your street who would never return your ball when it landed in his yard, choosing instead to remind you (just in case you had forgotten his last wild-eyed rant) that he had Fought Side-by-Side With The White Man™ in the Burma Theater so that scoundrels of no caliber such as yourself could be free to make “ah bloody hell of ah noise!” He would then affect clipped British diction as he fumed about “louts and scallywags” before returning indoors (confiscated ball under his arm) to his Chief Inyang Nta Henshaw records.

2) seedy drinking parlours populated by rheumy, hairy-eared leches, rank gin fumes seeping from their pores as they feasted upon dog meat and clumsily tried to seduce bubbleheaded, barely pubescent schoolgirls. (I once asked my cousin why highlife music was so called; he explained to me with all seriousness that the appellation was meant to be ironic. I believed him since so many of the people I identified with highlife were... Well, kinda lowlifes, really.)

Now, allow me to clarify a bit here: When I say that highlife was “old man music,” my issue was not (just) that the people who listened to it were old or that it wasn’t the latest flavor of the minute blazing its way up the hit parade. After all, most of the music I was digging at the time was stuff like classic Motown, Elvis, The Beatles, The Fifth Dimension--fifteen to twenty-year-old platters extracted from my parents’ record stack (when you haven’t even been on this earth up to a decade yourself, everything is new to you).

Also, I actually did like some highlife myself. I loved the aggressively flashy and forward "Ekassa" style of Sir Victor Uwaifo, for instance, and occasionally savored the mellow ambience engendered at family celebrations in the village by the gentle, muted wah-wah groove of Osadebe and the like. For some reason, though, I never really thought of that stuff as being "highlife" at the time. I can't remember exactly what I categorized it as, but I know that when I thought "highlife"--especially living in Calabar--I was thinking about the old-school "dance band" music with its quaint horn charts and spartan "palmwine" guitar style (so named for its association with drunkenness).

I couldn't conceptualize this sound as the theme music for hot-blooded Nigerian youth any more than I could imagine that a moldy old geezer like the Ol' Solja up the street had ever been bright-eyed and lusty, or fallen in love or had hopes and dreams beyond getting his jollies off by seizing errant footballs from hapless youngsters. Something about the music sounded inherently old and evocative of a faded glamour and vitality. There was a certain note of sadness and loss in it, and a languor to even the uptempo numbers that made it the perfect soundtrack for those whose best days were definitively behind them. Which is probably why I associated it so closely with Calabar.

"Calabar" was what Portuguese sailors called the Efik fishing settlement they encountered on the Bight of Bonny in the 15th century (They accientally also gave the name "Calabar" to a nearby Ijaw settlement, so the Efik area became "Old Calabar" and the Ijaw "New Calabar") and developed into probably the number one port for the trade in slaves. It's estimated that for up to 30% of all Africans shipped off to the New World in chains, Calabar Beach was the last thing they saw before being tossed into the dank hold.

(A good number of those enslaved Africans ended up in Cuba, by the way. There, slaves from Calabar became known as Carabali, and were greatly feared for their fierceness in combat and their clandestine, ultra-masculine Ekpe cult, which served as the foundation for the super-secret Cuban Abakuá society, the fount of seminal Afro-Cuban musical forms such as rumba and guaguanco.)

(See? I'm doing it again!)

Oh yes, one other interesting factoid about Calabar's macabre slaving past: From it we find possibly the oldest literary work by a Nigerian writing in English, The Diary of Antera Duke, being three years in the life of an Efik chief, 18th January 1785 to 31st January 1788. Only a fragment of it survives today, but it's an intriguing read indeed; Duke records in colorful broken English the day-to-day life of a local slave kingpin: Putting on his "whiteman trousers" to chill out and drink tea with the European slavers. Venturing out on expeditions to neighboring towns and villages to round up captives to sell to the whites. Storming a local bar and decapitating its patrons as a human sacrifice to his ancestors. (Legends such as this persisted as terrifying fables during my childhood; whenever an Obong--the ceremonial paramount ruler of Calabar--died, parents wouldn't let their kids leave the house until it had been announced that he'd been safely buried, as it was rumored that the Obong's minions still beheaded random people in order to properly inter the king.)

Even after the slave trade was abolished, Calabar remained a major trading port and the British kept it as the seat of government for for the Niger Coast Protectorate, making it, in essence, the first capital of Nigeria. With its modern roads, and other amenities such as the first post office in the country, the first primary school and one of the first and best secondary schools (the legendary Hope Waddell Training Institute), Calabar became known as "the Canaan City," the land of milk and honey. Even when the Brits shifted their administrative center to Lagos in 1906, Calabar retained a certain glamour as a cultural center, especially for its music. You see, Calabar was the home of the Niger Coast Constabulary Band, a police band that played loud, John Philip Sousa-style military marches on modern brass instruments. The influence of the Niger Coast Constabulary Band propagated a strong tradition of brass orchestras in Calabar, chief amongst them the legendary Calabar Brass Band, who would parade through the main streets of town playing their Africanized take on Salvation Army music with a gaggle of revelers trailing behind them.

When Calabar's economy started to decline in the 1930s, a lot of musicians left town to resettle in more happening cities, taking with them the distinctive Calabar brass sound that would infuse a very elegant and "modern" elan (and volume) to various local folk musics that up until then were built largely around low-impact instruments like guitars and mandolins, rattles, tambourines, empty bottles and tabletops. The Calabar Brass Band relocated to Lagos, where they continued their tradition of parading across the island and, under the alias "Lagos Mozart Orchestra," recorded sides such as "Ore Mi Kini Se?" ("What Did You Do, My Friend?"):

Lagos Mozart Orchestra - "Ore Mi Kini Se?"

The Calabar sound inspired many young players to pick up horns and was integral to the development of highlife. Calabar was a place that was frequently immortalized in song and just about every highlife dance band worth their salt had a "Calabar" number or two in their repertoire.

(Incidentally, here are two, both from Ghanaian bands: Jerry Hansen's Ramblers and King Bruce & the Black Beats:

Ramblers Dance Band - "Ekombi"

King Bruce & the Black Beats - "Abasi Do"

That was all over by the time I was growing up in Calabar, though.

Over the past decade, recently-departed Cross River State governor Donald Duke has done much to sexy up the Calabar's image, promoting it as one of the most progressive, pleasant and livable cities in the country. Still, my predominant image of it is one of a provincial town full of mold-covered, colonial-style architecture (Kinda like how I imagine Old Havana, I guess). My Calabar was a ghost town, a land that time had passed by, and nothing was more symbolic of that than its hoary old horn highlife which had seemingly fallen out of favor everywhere else in the country since after the war. Calabar was a place where young people complained how "dead" it was, and dreamed of getting the hell out of soon as they were old enough.

So once I was old enough, I got the hell out.

(Alright, y'all... I said it was rambling. And you know I hate long, long entries, so I'll just cut it off here and post the rest later.)

Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007)

R.I.P.

This is shaping up to be a rough week for cinephiles, isn't it?

Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)

Requiescat in pace.

Funny thing is that Bergman is one of those people who I always find myself thinking died years ago.

Qui sont ces Bobongo Stars?

First off: I don't know if I have words to express how shocked I was to check the DivShare stats and find out that less than 24 hours after I posted it, the PJ Gray Boogie Trip Mix had been downloaded more 400 times, making it the most DLed file I've ever put up here! Did it get cross-posted on other blogs/forums or do y'all just love disco that much? (If the latter is the case, there's more where that come from, I reckon.)

Today's another quickie drop. This is an album that John B sent me a few weeks ago (the man positively spoils me, I tell ya) but I never got around to posting it because I really don't know anything at all about the band and I wanted to dig up some background info so's I could say something more than just "Here's the music; hope you like it as much as I do! Bye!"

My research didn't lead to much, though.* All I can say for now is that they are called Bobongo Stars; they may or may not be connected in some way with Ray Lema; their drummer played with OK Jazz on the classic 1982 Franco/Sam Mangwana classic "Cooperation"; they are clearly one of the new wave of Congolese bands of the 1970s and 80s that broke the typical Congo rumba mold by evincing heavy soul, funk and rock influences.



Also, this album, Makasi, is quite the shit.



Well... Here's the music; hope you like it as much as I do! Bye!

> DOWNLOAD IT! <


*I didn't think to ask Ms Bazu if she or Guy knew anything about them, though. I should've done that.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on BBC's Hard Talk Extra

I saw this on African Shirts and I just felt the need to post it here, too.

Chimamanda's interview starts at about 2:00 minutes in.

Nigerian disco daze

Can it be I stayed away too long? Did you miss my posts while I was gone?

Been a bit busy lately, so I haven't been able to do any blogging... Fret not, family; I'll be back in full force next week.

In the meantime, I figured I'd drop a l'il somethin' to kick the weekend off right quick.

This here is "Boogie Trip," a funky (albeit too brief!) disco mix by PJ Gray of the Galactic Fractures radio show. Gray does a bang-up job, deftly pulling together a refreshingly diffuse selection, even including more than just a little dash of old skool Naija disco/boogie flavor.

Hence, sitting alongside killer cuts by The Caprells (a Jackson 5esque family band from Pittsburgh, best known amongst funk aficionados for their trippy version of "Walk On by") and Georgia's Together Band, you'll find the Esbee Family (who were probably my favorite Nigerian boogie band in the early 80s) and Doris Ebong's "Boogie Trip" (Cross River Radio, Calabar used to play this one a lot, not just on account of Doris being a local girl, but because the record is an ecstasy of funkiness).

I was particularly delighted, however, by the inclusion of Bunny Mack's "Let Me Love You," especially since I've been wanting to post up some of Mack's tracks for a while. Now I don't doubt that many of you might have attended an African party at some point during the past 27 years, and thus already have some familiarity with this hallowed slab of dancefloor dynamite; for those readers who remain innocent of its allure, allow me to elucidate:

"Let Me Love You" is, quite simply, one of the biggest African records ever. A collaboration between veteran Sierra Leonean singer Bunny Mack and London-based producer (also of Sierra Leonean extraction) Akie Deen. Deen really deserves an entry of his own, as he was a pioneer in promoting African music (and Black music in general) in the UK and was a key player during the period I sometimes call "the London era" of Nigerian music.

His main claim to fame, though, is his pan-African fusion of West Indian calypso, Brazilian samba, Sierra Leonean maringa, West African highlife and Congo rumba, sewn together with seductive disco beats and glossy production values. He called this style "discolypso," and it was quite a big deal indeed during the late 70s and early 80s.

("Ivory" by Nigerian singer Kio Amachree was another massive floor-filler in discolypso mode, though I'm not sure it was actually produced by Deen. I need to check that up.)

The release of "Let Me Love You" in a 1980 was the pinnacle of the phenomenon; the record was a bonafide international hit, reaching the number 5 slot on the UK disco charts and #76 on the singles chart, becoming an instant classic throughout most of (Black) Africa and the Caribbean, and being embraced even as far afield as Colombia.

The record has recently found new life on the international dance music scene, even inspiring remixes and remakes.

Here's the tracklisting.

1. "Boogie Trip" -Doris Ebong
2. "I Want Your Body" - Royale
3. "Listen to the Music" - Bayo Damazio
4. "The Way I Feel Rap" - Ronnie
5. "Ivory" - Kio Amachree
6. "Chics and Chicken" - Esbee Family
7. "You're Just Teasing Me" - Together
8. "What Ever Goes Up" - The Caprells
9. "Let Me Love You" - Bunny Mack

> DOWNLOAD IT! <

By special request... The Ikenga Super Stars

This one's for you, BigDaf... Don't thank me; thank John B!

And while you're at it, thank him also for this information about the Ikenga Super Stars of Africa, filched by moi from the breathtakingly thorough African Music Home Page:

The Ikenga Super Stars of Africa, led by Vincent Okoroego, a former member of Steven Osita Osadebe's Nigeria Sound Makers, were a leading Igbo "guitar highlife" group of the seventies and eighties in Nigeria. The Ikengas called their style of music "Ikwokilikwo," a word which has also been used to describe the early recordings of Oliver deCoque and Kabaka Opara of the Oriental Brothers, among others. About the meaning of this term, Fidelis N. Umeh writes, "...'Ikwokilikwo' actually has a 'vernacular' type of meaning in the Igbo language. To set it in context, take a look at a word like 'ngwo-ngwo.' Its meaning has been derived from the act of 'igwo abacha' (preparing cassava - normally in rich oily mixing bowl), 'igwo ncha' (preparing a dish called ncha with a special type of mixing bowl), etc. It has come to be used to describe any preparation which entails the act of 'preparation in a special mixing bowl.' Ikwokilikwo is derived from 'ikwo oka' (grinding corn into pulp form), 'ikwo okpa' (grinding beans and peas into pulp form) and denotes the grinding process. The type of music to which it refers is similar in vernacular to 'cooking' used in the U.S. in the 70's to refer to really 'heavy' music in rock, jazz, blues, etc."

Ikwokilikwo in the early days at least was associated with certain classes of people, particularly traders. Its hard-driving, bouncy beat was just the sort of thing to play over a market stall sound system to attract customers! The Ikengas' LP "Ikenga in Africa" was a pan-African best-seller, combining sharp Congo-style guitar work, rhythms similar to Camerounian makossa and lyrics in "broken" or "pidgin" English, which broadened its appeal across ethnic lines. Indeed, its call-and-response recitation of the countries of Africa inspired numerous imitations, including one by the Ikengas themselves! 1976's (and 1983's) "African Unity" was a rehashed version of the same tune.

Gilbert Hsiao has provided much useful information for this updated Ikengas discography that sheds light on the history of this influential group. One question which has apparently been resolved is the relationship between the "Nkengas," who issued at least two LP's, and the Ikengas. It now seems all but certain that these are one and the same group, headed by Okoroego. But this does not answer all of the questions! It has long been rumored that "Nkengas in London" was an Osita Osadebe master tape hijacked by Okoroego and other members of the Nigeria Sound Makers who defected in the early seventies. Absent any evidence to the contrary, this seems likely. "Nkengas in London" sounds not at all like other Ikengas recordings, for instance, "Ikenga in Africa." The vocals, the instrumentation, even the spoken comments at the beginning of the songs, are all classic Osadebe. For this reason, I have listed this recording in Osadebe's discography as well as this one.

The Ikengas have had numerous personnel changes and defections over the years. A significant split occured after the band won a sizeable award from the Nigerian government for their performance at FESTAC '77 in Lagos. Guitarist Aloysius Anyanwu left to join the Oriental Brothers, and subsequently had a solo career. While the Ikengas were basically an "Igbo" group, over time they took on a broader character, enlisting musicians from other ethnic groups and Cameroun. In this sense they were part of a broader movement in Nigerian music in the late seventies and early eighties that I call "Pidgin Highlife," a trend that included artists like Prince Nico Mbarga who sang mainly in "pidgin" or "broken" English rather than vernacular languages. As this genre faded away in the early eighties, so did the Ikengas. I do not know if they are still performing as a group. - John Beadle

Ikenga Super Stars of Africa
Ikengas in Africa
Rogers All Stars, 1975



> DOWNLOAD IT! <

(I apologize for the slapdash nature of this post. I got a serious case of the busies tonight, and I also want to check out that new Mad Men show on AMC.)

(John, meanwhile, apologizes for the skips in one of the tracks; I don't think it's too bad.)

Get Yer Ju-Ju's Out, Part 2: I.K. Dairo MBE

So since we were talking about juju music last time, I figured I might as well continue in that vein with some music from the genre's first superstar, Isaiah Kehinde Dairo MBE (1930-1996). I.K. Dairo is often referred to as"the father of juju" not because he invented the style (which he most certainly did not do) but because he took it from the lowly status of a back-alley urban folk music to a sophisticated, cosmopolitan popular genre on par with the urbane and glamorous highlife.

Like many juju musicians of the early era, Dairo started out playing music on a part-time basis while he worked as a barber and manual laborer. In 1957 he formed the ten-piece Morning Star Orchestra. The level of innovation he brought to juju was immediately apparent: He simultaneously modernized the music--incorporating cutting-edge Afro-Cuban rhythms, emphasizing the melodic role of the guitar and novel instrumental voices such as the ten-button accordion--and more deeply indigenized it via the introduction of traditional talking drums and thoroughly researched texts drawn from Yoruba folklore.

This tradition/modernity paradox also informed the subject matter of his songs, which often essayed the complexities of urban life while extolling the traditions of old. An ardent follower of the Cherubim & Seraphim "white garment" church, he advocated Protestant values even when he was singing about hip-swaying, painted-lipped city sirens. Take for example, the tune "Salome" in which he describes a beautiful, light-skinded femme fatale and then sings how it is "her character" that attracts him (LOL yeah right, dude!), and how he wants to work hard to make the money to get her.

His ambivalent relationship with urban glamour and decadence is captured in this passage from a 1969 Nigerian National Press article by Benson Corporo Okagbare:

I K has a character trait which is peculiar to him; he does not like to be interrupted when he talks and if you interrupt he will go on talking without a break in the line of thought. This peculiar character trait is much to his advantage. In any hotel, whenever he is playing and Bacchus is at work, people go very close to him. Some even go to the extent of entering on the stage to talk to him. All these do not disturb I K. In certain cases when the crowd - particularly girls, in miniskirts crowd on him while playing, he will close his eyes to avoid distraction; he prefers the audience far from the playing stage. I K is one of the greatest admirers of beauty; he has a great likeness for girls but he loves them and admires them as he would his sisters. This is another candle placed on a candlestick. I believe others will see light.

"The girls I sing of are not my girlfriends or lovers. In certain cases I pick up certain names and sing of them. Most of the characters are fictitious I am currently composing a song on Sunbo - I know nobody of such a name. I sing of girls and of 'love' because these are, in face essential factors in our lives. They are necessary compliments [sic] to whatever we are. 'Love' is indeed one of the essential ingredients of music and love songs are most appealing to all and sundry. I therefore sing them merely to give satisfaction to the people whom I am happy to see satisfied. I have carefully avoided flooding the market with such songs as they are most likely to encourage immorality." I K then concluded that if a musician was to retain his glory long he must abstain.

Dairo and his Morning Star Orchestra (renamed the Blue Spots in 1961) immediately captured the imagination of the public and rose meteorically, performing on radio and television, and becoming the favored party band among the Yoruba contingent while also drawing in fans from other ethnic groups. For his cultural contributions to the Commonwealth, Queen Elizabeth even appointed him a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 1963, making him the first and, to date (I think), the only African musician to receive such an honor.

Dairo & the Blue Spots' far-reaching appeal is documented in this article from the July 1964 issue of DRUM magazine.

His father gave him a drum to beat in his cradle. I.K. Dairo has been making music ever since. Today he is Nigeria's number one bandleader and he has been at the top for five fabulous years. How does he do it?

DAIRO IS A FIVE-YEAR WONDER

Britain has the Beatles who make teenagers scream and wail ecstatically at the slightest beat of the drums. America has pop singers like Elvis Presley and Chubby Checker whose music make [sic] her boys and girls go ga-ga. They are all worshipped by teenagers. Their grown-up fans are limited to people between twenty-five and forty years of age. But I.K. Dairo's music is a different cup of tea.


His music is not just a teenage drug, it also acts as a tonic on the grown-ups. For over five years, he has been treating the country to an unprecedented musical extravaganza--to a music that cuts across age and tribe, that is equally enjoyed by the ten year old and the septuagenarian and which gives the same kick and pleasure to the man from Lagos or from Abakaliki or from Ogbomosho or from Kaura-Namoda.

In spite of the fact that juju highhlife bands are common in Yorubaland, Dairo's music has more appeal than the music of all of them put together. It also commands more attention and respect among educated people and artists, because most of Dairo's compositions reveal a search into the past and because of their historical connections with the Yoruba folk songs.

Says Dairo: "Many older people have come to ask me for the meanings of the words I use in my songs and the majority of my Yoruba listeners are baffled at some of the incantations, verses and expressions I use. It costs me a lot of money and time to research Yoruba history and folklore. I have to travel around, talking to old men who know a lot about such things; I then go back home to turn them into modern music."


The original caption to the photo above was "DAIRO FINDS A lonely spot to compose a sad song. He says: 'I'm at the top and I mean to stay there.'"

Ironically, even as this article was rolling off the presses, Dairo's run as the King of Juju was coming to an end; 1964 was the year that a young guitar hotshot named Ebenezer Obey--lately departed from Fatai Rolling Dollar's band--formed his own seven-piece International Brothers orchestra, offering an ultramodern blend of juju-highlife, soul, country & western, Congolese rumba and an unabashed celebration of miliki, or "enjoyment" that made Dairo's studious traditionalism and Christian temperance appear hidebound and colo in comparison. Dairo managed to crank out a few hits here and there through the end of the sixties, but he really couldn't keep up with the escalated cutthroat competition amongst bands that had come to characterize the genre.

Dairo remained a beloved avuncular figure on the juju scene and given his propensity for moral messages and melodies inspired by Anglican hymnology, it was a natural move for him to put his juju ministry to service as the head of his own Aladura church, with its distinctly Yoruba brand of Christianity with a subtle orisha worship flavor.



Towards the end of his life, he also served as a professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Washington, Seattle. Upon his death in 1996, Radio Nigeria paid tribute to Dairo's standing as a sainted figure in the juju canon by playing nothing but his music for five days straight. His legacy lives on today not only through his evergreen songs, but through his son Paul IK Dairo (bka "Paul Play") who is the spitting image of his father, and one of the most popular singers in Nigeria today:



(Obviously, that "spitting image" comment was a reference to physical resemblance rather than musical. As much as Paul has expressed his disinterest in ever playing an accordion on record, the way he keeps his finger so heavy on that Auto-Tune kinda makes his vocals sound a little bit like an accordion sometimes. So in a bizarre way, he is maintaining some small piece of Baba I.K.'s musical voice, no?)

The album I'm posting here is Definitive Dairo, which probably suggests a representive anthology of his work, but the title is misleading. It's actually a lost 1971 London session that was unearthed after his death. I wish I could reproduce the lovely liner notes by juju scholar Chris Waterman, elucidating the song texts, but it's not really necessary to enjoy the music.

One thing, though; I kinda chuckled at producer Andy Frankel's efforts to rationalize the last two, Lingala-inflected songs on the disc, "Congo Kinshasa" and "President Mobutu"; he explains that the Blue Spots had just returned from Zaire, where they had enjoyed Mobutu's lavish hospitality and basically, it was a more optimistic time in Africa when nobody yet knew how the leopard-hatted one was going to wild out in coming years.

While I'm sure there's truth to this reading, I really can't ignore one aspect of the juju genre that's always kind of bothered me: Remember how I said before that juju was always sorta synonymous with toadying to me? A big part of the juju musician's repertoire has always been the ability to flatter wealthy and powerful patrons in their songs. That, to me, is some semi-feudal bullshit that I wouldn't mind seeing eradicated with all alacrity. While I know that praise-singing is a eons-old musical tradition throughout sub-Saharan Africa, so is abuse-singing (as exemplified in the modern era by Fela) and I used to be sickened by the unequivocal, oily encomium oozed by juju musicians upon robber barons, despots and other corrupt, blood-sucking reptilia (whether dressed in agbada or khaki) just as long as the money was flowing.

And that's why I found it a major head-scratcher why, when looking towards Africa for a "Third World Superstar" to replace the recently departed Bob Marley, Island Records ignored the logical choice of Fela in favor of King Sunny Ade.

King Sunny Ade? The hell?

Bob Marley became the first "Third World Superstar" because, in addition to being a gifted songwriter in the conventional pop mold, he was slick and sexy and projected the image of a real rebel against the system. This last element particularly appealed to the rock audience, which has continued to value and pay lip service to the idea of "sticking it to The Man," long after that concept ceased to have any real meaning. King Sunny Ade--apart from the fact that he didn't even sing in a language that the proposed audience could understand--he didn't stick it to The Man; he sucked up to The Man. And they were surprised that their precious rock audience didn't cotton to him the way they hoped?

...

Shit, I've wandered away from the point. I come to praise juju, not to bury it. Whatever philosophical difficulties I might have with it, it's still some good-ass music.



> DOWNLOAD IT! <

Get Yer Ju-Ju's Out

When I was a kid, juju was never a musical genre that appealed to me on any significant level; I just didn't understand it. And I'm not even referring to the fact that its lyrics are pretty much exclusively rendered in Yoruba (a language of which I have almost negligible comprehension despite having scored an A-1 in it when the study of Nigerian languages in secondary schools was made mandatory in the late 80s)--I really couldn't comprehend it on a basic musical level.

But then, why should I have? I was an Igbo kid growing up in the southeastern town of Calabar; juju was a regional sound whose turf was mostly confined to the western part of the country. Point blank: if you were not Yoruba--or at least living in Yorubaland--there was little reason to give a whit about this semi-obscure lo-fi music pulsing with the accents of strange membranophones and melismata.

What's that you say? I'm overlooking the more "mainstream" juju stars like King Sunny Ade and Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey who have been able to maintain considerable popularity on a national level (and beyond)? True enough, but let's not forget that they did so by infusing their juju with more "universal" sounds like highlife, soul, afrobeat and country music. And frankly, I didn't really care much for them, either.

Part of my problem was probably the fact that (as is the case with a lot of Africans of my generation) most of my understanding of music has been founded primarily upon the appreciation of popular Western formats. As a result, it was often difficult for me to fathom any sound that I couldn't comfortably situate somewhere within the rock & roll or jazz continuua. Juju was to me (and many others like myself) colo, that is, unhip; redolent of days gone by when benighted darkies toadied before mustachioed and khaki-suited colonial maw-stuhs. In short, it was too traditional--being the opposite of "modern" and the antithesis of le sexy.

Had I been just a little bit less of an unlettered horse's hindquarters, I would have understood intutively that juju was far from "traditional" but rather was one of the first modern song styles to develop in a burgeoning urban Nigeria. Nor did it evince any of the purity that we commonly associate with "traditional" forms; it was in fact a highly syncretized genre drawing on musical idioms from various points on the West African coast and even across the Atlantic.

But like I said, most of my musical thinking centered around the West. Therefore, my journey to juju (as has been the case with my appreciation of many other indigenous African sounds) required me to zip up my boots, reverse the Middle Passage and work my way backwards to the roots (word to Lamont Dozier).

For instance, I have long adored music from South America, particularly the Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian strands. Of course I knew that their intoxicating rhythms and even their idiosyncratic instruments were African retentions (or neo-African inventions) but only when I understood the story of the Aguda (or Amaros)--the Yoruba ex-slaves from Brazil and Cuba who returned to Nigeria and settled in Lagos, bringing back with them hybridized versions of African music like samba da roda, fado, burrinha and caretta--did I understand exactly how cutting-edge and mindblowingly modern juju must have seemed in the early 1930s. (I also understood why many distinguished Lagos families had names like Lopez, Fernandes, Pedro, Da Silva and Campos.)

And then you have all the other influences that shaped the development of juju: homegrown urban social musics like agidigbo, asiko, Muslim-derived sakara, Sierra Leonean palmwine music, "native blues" and colonial ballroom music and brass bands. But juju didn't really take off as a major genre until the late 1960s, during the Biafran War.

At the height of the Golden Age of Highlife in the 1950s and 60s, most of the top Lagos bands were ethnically integrated and often led by Igbos. When the Igbos all blew town during the war, Yoruba musicians were forced to look inwards, towards their own unique local forms.

This compilation, Great Juju & Sakara Music, is a snapshot of this period of self-discovery for Yoruba musicians. I'm not sure of the exact date of its release, but from the tone of the liner notes, I'm guessing that it's sometime in the very early 1970s:

Dominance of the Highlife music on West African music lovers is faultering [sic]. Other types of West African music generally associated with some set of people and regarded as underlings, are now coming into prominence. Of all these types the Juju music is seriously becoming outstanding.

Perched right under the nose of highlife, it (the highlife) will have to slice off a great part of its body to get rid of it and maintain the dominance. Presently, the juju music sounds ambitious and adamant, but the highlife music is impervious and unyielding, all to the delight of West African music lovers. Which will break the checkmate?

It will be seen that many bands now playing the juju music are off-shoots of highlife bands and it is not surprising that juju music has a little bit of similarity to highlife. However, there have been juju bands that have made names and stayed at the top but yet, there are other great bands with great juju beat, seriously seeking prominence without favour. The Fisher Music is delighted to introduce three juju bands on this album and one Sakara music band, to West African music lovers. Sakara music is one of the oldest music types in Nigeria and the particular artist on this album is a crowd-puller.

(SPOILER ALERT!! Highlife pretty much lost that standoff (at least where the nightlife in Lagos was concerned): You'll recall previous mention of Segun Bucknor's belief that juju was rapidly displacing his brand of highlife-inflected soul and funk, which led him to quit performing in 1975. More guitar-led brands of highlife--manifesting varying degrees of influence from Congolese music--continued to hold sway in the eastern part of the country, though.)

Have I rambled on too long? I feel like I have. Okay, one more thing and then I'll shut up. The last four tracks on this album (performed by Salami "Lefty" Balogun) are not juju but sakara. Please take note of the strong Islamic influence in the quavering vocal ornamentation and arabesque melody lines.


> DOWNLOAD IT! <

With Comb & Razor is for the children

For a moment, I considered titling this post "WHAT THE FUCK??!!??"

I did this blog rating thing about two weeks ago and it gave me a PG-13. "That can't be right," I thought. Tried it again today and now I'm upgraded to PG?

I mean... I'm not complaining or anything but, like, I do kinda cuss a lot on this page, don't I? I think so... In fact, many times after posting I have had to immediately hit the "edit" button to clean up my language so as to avoid the unnecessary assault of your gentle sensibilities, good readers. And I've seen blogs generally much more polite than mine get slammed with Rs and NC-17s for their occasional Anglo-Saxon flourishes, so I don't understand why I get off so easy here.

Anyway, 'tis what it 'tis...Prudish parents! Please park your precious progeny 'pon this page without peril!*





*Alliteration is so lame, but I've been addicted to it lately

Stumbled across this while looking for something else

The lovely Janet Kay performing "Silly Games" on Top of the Pops, 25 December, 1979. (Unfortunately abruptly truncated, but pretty cool while it lasts.)



I think I'm gonna do a big Lovers Rock post one of these days.

Yo pardon, this song been on my mind all week

STAFF BENDA BILILI ( et le sex machine)
Uploaded by belleKinoise

fleur d'afrique sent me and Denis this clip from Jupiter's Dance a few weeks ago, and since then the song has permeated my consciousness that even in my dreams I find myself barking "TEE-ro-pa, tee-ro-LAY... Tee-ro-PAPA! SEK-SU MAH-SHEEN!"

Similar to Israel Vibration of Jamaica or even Atlanta's Ying Yang Twins, Kinshasa's Staff Benda Bilili are united by their disability: the band is composed of musicians afflicted with polio (and a few street kids who accompany them) but they refuse to acknowledge their physical handicaps as anything more than a psychological hurdle to be overcome through ironclad resolve, resourcefulness and resilience.

Benda Bilili's "Sex Machine" is not James Brown's or even Sly's; it is a miraculous contraption conceived via the universal ghetto algorithm that nothing plus nothing equals something; contrived of rusty tin, sugar-packet cardboard and bicycle spokes bound together by rugged chicken wire, the soft, worn rubber of old fan belts and the Grace of God; fueled by a cocktail of sweat, spit and seminal fluid; ignited and propelled by the ever-burning spark of the human spirit.

Fela SHOUTS!!!

So I think I finally got this whole recording from vinyl thing figured out... I'm not yet in possession of the best hardware I could possibly have, but I have a more or less functional setup for now. What I have found myself lacking now, though, is the time. Denis and I have been sliding back into serious pre-production on Phase II of TOO MUCH BEAUTIFUL WOMAN (ha! must be a millennium since your man typed that majestically majuscular marquee-filler 'pon this page!) so setting up the turntable, making sure the records play through without skips, then editing the AIFFs and converting them to mp3s is just not something I can dedicate myself to at the moment.

Thank God for John B.

Our man has been lacing me up with a steady stream of music to post up here (did I just say "lacing me up"? Does anybody actually still use that term? Man, the 90s feel like such a long time ago!) and today we have another Fela rarity: 1986's I GO SHOUT PLENTY!!!

You'll notice that despite being released during the Egypt 80 era, the record is credited to "Fela and Afrika '70"... That's because the I GO SHOUT PLENTY!!! LP was actually recorded in 1977 (with "Frustration of My Lady" on the B side) but went unreleased for nine years until Decca chose to put it out without Fela's permission. The new B side, "Why Black Man Dey Suffer" was recorded for a 1977 album of the same name (with "Male" on the B side) but was also shelved by Decca.

(You might have seen a slightly bootleg-looking CD in the market called Why Black Man Dey Suffer, with "Ikoyi Mentality Versus Mushin Mentality " on the B side. That's a completely different version on a different LP recorded in 1971 for EMI; they didn't release it, so it came out under the African Songs label. Confusion break bone!)

Anyway, here's a clip from Jeremy Marre's Konkombe: The Nigerian Pop Music Scene:



I uploaded this clip yesterday because I had planned to talk up this theory Denis has about Fela and politics: He says that while Fela was generally thought of by most people (including himself) as a "political" artist, he was really more of a satirist, and the deeper he got into politics, the more detrimental it was to his music. It alienated a lot of his fans in the 80s, and it definitely pushed away his musicians, leading to the Afrika 70 mutiny.

We'll talk about that later, though.

Interesting thing, though: When I uploaded this clip, Dele Sosimi, with whom I had been chatting online earlier that day, messaged me to tell me that he was the skinny youth you see sitting in a chair leafing through a book. I asked him what the hell he was doing flipping through the pages so fast, like, was he really reading it or just playing to the camera? Turns out it was a book on jazz improvisation and he was trying to memorize some licks! That kinda surprised me because I really didn't know that any of Fela's musicians were, you know, musically literate (especially not the Egypt 80 players, who were generally younger and less experienced than the Afrika 70).



> DOWNLOAD IT! <

Fela don come again!

Well... I guess I shouldn't say "again" since I've never really posted a Fela album here before - I just like saying "Fela don come again." That was the first Fela song I remember hearing (or really paying attention to, anyway): You know, FELA YOU DON COME AGAIN O! and he replies, I never come, I still dey for far away... Wait, make I reach the place where I dey go...

Normally, I would probably avoid posting Fela albums as almost his entire catalog is currently in print on CD, but as it turns out, there are quite a few albums that have slipped through the cracks and escape reissue. One such record is Perambulator, released in 1983 on Lagos International Records. Once again, I've got to thank Mr. John B for hooking me up with this (I ought to make him an official member of the With Comb & Razor team the way he's been blessing us with these goodies, right?)

While the cover credits the record to "The Black President Chief Priest Fela Anikulapo Kuti and the Egypt 80 Band," it's not really an Egypt 80 record since both sides were actually recorded back in 1977, when Fela still had his Afrika 70 band (I guess the record's label kinda acknowledges this by crediting "Fela Anikulapo Kuti African '70 [sic] Organization and Egypt '80 Band"). "Perambulator" first appeared in 1978 as the B side to the French issue of Shuffering and Shmiling; "Frustration" (a.k.a. "Frustration of My Lady") was set to be the B-side to 1977's I Go Shout Plenty LP, which Decca ended up not releasing (a different, unauthorized version of I Go Shout Plenty was released in 1986. Thank you, Prof. Endo!)

("Frustration of My Lady" is, of course, is a re-recording of "My Lady's Frustration," the number Fela composed at the piano at Sandra Smith's house in Los Angeles back in 1969 when he resolved to "stop fooling around" and write "AFRICAN music.")

Also worth noting: featured as a "guest artist" on this disc is the legendary American jazz trumpeter Lester Bowie (best known for his work with the avant-garde Art Ensemble of Chicago) who lived and played with Fela for three months in 1977.

Alright... I know you wanna just hear the music, so here the music!



> DOWNLOAD IT! <

Nigeria 70: The Definitive Story of 1970s Funky Lagos

If I were asked to isolate a single event that sparked off the current vogue for funky 1970s Nigerian music of the kind we have been checking out here at With Comb & Razor, I would tarry not a second before citing the October 2001 release of the Nigeria 70 compilation on the much-missed Strut Records. The label--via its Club Africa compilations and reissues of music from bands like Lafayette Afro Rock Band and Oneness of Juju--had already done much to ingrain African funk into the fiber of dance music orthodoxy.

(The contributions of French label Comet and the UK's Harmless Records are not to be slept on, either.)

Nigeria 70, though, took things to the proverbial next level. Never before had an African funk anthology been so handsomely packaged and meticulously researched. Whereas most compilations of the day were offered sandwiched between overused stock photos by Adrian Boot and Malick Sidibé, with threadbare sleevenotes that often seesawed between cavalier and apologetic ("We really have no clue who this Beninois musician is or anything about him... But isn't this track great?"), Strut dispatched a team--including BLO's Laolu Akins--to Lagos to excavate rare gems, untangle credits and rights, interview players and scenesters, and assemble a robust booklet and audio documentary on the development of Nigerian popular music.

Also impressive were some of the more interesting and fairly unprecedented compiling choices. Rather than sticking firmly within the safe and assured market of the standard Afrobeat/Afro-Funk style familiar to the hipsters who bought all the Fela reissues, they included left-of-center selections like the Allah-exalting heavy metal of Ofo & the Black Company, Bongos Ikwue's Bible-thumping country-rock, and William Onyeabor's bizarre brand of one-man Afro-technofunk.

Nigeria 70 was a prestige release that showed that there was more to Nigerian music than Fela and King Sunny Ade, and is a holy text among the new wave of Afrobeat bands that is arising in various points around the globe. Thinking that it would be a good primer for the kind of music we've been sharing, I had considered posting the collection here, but I wasn't sure it was kosher: Yes, it is definitely out of print, but somehow I didn't think it had been long enough... Plus, I kinda know people who know people who were involved in the compilation's production and I didn't want to get them (or myself) in trouble.

But hey... Our friend Matt just alerted me this morning that some other blog has the whole thing (plus the documentary) up on their site. So, er... You might as well grab it if they're offering it, right?

I'm not gonna publish the download links on this page, but you can go get them HERE.

Enjoy!

Ghosts of Cité Soleil trailer

Looks like this movie is finally hitting theaters... I've been wanting to check this out since it made a splash at Telluride last year.

It's a "documentary" by director Asger Leth (a Dane!) with participation from Wyclef Jean, and there's a lot about the "Third World ghetto safari" approach of the filmmakers that I find kinda troubling.

But at the very least, it looks like a fairly dynamic cinematic experience. I can't be mad at that.



Wonder when it's coming this way...

Check out the movie's website here.

The Lijadu Sisters link is fixed!

You know, the one in this post, that I messed up the first time?

I haven't gotten around to re-recording the album yet (I'm trying to pick up some better vinyl-ripping hardware today) but I stole the new link from Club Cortez, an audio blog with all manner of cool music waiting to be deposited to your hard drive! (I for one cannot wait to listen to that Joe Bataan Singin' Some Soul they got up there!)

Cortez is free to snatch any of my links, of course... And thanks again to the anonymous commenter who pulled my coat!

Alright... To make up for the mess-up with the Lijadu Sisters album...

Here's another exclusive from our friend John B (a man who digitizes vinyl impeccably!)

This is Uhuru Aiye by Bob Ohiri & his Uhuru Sounds. John tells us that there's not too much info furnished on the sleeve, but we do know that Bob Ohiri was a guitarist with King Sunny Ade's African Beats until the mid-80s (this album came up around 1985) and apparently played with Fela, as well.

The only musicians credited on the album are "Bob, Shegun (probably African Beats guitarist Segun Ilori) and Prince." Too bad we don't know all the musicians involved in this so that we may salute them as they deserve for creating this deliciously trippy concoction of juju, afrobeat and psychedelic rock.

I'll probably edit this post within the next 24 hours to add some more information once I can dig up the liner notes of Soundway Records' Afro Baby: The Evolution of the Afro Sound in Nigeria, 1970-1979 on which track 1, "Ariwo Yaa" is included.

Hmmm... Come to think of it, that might mean that this album was actually recorded in the 70s, huh?

(EDIT 6/25/07: I just managed to retrieve my copy of Afro Baby, and oddly enough, Bob Ohiri is not on it! Yet most of the track listings I find online do list "Ariwo Yaa" as track 8 (including the one on Soundway's site), my CD has in its place Orlando Julius & His Afro Sounders' "Mura Sise"! Was there a second pressing of this CD that I missed? *shrug*)

Anyway... It's almost 1:30 ante meridien and I'm getting kinda sleepy. So for now, here's the music.




> DOWNLOAD IT! <

The Lijadu Sisters in Danger!

Alright, fam... This is basically my first attempt at ripping tracks from vinyl, so I hope it doesn't suck.

I had to use Final Vinyl, which doesn't give you as much latitude when it comes to manipulating the levels, and to make it worse, I had to run the audio directly from the turntable without the benefit of an intermediary amplifier.

To top it all off, for reasons I won't get into, I can't hear anything through my left ear at the moment, so I can't even tell you for sure if this thing came out sounding halfway decent! So let me know... If it sounds muddy or tinny, I'll re-do it with Audacity or something.




What we have here is the Lijadu Sisters' third album, from 1976, as produced by the talented Mr. Wright, as in Biddy. I'm not gonna talk too much about this one except to say that this is probably my favorite of all the Lijadu Sisters' records. It's pretty simple in formula and execution: most of the songs are basically one verse repeated over and over in almost trance-like fashion while Biddy and the band (well... Biddy is most of the band, isn't he?) improv tasty keyboard licks and low-impact guitar heroics around them.



The track that I've noticed being picked up most by podcasts and other compilers is "Life's Gone Down," but my pick for best cut on the album is "Amebo." That's a common term used to describe a gossip, derived from the name of a character with such tendencies on the classic sitcom The Village Headmaster.

(That's got nothing to do with anything, but I just thought I'd mention it. Oh well... Here's the credits:)

Biddy Wright: Lead and rhythm guitar, tenor saxophone, percussion and bass guitar
Ade Jolaoso: Bass guitar
Johnny Wood: Keyboards
Felix Shittu: Alto saxophone











All songs written and arranged by the Lijadu Sisters
Production by Biddy Wright
Recorded at Decca Studios, Abule-Oje, Lagos, Nigeria

> DOWNLOAD IT! <

EDIT: Damn, I messed up... Track 3 is actually called "Life's Gone Down Low." Do me a favor and correct that when you download it because I don't wanna have to re-upload the whole thing just to fix that one track title.

EDIT AGAIN: Yeah... It's been brought to my attention that (just as I suspected) the recording of this album is kinda effed up. So I've disabled the link. I'll let you know when I fix it.

Sorry!

Update 06/25/07: The link is back!

Also, I haven't been indicating what labels the records have been on for a while, have I? I know that info is important to a lot of people, so I'll do that from now on. This album came out on Afrodesia, which was an imprint of Decca West Africa.