Lately, a couple of readers have requested to hear some Felix Lebarty and I'll admit that it gave me a moment of pause: Why
haven't I posted any of his music at all up until this time? Was he not, after all, probably the biggest Nigerian music star for a good chunk of the 1980s? Did not his music burn up the floor at many a birthday party when I was in primary school?
Yes, all of that is indeed true. Also true is the fact that in some way, I'm a bit
embarrassed by Felix Lebarty. Somehow, I just don't feel like he's traveled very well. Of course, I realize that some would argue that
most of the music I post has not traveled well (if it even travels at all), but I'm not even talking just about Lebarty's
records per se. I mean
him--his whole style, image, everything.
The nasal singing. The crappy wannabe Yankee
phoneh. The "sexy" sighs and yelps. The drawn-out gimmick of him naming his lead singles after the girls he's supposedly dating at the time. The
okoro-next-door romanticism. The faux-leather pants. It's all terribly cheesy to me now and to be honest, it was cheesy to me even back
then. But, y'know, cheesy in that way that was
good in the 80s.
My feelings about Felix Lebarty reflect the reasons why until recently I mostly distanced myself from 80s (black) music in general: Because it was the soundtrack of such a formative period in my life, I used to fear that I was too close to it emotionally to ever objectively assess its actual value as, y'know...
music rather than as nostalgia.
I'm over that problem now, I think... As I've gotten older, I've found myself becoming less and less intimidated by the power of my own sentimentality and adhering more and more to Duke Ellington's rule of music appreciation: "If you like it, then it's good." I threw on
Lover Boy a few months ago, and yes, I thought it was good--mostly because of Jake Sollo's crisp production, of course.
I have frequently alluded to my ardent admiration for Sollo; amongst most lovers of 1980s Nigerian boogie Lemmy Jackson is the
ne plus ultra, but for
my money, Jake Sollo was the most vital and interesting producer of the era. (Not to mention one of the sharpest rhythm guitarists to ever walk the earth.) By the early 80s, after almost a decade spent in London gigging with everyone from Osibisa to Bunny Mack to Kim Wylde, Sollo was settling back in Nigeria, mostly functioning as a house producer/A&R at Chief G.A.D. Tabansi's Taretone/Tabansi Records, and it was in this capacity that he discovered Felix Lebarty.
Actually, Felix--younger brother of
Aigbe Lebarty, a Bini highlife bandleader in the Victor Uwaifo mold who enjoyed considerable popularity in the late 1960s and early 70s--had already been "discovered" before he met Sollo. Producer Odion Iruoje and fledgling pop star Kris Okotie spotted Felix on stage at the Presidential Hotel in Port Harcourt fronting his rock band the Sex Bombers and swiftly recruited him to play guitar (alongside BLO) on Okotie's 1980 debut
I Need Someone. Okotie, meanwhile, was already setting his eyes on consolidating power behind the scenes as a producer and an executive. He set up his own label and planned for his first artist to be Felix Lebarty, whom he was grooming into a lightweight version of himself. (He would later create a female version of himself in the person of his younger sister Lorine Okotie, of "Single Girl" fame.) But in the meantime, in order to strengthen the Kris Okotie brand, his primary focus had to be on releasing new Kris Okotie music. As Okotie knocked out three LPs between 1980 and 1981, Lebarty grew tired of waiting for his shot. Without the knowledge of Okotie and Iruoje, he took a meeting with Jake Sollo and forged what would turn out to be a longterm professional relationship with Chief Tabansi.
(This move would later fuel much controversy, speculation and rumors of bitter, mortal enmity between Okotie and Lebarty.)
In January 1982, Sollo traveled to London with Lebarty and recorded the album
Lover Boy. As was common during the London era of Nigerian pop, the record featured African and British musicians, including Pat Henry and Tracey King--two thirds of a trio of London session vocalists (along with Wendy Harris) who frequently worked with Sollo and whom he produced as
"Galaxy" (not to be confused with London producer Phil Fearon's 1980s band of the same name).
While Lebarty's warbling vocals and songwriting style retained a superficial resemblance to those of his erstwhile benefactor, Sollo distanced his new charge from Okotie's laidback pop-rock sound by cutting him on thumping discolypso arrangements full of big drum kicks, squiggly synth lines and bright, blaring horns.
Felix Lebarty - "Lover Boy"Felix Lebarty - "Ngozi"Felix Lebarty - "My Number One" Lebarty also filmed several promotional videos to accompany the tracks. I can still remember the Saturday afternoon they debuted those clips on NTA 9.... They all looked pretty much like the standard UK black music videos of the day--the male artist lip syncing in front of a glittery curtain... two women in chic disco wear gyrating on either side (as a rule, at least one of these ladies was always caucasian)... smoke machine... public access cable optical effects (usually doubling, tripling and quadrupling)... Basically, Snoop's "Sensual Seduction" video.
When he appeared onscreen blurting "Boy-Boy-Boy... I'm your Boy-Boy-Boy" we were like, "Who is this Kris Okotie
manque?" (
cf. the opening of "Lover Boy" to that of Okotie's
"You Are My Woman"), but within a matter of seconds it became clear that he was projecting a kind of saucy charm that was a world away from Okotie's earnest intensity.
By the time the barnstomping "Ngozi" came on, everybody knew the kid was a star. Instead of him being viewed as a Kris Okotie clone, almost overnight he had spawned his own army of imitators such as Dizzy K, Terry Mackson and Chris Mba. And because for the first several months of his stardom virtually nobody called him by his real name--he was generally referred to as "Lover Boy"--people were more inclined to compare him to Honey Boy (who was the biggest star in Nigeria at the time) than to Okotie.
Lebarty and Sollo reunited the following year for
Lover Boy '83, featuring the hits "Chi-Chi" and "Sexy Woman." As Lebarty's pop dominance grew from strength to strength, Okotie announced in 1984 that he was leaving the music business. Of course, the rumor mill went into overdrive about him being cowed by the Lover Boy onslaught, but really, Kris Okotie was a lot smarter than that; his premature retirement from music was actually a carefully thought-out power move. (We'll talk more about that later.)
Jake Sollo also had success in 1982 with
Peace of Mind, the sophomore album by the Esbee Family.
While officially a trio consisting of guitarist Kingsley "Dallas" Anyanwu and singer Maurice "Jackie" Anyaorah (both late of the then-recently dissolved varsity rock band Sweet Breeze) with bassist Ndubuisi "Roy" Obika, in essence Esbee Family was a supergroup comprising the Sweet Breezers, Galaxy, and Sollo himself lending support on guitar, synths and occasionally bass.
(Well, that was the case on the second LP, anyway; on the first, 1980's
Chics & Chicken, Anyaorah, Anyanwu, Obika and Sollo were joined by vocalists Carol Ingrams and Pamela Douglas.)
The Esbees were the first Nigerian band I remember seriously digging. So funky and urbane, such a suave and debonair look... They were like a Nigerian answer to Chic!
(Actually, now that I think of it, that's a fairly apt comparison as Sollo's guitar playing and production style always reminded me a little bit of Nile Rodgers.)
I also recall being rather fascinated by their lyrics, which seemed very "adult" and "sophisticated" to me at the time. In contrast to the generic proclamations of love I was used to in a lot of pop music I listened to, the Esbees often had a certain narrative specificity to their discussions of relationships between men and women. (I was intuitively aware of this even as I was unsure what they were talking about. "Chics are magnets"?
Huh? And what
is the meaning of this mysterious "gin & lime" that this woman wanted so badly? I still don't know for sure!)
Also, there was a mild sense of danger listening to them, as their wry, casual celebrations of fleshly pleasures were occasionally distressing to my nascent Christian sensibilities: I blushed at songs like "Chics & Chicken" that talked about girls who "spread their legs so wide/so you may see through" or "My Man Understands," in which Tracey King extols her dude, who is so much in love that he's willing to ignore the gossip and take a chance on turning a harlot into a housewife.
Esbee Family - "Gin & Lime"Esbee Family - "Chics are MagnetsEsbee Family - "My Man Understands" 
I really got into this band, and I was pretty disappointed when they didn't release another album (as far as I know). I later heard that Anyaorah and Anyanwu went to the States to get their PhDs and I know Roy Obika produced records for other artists in the 80s.
Tracey King is still doing her thing, but I don't know about the other two Galaxy girls. I was recently informed that the Sweet Breeze were reuniting, so I guess that's encouraging.
Sadly, Jake Sollo died in a car accident in the mid-80s (a loss that pretty much dealt a deathblow to Nigerian pop music, in my opinion).
May his funk forever live on!
Sonny was the first Nigerian artist to fully embrace the possibilities of reggae in his sound, but rather than just aping Jamaican riddims, he broke down the reggae beat and re-constructed it in his own image, investing it with a deeply "African" sound that entranced even the dreads in the land of reggae's birth. Okosuns performed with Toots & the Maytals and Jimmy Cliff, and Peter Tosh was also an admirer and a friend. When Tosh visted Nigeria in 1982, he spent three weeks in Okosuns' Lagos home, where he wrote the songs that became his classic Mama Africa album.
Sonny also maintained that Bob Marley had written him a letter expressing his desire to record Sonny's song "Holy Wars." I'll admit that this story always sounded unlikely to me, since (apart from early efforts like "One Love," which was an adaptation of Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready") Marley was not really known for covering other people's songs. However, he was not averse to borrowing others' riddims and singing his own lyrics over them, and it is possible that he might have wanted to do this with "Holy Wars," since during that period he had been very vocal about his desire to infuse his reggae with a deeper African sound--a desire that fueled the creation of the album Survival in 1979. That album featured the ode to "Zimbabwe," which Marley performed at the nation's independence celebration in 1980. Okosuns also took the stage at that event and performed "Holy Wars," among other songs.
Sonny was also friends with the great Eddy Grant, with whom he collaborated in 1979 on some lean, crossover-ready reworkings of earlier Ozziddi hits "Fire in Soweto" and "Papa's Land." My intention was actually to post those Eddy Grant-produced tracks here, along with "Holy Wars," but as luck would have it... er, I couldn't find them. They're somewhere in the crates.
It was in the 1970s and 80s that Sonny Okosuns achieved his greatest success, forcefully projecting through his music a message of African unity, pride, resistance to oppression and sympathy for the struggles for independence raging across the continent. The repressive apartheid policy in Southern Africa was the central target of his attacks, so much so that in 1978, his Fire In Soweto LP was officially banned by the government of South Africa. 
I've got an elephantine backlog of entries to put up, so I hope I get the chance to post 'em all this week.
Yes, I stay bigging up Boogieheads because it's one of my favorite podcasts and Obafunkie jR is a really cool dude to boot.
According to Nigerian gossip blogger Niyi Tabiti, Sonny Okosuns died this morning (apparently at Howard University Hospital in Washington D.C.).
Well, this is a bit of an oddity.
When I picked up this album in a Lagos market about eight years ago, I was motivated less by any curiosity about the music it contained than I was by my interest in vintage women's fashion and glamour photography. 
The London-based Holder followed in the footsteps of his Guyanese compatriot Eddy Grant, whose band The Equals helped forge the template for Europop with their energetic (albeit slightly awkward) approximation of US soul strung up with pop accoutrements and garnished with a dash of reggae. Grant of course went on to a successful career as a solo artist and businesman, founding Coach House Studios, the first black-owned recording facility in Europe. Holder would later release music on Grant's Ice label, but he recorded for a number of small labels throughout the 1970s, starting with 1973's "I'm Doing Fine Now" b/w "Something of Value" on Magnet. (Funk heads probably care more about mid-70s bullets like "Music Turns Me On" and "Whatever's Fair," though.) So why did he out of nowhere decide to record a tribute to Nigerian women and why doesn't this album show up on any discographies of the man's work?
...Well, not really.
Although she did not win the contest (and a contest it was in those days, rather than a "pageant"--hundreds of young ladies sent their photographs in to the Daily Times and the winner was picked by a panel) she might as well have been Miss Nigeria anyway, as she embodied the spirit and values that the title professed to represent: In 1959, at the age of 19, she became one of the first broadcasters on Nigerian television.
Her first album, Ere Yon (Sweet Songs) was released in 1977. Stalwart producer Odion Iruoje helmed the sessions at EMI Studios in Lagos, with ace players such as guitarist James Eyefia, bassist Kenneth Okulolo (of Monomono fame) and Johnny Wood (of S-Job Movement and Sonny Okosuns' Ozziddi). The material, as was the vogue for female singers at the time, is composed of rootsy arrangements of folk songs drawn from Coker's Itsekiri background. 
By 1981, the status of women in the music business was rapidly changing. Eighties ladies like Dora Ifudu, Oby Onyioha and Onyeka Onwenu were appearing on the scene, their flashy, unapologetically pop poses standing in stark contrast to Julie Coker's old-school conservatism. Coker's album Tomorrow shows her adapting to this new climate. Produced by James Eyefia, the album was recorded in the UK with a few of the usual London players (Jake Sollo, Pam Douglas, Carol Ingrams, et al) and featured Coker singing more in English over "a good blend of disco, crossover highlife and balad [sic]." "Sogio" is a remake of "Elelemi" and "Gossiper Scandal Monger" is singled out in the notes as a track that "makes for good disco dancing."
Harry Mosco - "Happy Birthday"
George Ema - "I'm Growing Older"
Prince Nico Mbarga & Rocafil Jazz - "Happy Birth Day"
Eric Kol - "Hard To Say Goodbye"
While Okosuns had enjoyed moderate popularity in the 1960s and early 70s with the beat groups The Postmen and Paperback Limited, he only achieved major success with the 1974 release of the Odion Iruoje-produced Ozziddizm LP. Unlike the "copyright" material that Okosuns had previously trafficked in, the album featured a new style--deep, Monomono-style afro-rock and lyrics drawn from Bini folklore and delivered in a declamatory style, as found on songs such as "O'Jesu" and "Adesua." 
Actually, Felix--younger brother of Aigbe Lebarty, a Bini highlife bandleader in the Victor Uwaifo mold who enjoyed considerable popularity in the late 1960s and early 70s--had already been "discovered" before he met Sollo. Producer Odion Iruoje and fledgling pop star Kris Okotie spotted Felix on stage at the Presidential Hotel in Port Harcourt fronting his rock band the Sex Bombers and swiftly recruited him to play guitar (alongside BLO) on Okotie's 1980 debut I Need Someone. 
Lebarty and Sollo reunited the following year for Lover Boy '83, featuring the hits "Chi-Chi" and "Sexy Woman." As Lebarty's pop dominance grew from strength to strength, Okotie announced in 1984 that he was leaving the music business. Of course, the rumor mill went into overdrive about him being cowed by the Lover Boy onslaught, but really, Kris Okotie was a lot smarter than that; his premature retirement from music was actually a carefully thought-out power move. (We'll talk more about that later.)
Jake Sollo also had success in 1982 with Peace of Mind, the sophomore album by the Esbee Family. 
