Journey to Luna

The photo above was grabbed from this video of Fela Ransome-Kuti performing at the famous Luna Nite Club in Calabar in 1971. I don't think I ever went to Luna; I was still in primary school during the club's glory days and even when I came of age, it wasn't really the kind of establishment I would frequent. For one thing, it was located in a slightly unsavory neck of the woods: the "Old Calabar" precinct that is now known as "Calabar South" and is today--as it was then--legendary for its rough characters. Among my middle-class stratum, we sometimes called this area "Target," a synecdoche referring to Target Street, one of the more rugged byways in that quarter of town. ("Target" was also an allusion to what an interloper might as well have his back wandering around that neighborhood after dark.) If someone owed you money or was messing with you, commissioning some thugs from "Target" to help you settle the score usually got the message across that you meant business.

Calabar had a spectrum of nightspots, with Paradise City on Atekong Drive representing the more upscale end and something like Hotel de Moon Rock on Mount Zion Road as the seedier extreme, but Luna was somewhere in the middle: a pleasure pit where you could relax, drink your Star or your Gulder and maybe enjoy some bushmeat--be it the kind that's bound with twine, soaked in tangy sauce and served with roasted plantains, or the variety that you might take back to one of the "chalets" behind the club that could be rented for a 30-minute "short-time" term ("bushmeat" being the local slang for a young woman who is relatively unsophisticated culturally and thus, is presumed to be reasonably available sexually).

If it was dancing you liked to dance, though, the big draw at Luna might have been the Anansa President, Bustic Kingsley Bassey, whose band was resident at the club for years.

Bustic (or Burstic, same pronunciation) was a local legend but never made much of a splash on a national level. Truthfully, he was a bit of a journeyman. While he undoubtedly delivered rousing shows on the Luna stage, I don't think he ever really developed a distinctive sound of his own. The records I have heard from the late 1960s and very early 70s, for instance, capture Bustic performing in a style very reminiscent of Rex Lawson's "New Calabar" danceband highlife.

Commissioner Burstic Kingsley Bassey and His Professional Pioneer Dance Band of Nigeria - "Ntinke Iko Edem"

It would seem, though, that Fela's Luna performance left a significant impression on Bustic because shortly thereafter, he started calling himself the Chief Engineer and plying a heavily Fela-influenced afrobeat style, even mimicking the nuances of the Chief Priest's laid-back, delirious vocal style.

The two tracks below are from the 1975 LP Gossip, when Bustic was still in his deep Fela phase.

Bustic Kingsley Bassey's Anansa Engineers - "Journey to Luna"
Bustic Kingsley Bassey's Anansa Engineers - "Allow Me Talk My Own"

NTIA (A belated realization)

A few months ago over on Likembe, John B. posted a few selections from Rusted Highlife Vol. 1, a compilation of forgotten highlife classics released by Mossaic Music.

While there's no doubt that Rusted Highlife Vol. 1 is a truly sublime collection of music, its annotations were perhaps a bit questionable. As John noted, the recording "Ima Abasi," attributed on the disc to Calabar musician Kingsley Burstic Bassey, is the exact version of the song from the Ghana classic Hit Sound of the Ramblers Dance Band LP. Similarly, "Abisi Do," which is listed as being by "Demmy Bassey" is identical to "Abasi Do," which appears on Golden Highlife Classics by King Bruce & the Black Beats, with composition credited to "Len Bassey."

Two tracks that really stood out to me, though, were "Solo Hit (Nwaocholonwu)" and "Mme Yedi," credited to B.E. Batta & Eastern Stars Dance Band and featuring a singer identified as "Emmanuel Vita."

B.E. Batta & Eastern Stars Dance Band - Mme Yedi
B.E. Batta & Eastern Stars Dance Band - Solo Hit (Nwaocholonwu)

Both songs rang faint but insistent bells in my head, though I couldn't figure out where I knew them from. The title "Solo Hit" in particular seemed like something I had encountered fairly recently, and not in connection with Orlando Julius Ekemode's 1967 souled-out version of the song:

Orlando Julius & His Modern Aces - "Solo Hit (Instrumental)"

Then, just the other night, it hit me.

Sometime last year, when I was looking for some info on Kingsley Burstic Bassey, I came across this article paying tribute to some of the forgotten highlife legends from Rivers State ("New Calabar") and Cross River State ("Old Calabar"). The unidentified author describes watching a young highlife band playing at a bash presided over by former Cross River State governor Donald Duke and current governor Liyel Imoke:

Somewhere along the imitative repertoire of the band, they broke into an up-tempo highlife tune, which: started with a vivacious and vigorous guitar riff. Quite expectedly, this generated palpable excitement as everyone including Duke and Imoke was nodding and/or swinging to the compelling rhythm of the tune. Even Domenico Gitto, the Italian Managing Director of the contracting firm, swung to the successful beat. As for me, I lost my cool momentarily, sprang to my feet and spun around a couple of times to the enchanted amazement of my colleagues in Gitto and the rest of the audience.

When the event ended and only the lesser mortals were left to tidy up the venue, I approached the lead singer of the band and challenged him to a four-point quiz with each question attracting a prize tag of five hundred Naira. Expectedly, he acquiesced; after all, he had two thousand Naira to gain and absolutely nothing to lose since the gamble was one-sided-it was mine.

Question: What is the title of the song that caused so much excitement?

Answer: Solo Hit

Question: Who sang it?

Answer: Emmanuel Ntia

Question: In what language was it sung?

Answer: Fish language

Question: What is on the flipside?

Answer: Meyedi.

Amazing! Though I lost two thousand Naira, I couldn’t be happier especially given the fact that this young man, was in his early twenties knew such details of a song that was released more than forty years ago. Of the accurate answers, the one that impressed me most was the language of the song, which, for me, is still as much a mystery as it was in the sixties. Fish language?! Whatever that means! But it came out right on the delivery and So Hit was a smash sensation on the highlife scene in the sixties.

Of course... "Emmanuel Vita" is Emmanuel Ntia. When I was a kid, he was regarded as one of the great highlife legends of Cross River State. (He comes from Abak, which is now in Akwa Ibom State.) His song "Ke Nsede Nasiaye Ufien," along with "Solo Hit" and "Mme Yedi" were played all the time wherever two or three older folks were gathered, and I went to school with one of his nephews. Emmanuel Ntia is still alive (see him pictured below with his wife and one of his sons) and still playing that good dance band music.



I'm posting up the Ekpo LP from 1975, which I think is fairly representative of the repertoire of many highlife dance bands in the 1970s, especially in places like Calabar and Ghana: old-style highlife numbers, with an increasing influence of "souls." (I just love saying that, "souls"... I like the way the old highlife guys tend to pronounce it as a plural.)

(Now if I could just find out something more about B.E. Batta...)

NTIA & EASTERN STARS DANCE BAND - EKPO (BEN RECORDS, BLP 0005, 1975)

SIDE 1
1. Ekpo
2. Ke Nsede Nasiaye Ufien
3. Kot Ndito Abasi
4. Iyedara

SIDE 2
1. Nya Ekpo
2. I Need Some One
3. Good Bye
4. By The Same Side

DOWNLOAD ZIP

Jake Sollo Is Awesome! Part 3: Sammy Obot

(This probably shouldn't be a "Jake Sollo Is Awesome!" post, but it's been a while since I said Jake Sollo Is Awesome. And he, uh... y'know, is.)

As I said in my last post, the Ghanaian dance bands of the 1950s and 60s tended to have little confidence in the trumpet-playing abilities of their countrymen and so often hired Nigerian trumpeters instead. Many of these trumpeters came from the Calabar area, which was noted for its brass band tradition. The greatest and most influential of these Calabar trumpeters was probably Sammy Obot.

Samuel Obot started his career in 1944 as a member of the Nigeria Police Band in Lagos. He then moved to Port Harcourt where he fronted his own band for the next couple of years. A teenaged trumpeter named Erekisoma "Rex" Lawson apprenticed with him, learning from Obot the expressive, muted tone that would become his trademark as one of the most popular highlife stars of the 1960s. Other musicians who studied the trumpet under Obot included Victor Olaiya and Sam Akpabot.

Obot then moved up north to Kano, where he led the Rendezvous Dance Band featuring Efik singer Inyang Nta Henshaw, who was one of the most popular musicians in Northern Nigeria. As the Gold Coast approached independence in 1957, Obot moved to Ghana and founded the Broadway Dance Band.

Broadway Dance Band - "Hunua"

Obot led the Broadway Dance Band as they played at the independence ball and soon became the unofficial national orchestra of Ghana, performing at state functions and accompanying Kwame Nkrumah on presidential trips. In 1964, the Broadway Dance Band changed its name to the Uhuru Dance Band; Obot handed leadership of the band over to Stan Plange the following year and moved to London where he participated in the local black music scene and studied at the Eric Guilder School of Music. Notable sessions he played on during this period include Flash Domincii's The Great and Expensive Sound of the Supersonics in 1967 and 1974's Independence, by afrofunk band Matata.

Flash Domincii & the Supersonics - "Igbehin A Dara Fun Wa"

Matata - "Good Good Understanding"

Obot returned to Nigeria in the 1970s and continued to perform until 1985 when he released the first (and to my knowledge, only) album under his own name, I Believe in Music, issued on the private Sagata label.

Looking at the record sleeve now, I'm amused to note that Sagata Records International's main office address is given as "55B School Road, Housing Estate, Calabar"; this was the home address of my across-the-street neighbor, Calabar businessman Chief T.A. Obot. While this record was released about two years before we moved there, I had always had a couple of friends who lived in that neighborhood and so I hung out around there a lot.

The Obot residence was a big white house surrounded by an intimidating wall. Chief Obot's daughter Lucy went to the same primary school as us, and everybody thought she was kind of stuck up. I do recall hearing that the famous old-time musician Sammy Obot was her uncle and seeing her in the "I Believe in Music" video (shot in the University of Calabar staff quarters, where I did live at the time). I thought that she thought she was all that. In retrospect, I guess she was just really sheltered; almost nobody was allowed into their compound unless you were going into Luciana Hair Salon (the small beauty parlor Mrs. Obot ran out of an extension at the front of the house; my sisters used to get their hair relaxed there occasionally, but not too often because Luciana seemed to be more expensive than most other salons and kind of cliquish, too), and I don't think she was encouraged to play with other kids in the neighborhood, even though she clearly wanted to.

Taking what I know about the Obots' business instincts into account, I can imagine that the goal was for the record to appeal to as wide (and young) of an audience as possible, and so they contracted the hottest producer in Nigeria for the job. And instead of Sammy Obot's familiar dance band highlife you get Jake Sollo's late-period technofunk, with Obot singing in Efik and English.

The sleeve shows Obot brandishing his axe, but he doesn't play a single note on the entire album. What little trumpet there is, is credited to Roxy Edet; Jake Sollo handles synth sax and all other synthesizers, programming and arrangements. The rest of the musical crew is made up of regular session players associated with Sollo productions during his Onitsha/Awka period: guitarist Eddy "Pollo" Neesackey, bassist Ernest Mensah, and background vocalists Veno Marioghae, Al Jackson Nnakwe, Mary Udekwu, Nkem "Ozzobia" Njoku and Murphy Williams (formerly of Apostles of Aba).

Taken all together, it adds up to a rather... interesting musical experience. I'll admit that it's somewhat surreal hearing one of the legends of dance band highlife singing an interpolation of "Don't Look Any Further" on "Mbon Sca Re," but it's not like he abandons his roots completely--if you listen closely to the title track, you might notice that underneath the glossy synth production, it's an old-fashioned highlife in the Ghanaian style, with the double handclaps and the palm wine guitar licks. (Perhaps it qualifies as burger highlife?)

I'm not sure how I Believe in Music was received in the rest of the country, but I can say with certainty that it got a lot of play in Calabar and became something of a sentimental classic. When I found this record last summer, even Koko--Koko, who usually resents my obsession with tracking down these old records--cackled with delight when I brought it back the house and listened to it from beginning to end, singing along gleefully.


I don't know if Sammy Obot is still around and/or active, but big ups to the master!

(I apologize for the roughness of these tracks, but just look at the sleeve and believe me when I tell you I literally dug it out of the ground.)

Sammy Obot - "Mbon Sca Re"
Sammy Obot - "Edue Ukot Akpa Itong"
Sammy Obot - "I Believe in Music"

EDIT: There was some sloppy editing at the beginning and end of "Edue Ukot Akpa Itong," but I've fixed it now.

Still on that Old Calabar tip...

The Calabar of my childhood was not today's affectedly quaint, glossily-packaged tourist trap but a city lost in time.

Back then, the town's strong connection to the past was not yet exploited as a marketing hook. In fact, it often seemed like an oppressive burden--weighing it down, dragging it back and keeping it perpetually out of step with the rest of the country. It was a ghost town where shadows of the glorious path were an everyday, almost suffocating presence.

I became aware of this soon after we moved into town. I was sitting in the Volvo with my dad, parked on Calabar Road while we waited for my mother who had gone up the street to Uruawatt (Watt Market, named for George Watts, the Liverpudlian merchant who helped establish Calabar as a major trading post in the 1880s). Here, in the heart of historic Old Calabar, surrounded by dusty, colonial architecture, my eye was drawn to the central post office (built in 1891, it was the oldest post office in Nigeria--and believe me, you could tell just by looking at it)--or rather, to the garish posters plastered on its outside wall. Most of them advertised the latest Bollywood and Bruceploitation extravaganzas screening at Patsol Cinema, but a couple of them were slightly faded placards that looked like they had been up for maybe a few months, announcing an upcoming performance by someone called Rex Lawson.

"Who is Rex Lawson?" I asked my dad.

"He was a musician who was very popular all over Nigeria," he said. "He's dead now."

"When did he die?"

"A while ago... During The War. Or shortly afterward. I think it was 1971."

I should mention at this point that this conversation was taking place in the year 1981. But that was Old Calabar for you: trapped in a twilight zone where Rex Lawson had never died and neither had horn band ballroom highlife, despite the rest of the country having agreed that it was yesterday's news ten or thirteen years earlier.

And so a youth would hear songs from the album Ekausen by local musician Bassey Archibong played on Cross River Radio almost every morning while getting ready for school. This is another record that I pretty much note-for-note, beat-for-beat.

Of course, listening to it now I am a thousand times more appreciative of it. As I've said before, I used to think of all of this Calabar brass band stuff as "old man music," but knowing what I know now, I recognize that there is a lot more than simple nostalgia happening on this record. There is a youthful vitality that differentiates it from the elegant languor of old-timers like Inyang Henshaw and it does acknowledge various developments that occurred in music since the end of The War. Some of Archibong's guitar licks evoke the Ikwokilikwo, craze and the drums and especially the keyboards on "Nsese Owo," "Nne Nne" and title track tip their hats to Sonny Okosuns' Ozziddi beat.

(In that regard--the carrying forth of dance band highlife traditions for a new generation--the music of Calabar bore more than a slight resemblance to the Ghanaian music scene, which is probably appropriate as there were so many Ghanaians living in Calabar in those days. Until 1984 most of my friends were Kwekus, Kwabenas and Kofis.)

I wonder if they still play music like this in Calabar. I heard some performed by a youth group at Calabar's iconic Qua Iboe Church last summer, and it was quite heartwarming hearing those kids swinging to that old-timey rhythm on their horns, but I don't know how much radio play this stuff gets,

Ah, well... Thank God for these fragile vinyl memories.

(I really wish I had gotten a photo of those Rex Lawson posters, by the way.)

BASSEY ARCHIBONG - EKAUSEN (MARTINS, MBLP 1005, 1982)

SIDE ONE:
1. Ekausen
2. Nsese Owo
3. Ufandi

SIDE TWO:
4. Nne Nne
5. Okukosong Iwana
6. Idofo Oro

Ndito Efik isong o!

That's a shout-out to my Calabar peoples.

I was quite delighted when I found this LP--Well, actually I didn't exactly recognize it, but I figured I'd pick it up since already had another Isaiah Dickson album and I dug the very modern cream-colored leisure suit he's sporting on the cover.

When I got it home though, I found that I knew every single song on the album by heart! This whole album got a lot of play on Cross River Radio when I was in primary school.

This is some correct Calabar music, reflecting the area's strong legacy of horn-laden dance band highlife, and reaching even deeper into the culture on the track "Mbre Isong," which takes traditional Ekpe songs of the kind you can see performed here by Cuban Abakua musician Enyenison Enkama





and transmutes them into a mean afrobeat groove.

The album is immaculately produced by the legendary Chris Ajilo and is presented here in its entirety for your listening pleasure.

ISADICO DANCE BAND OF NIGERIA led by ISAIAH DICKSON - EMEM... (FONTANA, FTLP 152, 1982)

SIDE ONE:
1. Emem-Da Yami
2. Ikim Ebot

SIDE TWO:
3. Mbre Isong
4. Yere Akam

Dove's Golden Voice

Have I ever mentioned that Maxwell Udoh is one of my favorite Nigerian singers?

I can't even make out what the hell he is saying more than half the time but there is something very appealing about the tension of his voice--the slightly hollow vocal timbre and plain-spoken, no-frills delivery. His burning sincerity was perfectly suited for the super-earnest style of Doves, for whom he sang lead vocals for a while (replacing Cameroonian singer Lawrence Nsoesie Ebanga, who died in an accident on the infamous Njaba Bridge in 1976) before going solo in 1982 at the age of 21.

Maxwell Udoh was not the kind of singer who was ever really "cool"--in fact, he was always very "local" or "bush," if you will. But while you could talk all day about his lack of polish or suaveness as an artist, there was no way you could argue with the persuasive power of his highlife calypso dance anthems.

In the late 80s, when reggae became the big thing, he dropped his trademark honorific "Dove's Golden Voice," and donned a beret and fatigues, billing himself as "Rasman Maxwell and his Masses Militia Band."

Apparently, he's still out there doing his thing:



Good for him. I was never that crazy about his reggae stuff, but these joints here (from his second solo LP, 1983's Don't Make Me Wait Too Long) are still the jams for me:

Maxwell Udoh - "Let's Dance Together"
Maxwell Udoh - "Baby Bye Bye"

Doves.

(Someone requested The Doves' The Lord is My Shepherd in the comments, but it might be a while before I can rip that... So I hope this does the trick for now.)

Like The Apostles, The Doves (or The Doves of Calabar) were frequently invoked sans the The in their name, bestowing them with a certain ethereal aura (and potentially engendering latter-day confusion with a really deck English rock band).

Also like The Apostles, I thought they were a gospel group for a while--but I think I can get a pass on that account because most of their songs did feature a strong spiritual redolence in both music and lyrics. Harmonically and melodically, they were driven by a slightly melancholic undertow, and the vocals had a certain shrillness to them that was characteristic of the Nigerian Christian music of the time.

This is some Sunday afternoon music. Like when you'd come home from Sunday school and gobble down your lunch and run over to your best friend's house and push the doorbell, but nobody would answer. So you'd push it again and still nobody would answer. You'd know someone was home, though, because you could hear muffled voices and wah wah wah sounds coming from within.

So you'd take a deep breath and ring the bell a third time. The door would swing open and you'd instantly regret it; there's your friend's mother, still dressed in her church clothes but her eyes flaring with distinctly unChristian contempt.

Da, my friend, why are you ringing my bell anyhow! she'd spit.

You'd probably been hoping your best friend's brother, or at least the housegirl would answer the door, but his mother? Negotiating a conversation with other people's parents can be like trying to defuse a ticking bomb; trip the wrong circuit and you're blown to smithereens.

Sorry, ma! you'd quickly gulp.

Good afternoon, ma! you'd nervously add after a moment, making sure to sound off the salutation loud and clear because you remembered that the first time you met your friend's mother--when you came over to collaborate on a Geography homework project--she'd hadn't heard you greet her good afternoon and your friend later told you that his mother didn't like you because she'd felt you lacked home training.

What are you looking for! she'd bark.

You'd ask her if it was okay for your friend to come out and play, adopting that supplicating manner that parents seemed to find so satisfying. Behind her, you can see a few grownups in the parlour, drinking Champion ("The beer for winners! Have a Champ, BE a Champ!") out of dimpled-glass steins, and chortling in Annang. You notice that the wah wah wah you heard earlier comes from the TV: the day's transmission hasn't yet started and the screen beams out the vivid color bars of a test pattern, overlaid with keening, plaintive music.

He is eating! your best friend's mother snaps. Wait here on the verandah! We have guests!

So you'd sit on the verandah and wait.

After a while, your friend would come out, his hand crusted with eba and afang soup, saying Hold on let me wash my hand and come!

While you wait for him to return, it might occur to you guys have been best friends for a long time--almost two years--and he practically lives at your house. He's cool with your parents, he eats lunch at your house on schooldays, he watches CHiPs with you on Saturday afternoon, running around the living room pretending to be Ponch & Jon and jumping all up on your mom's good furniture. And yet, in all that time, you've never actually set foot in his house. (Not counting the two or three times you were allowed to sneak into the kitchen through the back door to drink a glass of ice water between backyard sessions of "Police & Thief.") You're always waiting on the verandah.

The door opens and you hear your best friend talking to his mother in Annang. Years later, when you remember this scene, you might recall that as your best friend closed the door behind him, his mother muttered something about unege--the word by which they disparagingly refer to the Igbos, a tribe that many Nigerians view as the repository of most of the world's venality and duplicity. A tribe that, coincidentally, you happen to belong to.

But this probably won't resonate with you for a few more years. At the moment, you're just hoping that your best friend has at least tried to explain to his mother that you actually did say good afternoon to her that day of the Geography assignment but she didn't hear you because she was busy yelling at the driver for leaving the gate open.

You'd feel your best friend's damp hand smack you on the back as he shouted Okay, let's play CI5! And then he'd run down the steps trumpeting the theme from The Professionals.

You'd watch him racing down the street, steering an imaginary Ford Capri. After a moment, you'd run after him.

In the scenario outlined above, the music playing over the test pattern on the TV in the parlour would have probably been from The Doves' I Seek To Know This World.

The Doves - "Strange Land"
The Doves - "I Shall Be Free"
The Doves - "Lawrence Rest In Peace"

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.



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*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.

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*)

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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.)