Back into 45 bin again

Wrinkar Experience - "Soundway"

This is the B-side to "Fuel for Love," as heard on the already-posted first Flashback compilation. (Did the label take its name from this track?)

More Ofo from the 45 bin

"Let's Go Where the Action Is"

and on the B-side...

"The Book"

I always found it kind of interesting the way Larry made this song pronouncing the Bible to be "the Truth" when just two years earlier he was exhorting "Allah Wakbarr." But that's African musicians for you... They're always ready and willing to tailor their work to the needs of any audience!

A quick quickie from Ofo the Black Company

This 1972 fuzz-rocker sounds a lot like Ofo's popular "Allah Wakbarr" and is in fact the B-side of that 1972 single.

R.I.P. Larry Ifediorama.

Ofo the Black Company - "Beautiful Daddy"

Erykah Badu stays being the shit

Apart from Cody ChesnuTT, she remains my favorite contemporary artist working in the R&B/soul idiom, or whatever you want to call it. Sure, in recent years she has pulled a couple of stunts that have made me slightly question my devotion for her, but in the end, her wit, her creativity, her fearlessness, her goddamn flyness have always won me over.

One thing I've always loved from her right from the beginning is that she's a much underrated conceptualist and director of music videos, and I'm feeling her new one, "Honey":



The compositing seems just a teensy bit dodgy, but man, she is so fly.

And maybe I'm too much of a record store nerd, but I'm tickled pink (not literally, obviously) by all the cratedigger culture inside jokes and shout outs in there.

I wonder if MTV and BET will even bother to play this.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to her upcoming album, New Amerykah.

Lome ladies of song

Just wanted to quickly share this cool video I stumbled upon:



An October 2006 rehearsal of a theatre troupe in Lome, Togo, featuring the grand dame of Togolese music, Julie Akofa Akoussah. Man, I could listen to her piercing, haunting soprano all day! Sadly, Akofa Akoussah passed away a few months after this footage was shot, in April 2007. She was 57.

It's easy to forget how relatively young she was, since she exerted a presence on the Togolese music scene for so long. She was only 16 when she began her professional career in 1966, representing Togo at the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal and spanned five decades as a respected singer, songwriter and presenter on radio and television.

Check out these tracks poached from our friend Pieter's excellent (though infrequently updated) Sea Never Dry blog

Julie Akofa Akoussah - "I Tcho Tchass"
Julie Akofa Akoussah - "La Lem"

and then check out Akofa Akoussah's site.

But Julie Akofa was not the only Togolese chanteuse whose career was launched on that Dakar stage; 21-year-old Bella Bellow also represented Togo at the festival and became a legend almost overnight. As her country's favorite singer and the one with the greatest chances for international success, she hooked up in 1968 with the ambitious Paris-based Togolese producer Gérard Akueson, who set out to position her as the next Miriam Makeba.

Akueson's aesthetic seemed to be based on the goal of packaging African music for upmarket European audiences, with snazzy arrangements, Broadway-ready choruses and Ipi Tombi-esque exotic ambience, as heard on Akue releases such as

Bella Bellow - "Bem-Bem"
Bella Bellow - "O Senye"

and "Zelie":



Bellow parted ways with Akueson in 1971 and returned to Togo, but not before she recorded some grittier sides with Manu Dibango, such as

Bella Bellow - "Dasi Ko"

(Akueson, for his part, quickly rebounded from the loss of Bellow, embarking upon a long musical and matrimonial relationship with the young Congolese diva Abeti Masikini.)

Tragically, Bella Bellow's meteoric rise was cut short in 1975, when she perished in an automobile crash at the age of 27. She has remained a sainted figure in the musical canon of Togo and also in neighboring Benin, where singers such as Angelique Kidjo cite her as a major influence.

Vive les reines!

Afrikan Boy is back!

His flow is getting better, you fink?



...Well, when he's sober, anyway.



The culinary obsession in his lyrics is interesting.

Gnonnas Pedro -Dadjes encore!

Because you demanded it (well... b2v did, anyway!)...

GNONNAS PEDRO & HIS DADJES BAND - GNONNAS PEDRO & HIS DADJES BAND VOL. 1 (WORLD WIDE MUSIC, 1979, WWM 1 L)

SIDE ONE
1. Kalapchap

SIDE TWO
1. African Solidarity
2. La Musica en Verite
3. Maria Elena

Gnonnas Pedro: Voir le comédien, le musicien, le magicien

For some reason, when I was younger, every time I saw a "Gnonnas Pedro & his Dadjes" on a record sleeve, I read it as "Gnonnas Pedro & his Dandies." Looking back on it now, it seems somewhat appropriate. Dig: Yesterday I was reading The Painter of Modern Life, Charles Baudelaire's collection of essays explicating, among other things, the worldview of the dandy. This passage leapt out at me:

In this context, pray interpret the word 'artist' in a very narrow sense, and the expression 'man of the world' in a very broad one. By 'man of the world', I mean a man of the whole world, a man who understands the world and the mysterious and legitimate reasons behind all its customs; by 'artist', I mean a specialist, a man tied to his palette like a serf to the soil. M. G. does not like being called an artist. Is he not justified to a small extent? He takes an interest in everything the world over, he wants to know, understand, assess everything that happens on the surface of our globe.

Well, damn, I thought. That kinda describes Gnonnas Pedro, doesn't it?

Beninois singer, dancer, bandleader, guitarist, trumpeter and saxophionist Gnonnas Pedro was not an "artist" in the sense of being a specialist in one any one discipline, and if he was anything, it was certainly a man of the world. A dazzling showman who hewed to the old school entertainment ethos of giving the people want they want. You wanted to hear a bolero in Spanish? Gnonnas Pedro would sing it for you. French chanson? He was up to the task. American soul? Congolese rumba? Nigerian-style highlife? Your favorite country ballad? No matter the song or the style, you could count on Gnonnas Pedro to give it the old college try. At the peak of his popularity, Pedro's Dadjes were known as "the African band that speaks every language." His forte, however, remained crackling Afro-Cuban grooves as well as agbadja, a modernized form of Fon folkloric music.

The Republic of Benin never made a major impact on African or world music (or World Music™) culture. Perhaps due to being a tiny Francophone state wedged between the two Anglophone giants, Nigeria and Ghana, the nation was never able to produce and forcefully project anything like juju, soukous, benga or mbalax--a unique, homegrown style that changed the way the world listened to music and put its country of origin on the musical map.* What Benin did have in spades, though, was a slew of industrious, fanatically committed orchestras that mined borrowed styles like highlife, funk, jerk, jive and jazz for every drop of sweat, swing and soul they could wring out of them. Thanks to the tireless archaeological efforts of Soundway and Frank (not to mention Samy at Analog Africa), Cotonou is becoming a musical mecca for groove cognoscenti and the numerous works of Beninois bands like TP Orchestre Poly-Rythmo and Rego et Ses Commandos are now not only well known, but also keenly coveted.

It wasn't always like that, though. But while most of the Beninois bands toiled in obscurity, Gnonnas Pedro's stylistic versatility and affable stage presence earned him popularity across West Africa. His Yoruba highlife tune "Feso Jaiye" even became a standard among Nigerian musicians.

Gnonnas Pedro finally got to shine on a larger stage in the mid-90s, when he was recruited to replace recently-deceased singer Pape Seck in the Afro-Nuyorican salsa supergroup Africando, recording and touring with the band until he succumbed to colon cancer in 2004 at the age of 61.

This album here is a collection of covers that offers a sampling of his musical polymathy, with Pedro taking on everything from Merle Travis's "Dark as a Dungeon" to the cabaret of Charles Aznavour. Pedro was a great admirer of the French crooner (which whom he was privileged to record a single with in 1964) and there is a certain poignancy to his renditions of "À ma fille" and especially "Les comédiens" (here listed as "Les Commedies").

The lyrics of the latter song seem to describe Pedro's own metier to a degree: "Come see the actors, the musicians, the magicians..." On stage, Gnonnas Pedro was a musician and a magician, but perhaps beyond all that, an actor. His style-switching constituted more than just the essay of genres, but a deliberate reinvention of the self. When Pedro declares "Ladies and gentlemen... Now Gnonnas Pedro is gonna be James Brown!" before launching into a charmingly awkward phonetic reading of "I Got You," he dresses himself up in a constructed identity through music much as the dandy does through sartorial artifice.

And so, walking or quickening his pace, he goes his way, for ever in search. In search of what? We may rest assured that this man, such as I have described him, this solitary mortal endowed with an active imagination, always roaming the great desert of men, has a nobler aim than that of the pure idler, a more general aim, other than the fleeting pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that indefinable something we may be allowed to call modernity...

****

GNONNAS PEDRO & HIS DADJES BAND - GNONNAS PEDRO & HIS DADJES BAND VOL. 2 (WORLD WIDE MUSIC, 1980, WWM 4 L)

SIDE ONE
1. I Got You
2. A Ma Fille
3. Les Commedies

SIDE TWO
1. Massaniyo
2. Dark as a Dungeon

*Frank does, however, strongly maintain the singular belief that the roots of the Afrobeat genre lie in Benin and not Nigeria. It's an interesting theory, actually, and one worth investigating.

Lights... Camera...

I think the selection of this particular album was influenced by the fact that I hardly have time to post at all these days, so I deliberately chose a band I know next to nothing about so I wouldn't have to write too much about them!

Next to nothing, I said; here's the little I do know:

Aktion (sometimes known amongst fans as "The Actions") was an Eastern band based in Warri. Lemmy Faith was the group's leader and other members included Renny Pearl, Essien Akpabio and respected drummer Ben Alaka (who, curiously, is credited as a "guest" on this album).

An earlier incarnation of the band--under the name Action 13--released two singles in 1973: "Active Action" and "More Bread To The People".

Well, that's about all I know. Perhaps some of the veterans like Da Hurricane Man and Ehirim can further enlighten us on this band.

Update 1/18/08: And sure enough, Bro. Ehirim came through for us with some background on Aktion. I'll reprint the info here for those who don't read the comments:

Like you mentioned, Aktion, Action and Aktion 13 as known in some cases was a Warri-based band that played gigs all around the Eastside. Originally, the band was initiated in Calabar by the duo of Essien Akpabio and Lemmy Faith.

The band was resident at then famous spot in Warri called Lido Night Club and Restaurant where they entertained civil servants and off duty officers during happy hours known as "Afternoon Jump." During the festivities (Christmas and New Year holidays), the group embarked on a road trip playing gigs at college campuses, community centers and local villages to entertain Eastside students who were home for the holidays.

And of course, Ben Alaka who was the best drummer of that era was an in-session man but played more for Aktion when they were resident at Lido for the "Afternoon Jump" jam sessions. The band's early years between 1976 and 1978 was a blast which catapulted the group to the top during the 70s hippie era.

However, the band's success was shortlived when music of the era crossed over and the inability of band leader Lemmy Faith to compete with bands from the West resulting to music fans relocating to the West in search for better lives, and in some cases, academic pursuits elsewhere.

Ben Alaka still lives in Warri while Essien Akpabio relocated to his home base of Calabar. Lemmy Faith, I think, and as of the last time I heard about him was still producing.

Thanks, Ambrose!

AKTION - GROOVE THE FUNK (CLOVER, 1975, CXL 2001)

SIDE 1
1. Groove the Funk
2. Sugar Daddy
3. I Don't Have to Cry
4. My Baby

SIDE 2
1. I've Got To Hope For Tomorrow
2. Masquerade
3. I'm in Love
4. Tell Me Baby
5. Play With Me

Produced by Ben Okonkwo of Ben (Nig.) Ltd.

I had to leave off three songs because I couldn't get them to play smoothly even after repeated tries. And it was all the more frustrating because the record isn't really in bad condition, but Aba-based Clover Records had a tendency to press their releases on some of the thinnest, shittiest vinyl known to man, so even the slightest irregularity causes the needle to jump or stick.

Hope the surface noise on "Masquerade" isn't too distracting either, because that's one of the funkier tracks on the album!

Music of many colours

In continuance of the little Victor Uwaifo thing we've been on, I decided to post this offering from the crates, No Palava (or No Palava/Delicate Lover).

I just listened to it this morning for the first time in years and figured it merited sharing, though I must advise that it is from 1984, The Year (in my mind, at least) That Nigerian Music Started To Suck--as such it betrays hints of the glossy yet sterile digital production and cheesy synth sounds that would soon become the industry standard. The songs themselves are pretty good, though: on this album, Uwaifo skips the Edo folklore-based material for poppy songs in English and pidgin, dealing with the vagaries of romantic love. The title track, "No Palava," celebrates rough makeup sex while on the flip side, "Delicate Lover" offers, I guess, the antithesis to that. Actually, now that I think about it, side A sort of represents the "rough" side and side B the "delicate" side.

The liner notes by Dili Uzuka recounts Uwaifo's history and achievements up to that point, including his then-recent honor as a Member of the Order of the Niger. A lot of the other information contained therein is I already went over in my last post, but also one tidbit I forgot to mention: Victor Uwaifo's claim to have created an innovative system of musical notation based on not on notes, but on colors. Specifically, the colors of traditional woven akwete cloth!

SIR VICTOR UWAIFO born on the 1st March 1941, graduate of Graphic and Commercial Art, Yaba College of Technology (1963), had resigned his appointment with the Nigeria Television Service Lagos because he had discovered the relativity between Colours and Music. Elementarily, he explained it thus:

"...take for example BLACK which is the strongest colour: it's [sic] musical interpretation will be DOH, Dominant, which is also the premier musical note.
ME, the Third, is represented by BLUE.
SOL, the Fifth, which harmonizes with all musical notes is WHITE, Neutral, which harmonizes with all colours".

If we struck at Chord of C Major, we'll have a representation like this:

DOH - BLACK
ME - BLUE
SOL - WHITE
DOH - BLACK

A colour out of place in a painting will cause as much unpleasantness as a discordant musical note in a chord. SIR VICTOR UWAFOR'S [sic] inspiration came from the 'rhythmical' colour-weave pattern of the African Akwete Cloth. He says with elation, "I can conveniently marry sight to sound because I 'see in colours' and I can 'hear'.

(Frankly, I never really comprehended Uwaifo's color notation theory, and I doubt anyone else did either, but hey... We're merely mortals!)

Elsewhere, Uzuka exhorts that just as Uwaifo's innovative music withstood the encroachment of soul and pop in the 1960s and 70s, so would it survive the "rasta invasion"--At the time this record was released, reggae was stealthily, steadily creeping up to become Nigeria's predominant pop sound.

Of course, Uwaifo himself had been flirting with reggae rhythms since the mid-70s and includes the sweet lovers tune "Take This Message To My Darling" on this album. Interestingly, the drummer on this session is Black Rice (or Black O'Rice), sticksman in the Benin-originated underground roots reggae band Jahstix. In the mid-80s, Jahstix was set to blow up in a big way, but their album never came out and their lead singer/guitarist Majek Fashek got a solo deal and was prodded into the Next Bob Marley™ fast track. Black Rice later moved to the Netherlands, and last I heard, he was serving a jail term for murder there. (Don't know if it's true, though.)

SIR VICTOR UWAIFO (M.O.N.) - NO PALAVA (POLYGRAM, 1984, POLP 111)

SIDE A
1. No Palava
2. Abana
3. Khakhi Nobi Leather

SIDE B
1. Delicate Lover
2. Take This Message To My Darling
3. Come Into My Life Jejeje

All songs composed and arranged by Sir Victor Uwaifo (M.O.N.)

PERSONNEL
Bass guitar - Tony Bucknor
Percussions - King Pago
Ekwe - Sam Abosei
Drums - Black O'Rice
1st Guitar - Godfrey Okunmwonyi
2nd Guitar - Jerry Moscow
Lead guitar, vocals, keyboards and flute - Sir Victor
Tenor sax - Roy Maco
Tenor sax solos - Christopher Uwaifo, Kojo Ochri
Backing voices - Osayame Uwaifo & Mabel Judith Ezekoka & Christy Odita

A Joromi Production

Ekassa Fever! (Part 2)

(This is cheating, you know... It's really part 1!)

In addition to being one of the flashiest and hardest working Nigerian musicians of the highlife era, Sir Victor Uwaifo was almost certainly the most ingenious. Never content to follow the boilerplate of the highlife mainstream or to slavishly ape imported trends, Uwaifo built his reputation on ostentatious showmanship and the judicious mining of the legends and songs of his native Edo culture, which he repackaged as newfangled pop: modern music of African folklore.



Victor Uwaifo was born in Benin City in 1941. Like Fela, he was born into a family that placed a high premium on education and achievement. As a child, he showed precocious talent in athletics, art and engineering, constructing intricate toy cars and airplanes and even a guitar that used high-tension wires for strings and bicycle spokes for frets. Much to his father's disapproval, he had a "drinkard" at the tavern tune the guitar in exchange for a jug of palmwine, got himself a book on music theory and started teaching himself to play.

In his teens, he was sent off to Lagos to attend the prestigious St. Gregory's College (which later produced bands like Ofege and Grotto), where his time was split between studying, sports, playing with the school band and apprenticing with "the evil genius of highlife," Victor Olaiya and his All-Stars. Upon graduating from Greg's, he won a scholarship to Yaba College of Technology where he studied graphic arts by day and played with dance bandleader E.C. Arinze by night.

After leaving YabaTech in 1964, he took a job working as a graphic artist at NTV Channel 10 in Lagos and formed a band called the New Melodies with whom he performed Bini folk songs. It was during this period, he has long maintained, that he encountered a mami wata, or mermaid, while lounging on Bar Beach. The experience inspired the song "Guitar Boy & Mamywater," a massive hit for Uwaifo's renamed Melody Maestroes.

Another early hit was "Joromi," a dance number that retold the Bini legend of a swaggering wrestler who dared to wrestle spirits and demons in the afterlife and became the first certified gold record in Africa. Uwaifo continued his pattern of drawing from Edo folklore to create custom pop sounds like akwete, mutaba, sassakossa and of course, ekassa.

Uwaifo explained the his modern articulation of the ekassa in John Collins' Musicmakers of West Africa:

In fact I wouldn't say I created Ekassa as it was already here as an indigenous dance of Benin. It was a royal dance performed during the coronation of a new king. Some people thought it an abomination to hear "ekassa" while the king was still alive, but I didn't mind them as the first tune was a brilliant hit and others followed. Ekassa incorporates the beat of the tom-tom and agba drums, Western wind instruments, two guitars and, of course, me on the guitar singing in the Edo language.

Uwaifo rode the style for four or five years, releasing four longplaying Ekassa volumes and several singles between 1971 and 1975.

As might be expected, Uwaifo's appropriation of ancient, and in some cases sacred, songs for the purposes of contemporary dancehall debauchery did not always go down well with the self-appointed guardians of the legacy of the great Benin Empire, but Uwaifo viewed his work as that of a high-tech curator:

They fail to see the foundation of my music is very cultural, as demonstrated in the beat and the lyrics. The fact that I use modern instruments to produce my sound has not altered the basic character of the music, otherwise we might as well argue that a historian writing ancient history with modern tools, like a Parker pen and paper, is a farce. The tools he uses to write history will not alter the facts and dates of the book. We have experimentation and evolution of ancient African cultures and my music is no exception to this.

Victor Uwaifo went on to build hotels and a TV studio, went back to school and got a master's degree in sculpture, established himself as a renowned visual artist, served as a professor at the University of Benin and a commissioner in Edo State, and he still performs regularly. His proteges and followers have included musicians from the Midwest such as Sonny Okosuns, Aigbe and Felix Lebarty and Sir Patrick Idahosa. Still, in characteristic cocky form, Uwaifo shrugs off the idea of naming a successor; even as he continues to refurbish the ancient mythos of Benin, his favorite mythology is that of Sir Victor Uwaifo himself:

Since I don’t believe that a genius ever has a successor, I don’t expect any of my children to succeed me. Let’s compare notes: Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, John Stevenson, did anyone ever succeed them? And back home, has Ghana or Africa ever found another Nkrumah? I am a rare specie, and it’s very unlikely that anyone will ever succeed me. If that happens, then I do not rate a genius.

I am not bothered by this. Even if I get a successor musically what about other fields where I also excelled? I am a writer, publisher, philosopher, a scientist, a painter, sculptor and a musician that plays several musical instruments. I remain the only musician today who invented a double-necked guitar, designed and built his own car. And above all these, I’m still alive. I’m yet to see anyone capable of succeeding me.*

Sir Victor Uwaifo: there can be only one!

(And massive big ups to another singular gentleman: our good friend Zim, who niced us up with this this nicety!)

*quote culled from Nigeriafilms.com.

SIR VICTOR UWAIFO & HIS MELODY MAESTROES - EKASSA - MODERN MUSIC OF AFRICAN FOLKLORE (PHILIPS, 1971, 6361 013(PL))

SIDE A
1. Dododo (Ekassa No. 1)
2. Obodo-Eyo (Ekassa No. 12)
3. Vbakha-Okun (Ekassa No. 10)
4. Iduah (Ekassa No. 18)

SIDE B
1. Obele (Ekassa No. 14)
2. Edede (Ekassa No. 13)
3. Izogie-Eronmwon (Ekassa No. 16)
4. Omoseruwa (Ekassa No. 15)
5. Ogieni (Ekassa No. 17)
6. Ovoramuen II (Ekassa No. 8)

Ofege IV: How Do You Feel

Okay... 2007's got like 30 minutes left; let's see if I can squeeze in one last entry before 2008 and close out the Ofege series with the fourth album, 1978's How Do You Feel.

I've often wondered why this album is rarely mentioned in discussions of Ofege... I guess a lot of people just don't know it exists. But I wouldn't be surprised to find that some degree of rockist snobbery were involved; you know, the "Disco Sucks" variety, the kind that makes heads snicker at BLO's latter albums like Bulky Backside.

But such was the tide of the times; 1978 was a world away from 1973 and even in America, black bands like Funkadelic and the Ohio Players that had erstwhile purveyed raggedly funky rock were shifting their output exclusively towards slicker, more dancefloor-oriented material. As Melvin said to me, "the fuzzbox was out of fashion."

A few weeks ago, I enjoyed a brief chat with Ofege bassist Paul Alade. I found him to be a very charming and affable fellow with a markedly philosophical perspective on his days of pop stardom. He swiftly rejected the suggestion that How Do You Feel? represented the band searching for a new sound or trying to fit in, asserting that it was "just us being us."

Interestingly, Alade confirmed my earlier suspicions that the sound of the second album, Last of the Origins was a record company-mandated attempt to steer the band in a more polished, mainstream direction ("To them, we were just some stupid kids," he snorted) and recalled Higher Plane Breeze as a return to the roots, free from label manipulation. The difference in sound from their earlier recordings he attributed to the band's burgeoning maturity and changes in their musical environment.

"Right back to Try and Love," Alade explained. "if you listen to any of our records, you can hear our influences... You can tell what we were listening to at the time, whether it was Santana and jimi Hendrix, or Osibisa... Sly & the Family Stone and everything else.

"By the time you get to How Do You Feel, we're really still doing the same thing, playing our same sound, but also absorbing some of the other things that were happening at the time. Like the disco sounds you hear on the record. And reggae was a big thing happening at the time. But when you listen to songs like 'World at Peace' and 'Frustration,' that's just the basic, roots Ofege sound."

Judging from a song like "Bomp Your Booty," I'm going to guess that they were listening to Kool & the Gang and Ohio Players. Probably some Akie Deen stuff too, as evidenced by the soca-ish intro of "Check It Out," which leads into a lean, angular groove that sounds like it was ripped from Jake Sollo's late-70s playbook (as do, unfortunately, the disco hoots). Sollo himself--recently having partaken in Kiki Gyan's mutiny from Osibisa--plays lead guitar on the album.

The Ofege lineup here is pared down to its core: M-Ike on drums, Paul on bass, Melvin on rhythm guitar ("Today, we probably would do everything by ourselves," Alade reflects. "But back then you needed to hire extra guys to play live").

As on Higher Plane Breeze, Robert Bailey, late of Osibisa, mans the keys; another Osibisa insurgent, Kofi Ayivor, aids on the congas; and the synth textures of Francis Monkman, last heard on Last of the Origins, are back again.

I forgot to ask Alade about the identity of "Majek," who produced the last two Ofege albums, but I must say I like the job he did on them. As much as I love the rugged stonerism of Try and Love, the Ofege songs I return to most are the more melodic groovers like "H.P.B." and this album's "Take Your Mind Away" that employ the acute guitar attack in service of fluid danceability. The title track is a sexy rub-a-dub killer, too, perfect for win'ing yuh waist pon the gyal or bwoy of your choice!

How Do You Feel does project interesting new directions for the band, but we would never discover whence those paths would lead, as after this LP, Ofege was no more.

I asked Paul Alade if they went into How Do You Feel knowing that it was going to be the final album.

"No, not at all," he replied. "We would have liked to keep going... When we were in school, we all lived in different parts of the country, but every summer we would try to get together and [record an album]. By the time of How Do You Feel, school was over, and we just went in different directions. The three of us were able to come together to make this album, but after that Ike went to school in England, and then I left to England too for a while, then to the States. And I've been here ever since."

Melvin Noks released two seldom-heard solo albums as Melvin Ukachi, Evolution (1982) and Ofege as One (1984) before packing it in.

They all admit to missing it, though, and they're all down to put the band back together... but only if they can get a fair deal this time. So if anybody out there has the wherewithal to make that happen, wouldn't it be cool to be able to write another chapter of this story in 2008?

(There's a little surface noise on this record, y'all... Especially on side B. One thing I have definitely got to do in 2008 is invest in a vacuum vinyl cleaner!)

Happy new year, everybody!

OFEGE - HOW DO YOU FEEL (POLYDOR/PHONOGRAM, 1978, POLP 030)

Paul "B-Tee" Alade - Bass, vocals
Melvin "Karchi" Noks - Main vocals, rhythm guitar
Mike "Ike" Meme- Drums, congas, percussion & vocals
Jake Sollo - Solo guitar
Francis Monkman - Strings & keyboards
Robert Bailey - Keyboards
Kofi Ayivor - Congas
Miranda - Violin
Ann - Vocals

Special thanks to Georgie Mann for spreading his good vibes

All songs composed and arranged by Ofege
Produced by Majek

SIDE A
1. World at Peace
2. Burning Jungle
3. Check It Out
4. Bomp Your Booty
5. Take Your Mind Away

SIDE B
1. How Do You Feel?
2. Ideal Situation
3. Naira Power
4. Nature Queen
5. Frustration

(Pardon the rough cover scan... I'm in a bit of a hurry, but I'll fix it later)

Ekassa fever!

When I posted that Sir Victor Uwaifo's Greatest Hits comp a few months ago, I said that I didn't think it was representative of his best work, but I didn't say what I thought was.

For the record... This:



For my money, Uwaifo's early-70s "Ekassa" recordings captured the most exciting synthesis of his highlife, cubano, Bini and soul & rock influences, with the "Guitar Boy" getting flossy on the axe, drums, organ, flute and xylophone.

SIR VICTOR UWAIFO & HIS MELODY MAESTROES - EKASSA VOL. 2 - TALK OF THE TOWN (PHILIPS, 1973, 6361 033 (PL))

SIDE A
1. Ekassa 28 (Ebibi)
2. Ekassa 34 (Igiodo Giodo)
3. Ekassa 31 (Isede)
4. Ekassa 32 (Votumamuoga)
5. Ekassa 25 (Aiworo)

SIDE B
1. Ekassa 38 (Ame'sihion Segbe)
2. Ekassa 24 (Kikikri)
3. Ekassa 26 (Akhuankhuan)
4. Ekassa 35 (Sumwen-Sowa)
5. Ekassa 29 (Osulelelemule)

Yeah, if I were to select any Uwaifo records for a collection of "classics," I'd definitely have to choose some of these. Here are some (relatively) recent video clips of the perennial showman performing "Ekassa":

Wake Up Your Mind

Yes... Back to business.

The past week or so has been so busy that I've hardly had time to check out my favorite blogs, let alone post anything on this one, so yeah... I know I've got a backlog of requests to get to.

I promised my man Calumbinho that I was going to throw up Joni Haastrup's Wake Up Your Mind like three or four days ago and my pal Ofon has been waiting for Haastrup's Monomono albums for months now--one of the reasons I delayed on the Monomono stuff was because I had been trying to secure an interview with Mr. Haastrup, and that hasn't quite worked out yet. I'll keep trying, but in the meantime, I guess I can at least make Calumbinho happy!

Let's see... What to say about this record? Well, it's the one and only solo album by one of Nigeria's most respected and beloved musicians. While Joni Haastrup is mostly unknown to kids who came of age in the 1980s (my generation), among the folks who were grooving in the late 60s and the 70s, the mere mention of his name is apt to elicit responses of tremendous affection and awe. I've gotten the sense that more than any other single musician, Joni Haastrup embodied the all aspirations of Nigerian music in the post-highlife era.

Earlier in his career, he was billed as "Johnny Haastrup"; the later "Joni" spelling appears to be a tip of the hat to Jimi Hendrix, and like Hendrix, Haastrup exuded the aura of an individual who just has music spontaneously pouring out of his soul. He started performing as a teenager in the town of Ilesa, singing in school bands with his older brother, guitarist Segun Haastrup. During a trip to Lagos, the brothers tried out for immortal bandleader Bobby Benson's Jam Session Orchestra; neither of them made the cut, but Joni brought the house down with his animated Chuck Berry impression. Soon thereafter, legendary trumpeter Victor Olaiya witnessed Joni's energetic dancing and singing in a high school drama group and was sufficiently impressed to recruit the youngster to join his Cool Cats band (in which no less a personage than Fela Ransome-Kuti had apprenticed in the late 1950s). This was 1965 after all; the rhythm of Lagos nightlife was changing. "Beat music"--rock & roll and soul--was seeping into the scene and Olaiya (true to his reputation as "the evil genius of highlife") presciently realized that he would have to incorporate the new foreign sounds. The Cool Cats became The All Stars Soul International, which Joni Haastrup fronted for a year and a half.

In 1966, saxophonist Orlando Julius (a contemporary of Fela, credited in some quarters as the true originator of the term "Afro-beat music") released the album Super Afro Soul on which Joni Haastrup featured as a guest lead vocalist on a few tracks, such as "Bojubari" and a "copyright" of the Temptations' "My Girl." The album was a momentous success, helping to usher in the ascendance of soul music and cement Joni Haastrup's reputation as "Nigeria's Soul Brother Number One."

During the war, beat groups prevailed: Segun Bucknor & his Soul Assembly, The Strangers, The Clusters (whose lineup included future BLO members Laolu Akins and Mike Odumosu and, briefly, Joni Haastrup) and The Hykkers. It was with the latter band that Haastrup was sitting in when he caught the attention of Ginger Baker, on his first visit to Nigeria in 1970. Baker was so besotted by Joni's electrifying stage presence that he snatched him off to London to join Ginger Baker's Air Force. Baker envisioned him playing a multiinstrumental role, which was initially a surprise to Joni:

There was a lot of misconception about what I could do. When I went with Ginger, he saw me singing. He never saw me play an instrument, but he had this great belief within himself that I could play any instrument. So he wanted me to play the organ because Steve Winwood was leaving. And he also wanted me to play guitar because Denny Laine was leaving. So I got into London on a, I think on a Tuesday. The first gig was on Thursday. I have never heard the music of the band. I don't know what they sound like. I don't know anybody in the band but Ginger. I've never even heard Ginger play drums face-to-face except on record. He wants me to play organ and guitar and sing in this big ten-piece band with Graham Bond and Bud Beadle and all these people. And I uh, and I said, "Well, Ginger I don't really play any of these instruments. I'm just a singer." And he goes, "Hey! You can do it. You can fuckin' do it." [laughter]

It's a testament to Haastrup's innate musicality that, despite his initial reservations, two days later he was playing guitar and keyboards in the Air Force!

Haastrup returned to Nigeria later in the year, playing the keys for Baker again in Salt.



(Yes, I've posted this video before, but I wanted to point out something I didn't mention before: Mr. Muttonchops in the red tank top? That's Tunde Kuboye, later of Jazz 38 fame.)

Joni hooked up with Kenneth Okulolo, who had played bass in Olaiya's All Stars during Haastrup's tenure with the band. He served as Haastrup's co-pilot in Monomono, one of the earliest afro-rock ensembles to capitalize on the success of Osibisa. The band's 1972 debut album, Give The Beggar a Chance, was met with massive success in Nigeria and beyond, and the 1974 followup, Dawn of Awareness was picked up for international distribution by Capitol Records.

Confident that Monomono was about to cross over into the big time, Haastrup traveled to the US to urge Capitol to back a tour for the band. Capitol balked, and Haastrup returned to Nigeria dejected. He made another attempt in 1976, but when it became clear that Capitol was not interested in promoting them, Monomono disbanded. It was at this point that he recorded his solo album, with some assistance from some of his bandmates.

Wake Up Your Mind was released in 1978, the year after FESTAC, so it's unsurprising that it finds Haastrup in a pan-Africanist mood. In the music, one can hear echoes of Stevie Wonder, Kool & the Gang, Mighty Sparrow and even KC & the Sunshine Band's Bahamian junkanoo-inspired disco, as the lyrics exhort the unity of the African disapora. The album is definitely designed for maximum crossover effect, but Haastrup has never been shy about his ambitions to transcend the conventional ideas of what an African musician should sound like:

[We need to] show the African musician as an artist first, then as an African... We can be pop, we can be rock, we can be jazz, we can be soul, we can be everything because in actual fact we have [made] an incredible contribution to all of that already. So why deny ourselves, or why deny us, the opportunity to cross over into the commercial industry.

I don't know to what degree the album was successful in penetrating the international market, but after Wake Up Your Mind, Haastrup left Nigeria pretty much for good. He worked as a session musician and producer in London and by the early 80s he was in the Bay Area, fronting Joni Haastrup & the Afrikans and doing more session work (most notably on several Chris Isaak albums from the late 80s up until the mid-90s).

Just yesterday, I was chatting with Calumbinho about Joni Haastrup and he made an interesting observation about Joni's singing. Despite his reputation as a showman, his vocals have a decidedly understated quality to them, and even when if he's singing in Yoruba and you don't understand the lyrics, you can feel the humility, honesty and intense love radiating from his delivery, much like Milton Nascimento. By all accounts, Joni is a really zen dude, and while's he's been a practicing Buddhist for many years, music is his real religion. As he says: "I just want to play my music and make people smile, keep people happy. Not limit myself to what people think I should be."

Today he still lives, plays and teaches in Oakland, California.

JONI HAASTRUP - WAKE UP YOUR MIND (AFRODESIA, 1978, DWAPS 2053)

SIDE ONE
1. Free My People
2. Greetings
3. Wake Up Your Mind

SIDE TWO
1. Champions and Superstars
2. Do the "Funkro"
3. Watch Out

All Joni Haastrup quotes above culled from Breakout: Profiles in African Rhythm, by Gary Stewart, 1992, University of Chicago Press.

Update 1/27/08: Damn... I just noticed that I said the bass player in that clip was Ken Okulolo when I meant to say Tunde Kuboye! Damn... My bad. Wires got crossed there. I've fixed it now, anyway. My apologies for the misinfo!

Ozziddi For Sale

This selection was spurred by an observation Undercover Black Man made in the comments earlier this evening regarding the odd title choice for Yvonne Maha's Child For Sale. I always thought it was an odd title myself, especially since it was hardly reflective--even obliquely--of any content on the album. Then it occurred to me that it might have been a riff on the title of this 1976 album by the album's producer, Sonny Okosuns.

Ozziddi For Sale is mostly a loose Ozziddi band jam session essaying reggae, afrobeat and the trademark Ozziddi sound. The album was a major breakthrough for Sonny, and represented the beginnings of his reinvention as a champion for social justice; the song "Let My People Go" presages the "voice of the downtrodden" persona that would define his music through the 70s and 80s, and even hints at the Christian voice that would become his emphasis in the 90s.

Here's two tracks from the album:

Festival of the Hunters

Let My People Go

Twenty-five years ago today

...and then, everything changed.

I still love you, Thriller; you're the tops!

(I should totally be making a full-length post about this, but time's tight this weekend... Maybe later!)

On: The Quincy Jones of Nigeria, woman singers and the London Era of Nigerian music

When I first started seriously getting into music around 1982 or so, like most people, my interest in various records was based upon the appeal (vocal and/or visual) of the singer. I maintained massive mental inventories of my favorite vocalists; when required to fill in the "Fave Singer!" category in slum books, I took five or six single-spaced, tightly-packed lines to list them all. But I soon learned that this adoration of singers was the way that small boys--or girls in general--approached music. Within the esoteric community of serious soundheads (an all-male fraternity, of course), singers were admired, sure... but ultimately, the name and face shouting from the front of the record sleeve was much less impressive than the name listed under the credit "Produced By."

When I hung out with music hipsters in their teens and early twenties, their conversations were just inscrutable to me--hours of nothing but Leon Sylvers III produced this and Mizell Brothers are in the studio with so-and-so and Nile Rodgers should have been behind the boards on that session and Narada Michael Walden is a very underrated producer... What lingers in my memory above all is the hushed reverence that crept into their voices every time anyone uttered the name Randy Muller, like some sacred oath!

Now I didn't know shit about what a producer did: I reckoned he was something like the conductor of an orchestra, but truthfully, I didn't exactly know what a conductor did either. I mean, the musicians already have the sheet music in front of them, right? So what's that jerkoff in tails really doing standing in front of them gesticulating with a stick?

Regardless, I sussed that the producer was somehow the smartest guy in the room; the man who saw the big picture... who made it all happen. Part technician, part musician, part magician. While the singer stood in the studio, emptying her soul into the microphone with an emotional nakedness that would move any onlooking mortal to the point of tears, on the other side of the glass, the producer was mostly unaffected, entrenched as he was in manipulating the knobs and meters on his expansive mixing desk, obsessively committed to achieving the sonic vision in his ears.

The only producer I really knew or cared much about was Quincy Jones; he had produced Off The Wall, after all, and at that point, my world pretty much revolved around Michael Jackson. The next producer I took an interest in was one whose name had been popping up with increasing frequency in my hipster friends' conversations and among the supercool DJs on Calabar's Cross River Radio: Lemmy Jackson.

I admit it: the only reason I cared about Lemmy Jackson at first was because I thought he might be a heretofore undiscovered member of the seemingly ever-expanding Jackson clan. I got into Millie Jackson for the same reason. (What a rude shock that was!) Millie Jackson was not, of course, any relation to the Jacksons of Gary, Indiana and neither was Lemmy. Lemmy Jackson (born Otu Udofa) was in fact a Nigerian producer, and if you were a Nigerian musician, you weren't shit if he wasn't producing your record. "The Quincy Jones of Nigeria" they called him.

Jackson's rep as "the man with the magic fingers" took off in 1981, a banner year in which three landmark albums bore his production credit: Christy Essien-Igbokwe's Ever Liked My Person?, I Want To Feel Your Love, by Oby Onyioha, and under his own name, Tonight. The latter two were released by Time Communications, a new label established by insurance tycoon Paul Aifuwa of Time Insurance Brokers, who had hired Jackson to serve as in-house producer. Aifuwa envisioned an affair much more upmarket than the average Nigerian record company and even than the multinational labels like Decca West Africa and EMI Nigeria: handsome packaging, lavish production values, proper publishing for the songs... the whole nine.

I'd wager that Aifuwa was inspired in some part by apala star Alhaji Haruna Ishola's Phonodisk Records, which had been the first homegrown "major" label on the continent built from the ground up by indigenous Africans. Phonodisk had not only top-shelf recording and mastering facilities and a reheaarsal studio, but also its own record press and a motel to house talent and personnel during sessions. Phonodisk's first smash was the 1980 album I Need Someone, recorded by a young law student named Kris Okotie, produced by Odion Iruoje and featuring the band BLO (for which Lemmy Jackson was keyboardist) as session players and arrangers. Jackson, sans BLO, had since become the leader of Phonodisk's house band.

Aifuwa entered a partnership with Phonodisk, recording at the company's studios at Ijebu-Ode, Lagos and having Time Communications' records distributed by Phonodisk. However, instead of mixing the records at Phonidisk's facilities, he chose to send the tapes to London for that extra awayan polish. This was hardly an uncommon practice, of course. A good chunk of Nigerian records at the time were mixed and mastered in London. I'm not completely sure why, as there were many facilities where the records could be competently mastered back home in Nigeria... I guess they did it just because they could. These were prosperous times: civilian government had returned after more than a decade of military rule; the oil boom was over, but the Nigerian naira was still almost twice the value of the US dollar; casual weekend trips to London were not unusual among the middle class. The music industry was booming too, and EMI and Decca were spreading that major label moolah, flying musicians to record their albums and shoot their videos in London like it was nothing. Even tiny, backyard labels like Average Records were sending their tapes to Jand for mastering. I often refer to this period as the London Era of Nigerian Music.

Another distinguishing feature of the London Era was the large number of Nigerian musicians residing in the UK at the time. The most important of these were probably The Funkees.

The Funkees originated as an army band after the civil war, and by the time they relocated to London in 1973, they looked to be the group that was closest to achieving the dream of becoming "the next Osibisa." Unfortunately, after just two LPs and a couple of 45s, the band broke up in 1977. Most of the members--Jake Sollo, Harry Mosco, Mohammed Ahidjo, Chyke Madu and Sonny Akpan--remained active in the London music scene, doing session work, recording their own albums aimed at the Nigerian market at home and abroad, and supporting visiting Nigerian artists.

The Funkees' debut album Point of No Return (alternately issued in France as Afro-Funk Music) was co-produced by a charismatic Sierra Leonean named Akie Deen, who had been hustling hard to promote West African and Caribbean music around London since the beginning of the 1970s, before there was any real "scene" to speak of. Over the course of the decade, Deen would become the man to know among African musicians in London as he knew everybody in London's black music world and was a central force in organizing, booking and marketing West African and West Indian musicians, between which he made little distinction. The result was a dynamic, musically miscengenous climate: Nigerians, Ghanaians and Sierra Leoneans making soca and calypso, Trinidadians playing on Nigerian afro-funk records, and hybrid styles like discolypso.

Adding to the mix were the many young white session players who worked in the London black music scene and, by extension, on African pop records. Probably the most significant of these was trumpeter Luke Tunney, whose credit appeared on several Nigerian albums in the early 80s, mostly as a horn arranger. Tunney went on to form the duo Mercy Mercy, best remembered (by some) for the 1985 soulboy dance classic "What Are We Gonna Do About It".

Another one was Morris Michael. Michael mostly contributed background vocals on Harry Mosco and Jake Sollo sessions, but he was also a guitarist with a clean, jazzy tone, as he would show later in the 80s as half of the Tears For Fears-esque sophistipop duo Private Lives.*** (The band broke up shortly after its 1984 debut Prejudice and Pride--featuring the single "Living In A World (Turned Upside Down)"--flopped, but like another short-lived, twee 80s New Romantic twosome, Seona Dancing, they have continued to be big in the Philippines.)

Okay. I am really digressing now, aren't I?

So yes. The Time Communications label mixed their records in London.

Oby Onyioha was the first artist signed to Time. A baby-voiced vocalist with a toothy grin, Onyioha represented the new wave of Nigerian female pop singers emerging with the arrival of the new decade. It might be odd thinking about it today, but twenty-five years ago, the very idea of Nigerian female pop singers was in and of itself quite novel and maybe even a little revolutionary. Looking over the Nigerian popular music scene of the 1960s and 70s, you notice that female singers are very rare, owing largely to the prevaiing perception in the culture that a female singer was two, maybe three notches above a prostitute. Yes, there were a couple of ladies like Joyce Obong or Alice Eyo who cut a few sides or featured as girl singers in the highlife orchestras, but their careers were usually brief: they got married and left the singing behind, because it just was not a good look for a woman of decency.

Which is not to say that no women whatsoever were able to grab a microphone without letting go of dignity. In the early 1970s, Nelly Uchendu and Joy Nwosu managed this balancing act, and Julie Coker released some well-received records, as well. But Coker had the advantage of already being a respected television newscaster and in any case, her records featured "folk" music rather than "pop." Uchendu and Nwosu were also billed as "folk singers," clearly a much more respectable sobriquet than "rock singer." Other than the freespirited and fiercely independent Lijadu Sisters, who started out singing folk but switched to rock--and frankly, were viewed by some as being kind of "loose"--it's hard to think of too many female "pop" singers from that era.

Then came the 1980s, bringing with them Onyeka Onwenu, Martha Ulaeto, Julie Pip, Dora Ifudu, Uche Ibeto, Funmi Adams, Ima Valentine and a score of educated modern ladies holding their heads high and singing the liberated songs of the New Woman--and some of them even wearing trousers as they did it! After the decidedly austere presentation of the folk singers, to have a woman like Oby Onyioha wearing red lipstick and a perm, cooing "I Want To Feel Your Love" and exhorting her sisters to "Enjoy Your Life" while decadent strings swooped around her was a deliciously radical change of pace, forerunning a substantial cultural shift.

In his Da Capo Guide to Contemporary African Music, Ronnie Graham attributes this sudden surge in female singers to the success of Nigerian entertainer Patti Boulaye, who had become the UK's answer to Diana Ross after winning the TV talent show New Faces in 1978. I used to think that was just a little bit farfetched since Patricia Ngozi Ebigwe had been in her teens when she left the country during the war and her rise to stardom had entirely taken place away from Nigerian shores, so I thought of her more as a "Nigerian-born singer" than a Nigerian singer per se.

Of course, I didn't doubt that Boulaye was an inspiring figure to Nigerian women, especially as her kisser was plastered on the wrapper of the most popular bath soap in Nigeria (1:17 mark, yall), but I felt her success said as much about the prospects of Nigerian female pop musicians at home as, say, Shirley Bassey's did. But when I think about it now, Boulaye was not as divorced from the Naija scene as she might have seemed; in 1976, before she really blew up, she returned home to star in one of the first major Nigerian feature films, Ladi Ladebo's Bisi, Daughter of the River.

If Boulaye's meteoric rise left any doubt regarding the commercial appeal of Nigerian female pop singers, Theadora Ifudu blew it off the map. In 1979, the arty co-host of NTA Channel 10's Bar Beach Show self-released her debut album First Time Out (backed by members of Monomono) and almost immediately was signed by Epic Records and whisked off to New York to record her followup. It was official; someone out there wanted to listen to modern Nigerian women.

It made sense that the next singer poised to take advantage of this new vogue would be the woman regarded as one of the grand dames of Nigerian female pop. In 1981, Christy Essien-Igbokwe was only 21 but was an old hand, having released her first record (1977's Freedom) when she was a mere 17. Like Coker and Ifudu, she had been a beloved television personality and her wholesome image made her the perfect ambassador for the country. Her sixth album was set to be a major affair intended to cross her over to international audiences.

The new album would be the first album release from Lagos International Records: I don't know a great deal of the story behind Lagos International, but from the slick LIR releases I've seen, it is clear that it was a London-based label more or less dedicated to disseminating Nigerian pop music in Europe and America. LIR's domestic marketing and distribution was handled by Skylark Records, the label owned by Chief Olu Aboderin, founder of the Nigerian Punch newspaper (at which Essien's husband, Edwin Igbokwe was GM at the time). Several Skylark releases featured arrangements by Lemmy Jackson--who, with BLO, had also backed Essien on her previous album, 1980's Give Me A Chance--so not surprisingly, Jackson got the job helming the Ever Liked My Person? sessions in Los Angeles.

Ever Liked My Person? deviated from previous Christy Essien outings in numerous ways. For one, no Nigerian musicians on the record; Jackson instead used seasoned L.A. studio vets like George Bohannon, Webster Lewis and James Gadson, imbuing it with the ultra-professional, early-80s West coast gloss of a Brenda Russell record. (Just in case you're wondering: I like Brenda Russell.) And the material ditches the funk and soul that characterized previous Christy releases in favor of adult contempo, country & western, and highly polished pre-World Music™ fusions of Caribbean rhythms sung over in Yoruba, Efik and Igbo. The record itself was pressed up on snazzy green vinyl!

I don't know the extent to which Person? achieved its goals of putting Christy on the international radar (I recall seeing her mentioned in write-ups in minor rock mags) but it is definitely her best known album back home. If there's one Christy Essien tune universally considered an evergreen classic in Nigeria, it's "Seun Rere," the song with which she represented Nigeria at... some international song contest.

(I can't remember exactly what it was called... It was like Eurovision, except I think it was in L.A. I remember the announcer's voice proclaiming "CHRISTY ESSIEN i-guh-BO-kway!!" and her coming out and performing "Seun Rere" and "Ka Anyi Gba Egwu"--the latter with some frantic dancing--and then they showed a video of her walking the streets of Los Angeles singing "Ever Liked My Person?" It's stunning that I can hardly find any documentation of this online, because it was quite a big deal at the time; thereafter, she became known as "Nigeria's Lady of Songs.")

Lemmy Jackson's sumptuous solo album, Tonight, was recorded simultaneously with Onyioha's, using the same Phonodisk standby studio players like Eugene Ndema, Basil Barap and Paul Sokeng (I believe all three were Cameroonians) as well as his BLO colleague Laolu Akins. In London, he overdubbed strings and horns (provided by Luke Tunney, Annie Whitehead, and Gary Barnacle) and percussion from London-based Nigerian musician Keni St. George.

I can imagine that the results might be a tad rich for some tastes, but this was pretty much what a lot of people wanted to hear back in '81: Homegrown music with production that was just as slick and "sophisticated" as anything by Gamble & Huff or The Bee Gees. Lord knows I ate it all up: the rare Morris Michael guitar solo on the title track... the mutated bass on "I Can Satisfy You"... the restrained vocal on the ballad "Tell Me Love"... the subtle tonal shifts between chorus and verse in the bubbleheaded disco number "Make Your Body Dance"... I loved it all and I still do. (A different version of the song appeared on BLO's 1980 Bulky Backside LP, by the way.)

While I Want To Feel Your Love and Tonight sold well and signalled a promising start for Time Communications, they ended up being the label's only releases. Apparently, Aifuwa quickly learned that as the economy started dipping, the rewards of the home market alone were insufficient to support or justify the expenditure he was pouring into the enterprise. Aifuwa didn't leave the business of show, though; later in the year, he staged the massive Tempo '81 concert featuring (among others) Miriam Makeba, The Commodores, and reggae band Third World, who so enjoyed their trip to Nigeria that they immortalized it in song.

Phonodisk also packed it in a couple of years later, a casualty of perpetual mismanagement. Haruna Ishola was a very smart and ambitious man, but he was also illiterate and spoke no English; hence, he was dependent upon his children to carry out most of the label's day-to-day business. Let's just say they didn't exactly uphold dad's noble aspirations for the company.

Out of the fray, Lemmy Jackson ascended from session man to studio royalty. BLO called it quits in 1982, freeing Jackson up to devote himself to fulltime production. He would enjoy a decade-long run as Nigeria's producer par excellence, weathering changes in public taste from disco and boogie to reggae and beyond. After the hits dried up for him altogether, he accepted the invitation from the governor of Akwa Ibom State to run the state's new ultramodern recording facility in Uyo, where he resides today, developing new acts and training the next generation of studio wizards.

Now, there's something I've been wanting to clear up regarding Tonight. In a previous post, I referred to Lemmy Jackson as a "velvet-voiced soul singer and keyboardist." This characterization was based on the Pendergrassian baritone on display throughout the Tonight album.

I never actually owned this album back then, but I knew it every song on it by heart because Cross River Radio played the thing from end to end, as they did with Ever Liked My Person? and Oby Onyioha's I Want To Feel Your Love. (I should probably mention that both Jackson and Essien were local kids done good.) So I never really read the sleeve notes on Lemmy Jackson's Tonight; I just knew that these songs were credited to him.

So, not long after I made that post, I'm looking at the credits on Tonight and I notice that right at the bottom underneath every other credit--including the engineers and stuff--that it says "Lead vocal - Selmore Lewison."

Hmmmm.... That's interesting. Lead vocal on what? All the songs seem to be sung by the same singer...

Then I realize that Lemmy Jackson is not credited for a vocal performance anywhere on the record; not even for background vox.

Then I realize that on BLO's last three records, Lemmy Jackson is the only member of the band who is never credited with any vocals whatsoever.

For some reason, I felt a bit deceived... Like, after 25 years of thinking he sang these songs, he actually didn't sing shit?

I guess I can't be mad... It's not like he ever claimed that he did sing on the album (even though they practically buried that "Lead vocal" credit) and hey... They called him the "Quincy Jones of Nigeria," right? I guess this "Selmore Lewison" was his James Ingram! And it explained a lot, really: I had long wondered why--if he had a voice like that--he had never released another solo album. Then again, it raised the question why me and my man Enyi felt we could hear a tinge of an Efik/Ibibio accent on songs like "I Can Satisfy You" and "Tell Me Love" while "Selmore Lewison" was clearly a name that could only belong to a West Indian?

Who was this "Selmore Lewison"?

Well, it didn't take too long to ascertain that Selmore Ezekiel Lewinson was the birth name of Dan-I, a Jamaican-born British singer who scored a top 20 UK hit in 1979 with "Monkey Chop"--an early Trevor Horn production that incidentally got a lot of burn on Cross River Radio. (I actually thought that it was a Nigerian song, largely because of the pidgin English lyrics... I probably should have saved this for "West Indian Musicians I Once Thought Were Nigerian" week.)

Sure enough, "Dan I" was credited as a background singer on the Oby Onyioha album, so I decided to find out more about Mr. Lewinson. Here is some of what I found.

Dan-I performed in various styles throughout his long career--pop, rock, reggae, ska, gospel--he even toured Nigeria during FESTAC '77 and was a member of a short-lived Funkees splinter group called Abraka (apparently named for the 1974 Funkees single).

Sadly, Dan-I passed away in September 2006. So I'm posting the Tonight album in his memory (and also dedicating it to my boy Etino).

Hope y'all enjoy it as much as I do.

LEMMY JACKSON - TONIGHT (TIME COMMUNICATIONS, 1981, TPLP1001)

Lemmy Jackson- Yamaha Acoustic and Electric Grand Pianos, Fender Rhodes, Clavinet, Prophet 5 Synthesizer
Laolu Akins - Drums on all except "We Can Do It"
Basil N. Barap - Bass
Eugene Ndema - Guitar
Paul Sokeng - Drums on "We Can Do It"
Morris Michael - Guitar on "Tonight"
Percussion - Keni St. George, Lemmy Jackson, Dean Disi
African xylophone - Francis Igboke, Igwe Ede
Horns - Luke Tunney (trumpet), Gary Barnacle (sax), Annie Whitehead (trombone),
Strings - The Locrian String Ensemble

Backing vocals - Jane James, Ray Shell, Morris Michael, Simeon Catlyn
Lead vocal - Selmore Lewinson

Backing tracks recorded at Phonodisk Studio, Ijebu-Ode, Nigeria
Overdubs at Hillside Studio, London, England
String overdubs and mixing at Rak Studios, London.

All songs written and arranged by Lemmy Jackson
Horn & string arrangements by Luke Tunney

Get the ZIP or track by track:

SIDE A
1. Don't Let Love Slip Away*
2. Tell Me Love
3. I Can Satisfy You

SIDE B
1. We Can Do It*
2. Tonight
3. Make Your Body Dance



*Yoooooooooooo... I gotta apologize for the skip at the beginning of "We Can Do It" and the maybe four skips in "Don't Let Love Slip Away"... I actually ripped those songs, like, eight different times trying to get rid of them, but in the end I had to accept that the problem was due not to scratches or even dirt, but small defects in the vinyl itself. Hope it doesn't bother anybody too much!**


**Why am I so apologetic about this? Shit, stuff like this is just part of the vinyl experience! I dunno, though... Modern listeners (among which I count myself, I guess) are so conditioned to a perfectly pristine listening experience at all times that I feel almost like I'm spitting in your faces by posting any recording that's anything less than flawless!

Here's some bonus beats for ya, for what it's worth:

Oby Onyioha - "Wait for Me"
Christy Essien-Igbokwe - "Shooby Shooby"
Oby Onyioha - "I'll Put It Right Again" (Doesn't this song kinda anticipate Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called..."? BTW I really don't care if you think this tune is a saccharrine monstrosity, I love it!)

***12/5/07: I kinda implied above that Morris Michael was a "young, white session player"; however, I just found this photo of Private Lives and alas! he appears to be a gentleman of significant negritude! My bad... I guess I racially profiled the dude based on what his band sounded like, which is more Kajagoogoo than Imagination. (Actually, Kajagoogoo bassist Nick Beggs guests on Prejudice and Pride.)

For what it's worth, I had only ever seen the album's front cover, which for some reason pictures a drawing of two white guys... So you can't blame me!