Vinyl Anthropology!

Flying to West Africa, northern Latin America, and the Caribbean looking for rare records to create re-issue albums with great aesthetics and brief histories of your favorite periods in musical history is a pretty sweet job. That's what Miles Cleret does to earn his crust with his Soundway record label. In his travels Miles has documented whole cultures on the brink of extinction, as well as entire histories of musical experimentation, one-hit wonders, and sky high egomania.

Miles insists on clarifying, however, how dull 95% of his job is, but we can be sure that the other 5% is probably a bunch more fun than you have 100% of the time at your job.

Vice: How did you turn something that a lot of people consider an obsessive but recreational hobby into flying all over the world pretending it’s a job?

Miles Cleret: I grew up in a house full of records. My dad was a big record collector and I remember how magical it was discovering new recordings and holding them in your hands. The essence of this whole crate-digging—call it what you like—the inspiration comes from looking for music to present to people who don’t know it, and I suppose the label and everything that happens with it is just an extension of that.

So what made you go from there to reissuing such specific eras?

Recordings from the periods that we tend to reissue are in real danger of dying out from being neglected and overlooked. There is a tendency for people to think that something made in the 70s will never be endangered, but that's not always the case. Some of those records were pressed in really tiny numbers, sometimes only two, three, four hundred copies, and 95% of them lie smashed in pieces on the ground or scratched to high hell, or were never sold and melted down to make the next record. So, there’s a real chance these records will never be heard again unless somebody puts them out or focuses on them. It’s a kind of audio conservation I suppose.

Is it working?

Well, 15 years ago some records were absolutely impossible to find. They were just these weird little things that might turn up in tiny second hand record stores in New York, London, or Paris. Now they are easier to get a hold of, and the more people that get into them the bigger the market becomes for those kind of records. Record dealers respond to that. The more compilations that people like myself do, the more people who are solely in it for financial reasons see an opportunity to sell records.

So basically you just wanted to find and release stuff that people didn’t already have.

For sure.

You've taken crate-digging to its logical conclusion. Some people must be green that you get to do that all day.

I guess so, but there’s always a tendency to romanticize it. Hunting for records is actually a pretty dull thing. You get taken into some pretty odd areas, and some places are pretty risky, but to be perfectly honest 95% of it is extraordinarily frustrating. You spend hours hot and bothered, going through the process covered in sweat and dust, day after day, often with very little reward and lots of mosquito bites. But the other 5% of it is really fun and makes it all worthwhile.

What constitutes that 5%?

Just finding great records. I think it’s inevitable that there will be a new generation of people who don’t give two shits about the actual record and the sleeve. They just want the music. But for me, that’s what it’s all about.

Despite the fact that many of the scenes and genres you have documented are all over the world, many of them seem to have occurred at around the same time.

Well, we are doing one from Colombia, which is 70% 80s, but it’s no secret from looking at the records I’ve put out that the music I’m into is generally from 1955 to 1980. It was a very prolific time--it was before music became disposable and easily digitised, but after it was very much controlled by a small select few. From ‘55 to ‘80 lots of small runs of obscure records in different styles came out and people really got a chance to experiment before the music industry, digital technology, piracy, and cassette tapes came in and killed it off. If I were to go to outer Mongolia looking for 60s and 70s records I wouldn’t have much luck.

Going to the countries themselves makes you understand the way the music moves, intertwines, and goes back and forth. West Africa, the Caribbean, northern Latin America--all the big musical movements of the 20th century developed in an intertwined manner. So Latin music has its roots in African music, but that music went back to Africa in the 40s, 50s, and 60s and, in turn, influenced African music, and then went all the way back again. Similarly, Colombian music in the 80s was influenced by sailors from Nigeria and Ghana bringing records back to Colombia so that they could be played on Colombian sound systems. Jamaicans did the same with American R&B records, and scratched the labels off of them to see if people could tell the difference. That influenced ska, which in the 70s massively influenced music in England. So it just goes back and forth.

How does sourcing obscure records vary from country to country?

In Latin America old music is very much alive. In Colombia they have much more of a culture of sourcing old music. But in Ghana or Nigeria, a lot of people have sort of wholesaled, cancelled, or dismissed old music. It stops with the people who were around at the time. If you meet them, sometimes they’ve got stories, but quite often they’ve forgotten them or they get the stories wrong, or they're just gone. The truth exists in the record.

But records that no one wants anymore.

Not in Nigeria. In Colombia you will find young guys in their 20s who are just as into finding old records as I am. There is a ravenous DJ culture in Colombia, especially for old African music. So when word got out that I had a bag of African records I was willing to trade for Colombian records, I was mobbed. My phone didn’t stop ringing, people turned up to my hotel and followed me around when I was out.

Are there actually that many stores, or even crates to look through in places like Bogota?

There are virtually none in Africa anymore, but there are still a few in Colombia. There are some people who sell records from their garages, and there's still one or two collectors who sell off stuff that they don’t want anymore. There are guys on the street who have these little stores just set up on the pavement. I tend to just turn up in a place and start asking around though. One thing tends to lead to another.

When you're on the hunt, do you prefer finding the artist or the record?

The record. Records don’t always phone you asking for money. Some artists are great, but some are a pain in the ass and have a much bigger sense of their worth than is realistic. People somehow can’t quite believe that you are only selling X amount of records. They just assume that their music must be selling hundreds of thousands of copies and you owe them money.

Sir Victor Uwaifo: Guitar Boy Superstar checks pretty much all the boxes as far as album titles go. Which category did he fall into?

He is one of the small few that fall into the category of being everything I hoped he would be and more. He’s a national hero--he’s regarded as a real keeper of Benin culture, a true ambassador for highlife music, and has managed to be a superstar at the same time.

Was he still a superstar when you met him?

Well, he picked me up from the airport and drove me to his house. He lives in a house called Superstar Highgate on 1 Victor Uwaifo Avenue.

Sounds pretty starry.

The first room you go into is the Victor Uwaifo Hall of Fame. So you have this big room covered in pictures, bits of memorabilia, newspaper clippings, records, and guitars--even the bicycle he used to ride to school--all in this room in his own house. You go from there to the Nigerian History Room, which is a tour through the history of Nigeria and its leaders over the years. That’s followed by the Chamber of Horrors.

What, like a carnival ride?

No, we sat down and watched notorious armed robbers being shot by a firing squad. Then he took me into his concrete airplane he had built onto the side of his house. It was exactly like being in a real airplane--there were windows all down the sides. But in the cockpit there was a piano. He just sat in the cockpit and played for me as we sat and drank beer. It wasn’t your ordinary day.

Surely a lot of the records you find are in unsalvageable condition.

Sadly, yes. They are often not just broken, but the recording is so terrible that it’s unusable. With technology being what it is today, you can actually take out the noise and scratches, but you can’t add anything that wasn’t there. Your hopes rest with the record.

So if it’s broke, you can’t fix it.

Yeah, you can try and pull out what's there as much as possible, but if it’s not there you’re stumped. There are records that I’ve been desperate to find clean copies of for years that I just haven't found.

Such as?

There’s a 45 by The High Grades called Jumping Cat that I’ve been looking for for about ten years now. I’ve got a copy but it’s far too mashed to do anything with.

Is that your Holy Grail?

One of them.

vice.com

Cassette Culture: An Interview

An Interview with Awesome Tapes from Africa’s Brian Shimkovitz

It has been an exciting year for ethnomusicologist/blogger/label owner Brian Shimkovitz. His blog Awesome Tapes from Africa has spread like wildfire among music enthusiasts intoxicated by the heady mix of cassette music from across the continent, salvaged from obscurity and presented as full-length streamable albums. Off the back of the blog’s success, which he is proud to say has become more of a ‘public project’, Brian has started a label, reissuing whole albums (rather than compilations) on vinyl, the first of which La Grande Cantatrice Malienne Vol. 3 by Malian singer Nâ Hawa Doumbia came out in late 2011 to widespread critical acclaim. With a second release, Bola – Vol. 7, hitting the shelves as we speak, we caught up with Brian to get deep into what lies behind this incredible project.

How did you first get into the whole scene?

When I went to college I had the chance to study abroad. I was interested in African music and rhythm and jazz and I knew a little bit about Ghana and I saw that there was a chance to do an arts and culture project there, so I spent 4 or 5 months there the first time in 2002. It was studying hip-life and youth culture and the way that globalization and technology have made it possible for this new movement to happen and how the youth are doing to it to make jobs and to do their thing and to express themselves. I went back second time in 2004/5 and I stayed for a year and just did tons of interviews with rappers, DJ’s and record producers. I collected tons of tapes and asked a lot of questions and went to a lot of different places around Ghana and I also had the chance to also travel to Mali and Togo and Burkina Faso.

Where would you get the tapes from?

It’s a combination. In Accra, the capital of Ghana you have everything from a wooden kiosk on the corner of a street lined with tapes, or massive markets. Or you just have a guy with a bicycle with a wooden thing attached to the back and he’s got 30 or 40 tapes. Sometimes people would give me stuff, or you’d be on a trip in a public bus and a guy would be playing music he’d show you where you could go to find these kinds of things.

Were people interested in what you were doing?
Well it’s weird, because I wasn’t doing this Awesome Tapes From Africa thing – I didn’t start doing that until after I moved to Brooklyn. What I was doing was learning how to speak Twi, the main lingua-franca there, and I was learning about Ghanaian music and so if you’re a foreigner and you’re really interested in the Ghanaian music then most of the people were just really excited that you were interested, so they wanted to share things with you.

Why do you think tape culture has persisted so much? Is it an economic question?

It was at first. It was also a means to an end, of sort of just getting the music out there. Initially tapes are really helpful in piracy, which is not a good thing, but also piracy also helps the music spread further because not everyone was buying tapes. When CD’s and mp3’s came into play they still just weren’t as accessible and the prices were kinda high.

The tapes also persisted because of the environment. You have a lot of second hand buses and cars that still have tape decks and tapes seem to last a while in that environment so long as you keep them a little bit out of the sun. A CD can get scratched up with all the dust and all the passing around, because things get shared a lot within the household or within the neighborhood.

I know that everyone is trading music with their bluetooth links and stuff like that even out in the Sahara Dessert these days but I also know that cassettes are still being made for almost every release that comes out.

How many tapes do you own?

I own more than 4000 tapes. I have a storage space in Brooklyn. I was living in Manhattan for a few months and my apartment had boxes and boxes almost to the ceiling on one side.

And this is older stuff as well as new releases?

It’s everything. I wanted to find old stuff because I initially came to Ghana interested in highlife music, but then I found out on the very first day I arrived there in 2002 that highlife was almost dead, in the form that we know it as with acoustic instruments and what not. So everything, the brand new stuff and also certain reissues where you can sometimes hear the crackle of the record and someones just set the tape record next to the record player.

How do you recognize something potentially interesting?

Coming from Chicago, I was already familiar with the concept of digging [vinyl] like that and going to all the record fairs. If I came to a town that I hadn’t been to before I would ask around my friends or I would go into a shop and I would just ask. And then also there was a lot of that thing that people do when they digging in foreign countries and you just see a crazy cover and you say “I have to see this”. It’s the same thing with record collecting though; sometimes the most amazing cover is a tape that’s not so interesting.

Where do you get your new tapes from now?

These days I get them from neighborhoods in Paris, places in New York where they have them, and I’ve been really lucky because people email me a lot and say “hey I got some tapes, I’ll send them to you”. I think it’s all part of the sort of public project the blog has become.

In what way has it become a public project? 

You’ve probably seen on the blog – and this is the thing that I’m almost the most proud of in terms of the blog itself – is that when I post something that I know nothing about after several comments there is this whole crowd source story of information and links and this is what the internet is all about.

Do you also use the internet to archive the tapes?

I’m not archiving stuff apart from just what you see on the blog. The longer term plan is to make some sort of archive – maybe partner with a museum or some kind of institute, but copyright is an issue and I am giving away peoples music for free, which is a complex thing. So what I feel at the very least is that what you see on the blog is being “saved” in a certain way.

I don’t wanna say, “I’m this foreign guy who is adding value to this music by saving it.” The reality is that a lot of these recordings, especially the ones that people have given me that they’ve bought in the 80’s or the early 90’s, you can’t really find them anymore in that place, some of them are quite rare there. I feel like it’s a good idea to digitize them and put them online.

Are you in contact with the artists you showcase on the blog?

I’m not in contact with the artists. Most of the people whose music is on my blog don’t even know that it is there, for a variety of reasons. Be it shortage of bandwidth or maybe they are not even alive any more or maybe when they go to the internet cafe like most of my friends in Ghana, they’re not looking for African music, they are going on Facebook and they looking at stuff from other places, because the web is a portal for these folks who live in remote areas to really be connected with stuff.

The negative thing that has come up over the years is that people sometimes either explicitly or implicitly express that they want Africans to stay in their little box and make the music the way that they have always made it and [for us not to] “don’t pollute what’s going on there” and that just seems lame.

Having studied ethnomusicology, where do you stand in relation to the debate about cultural colonialism? Even though Awesome Tapes presents the music in a very pluralistic and unpretentious way, how do you avoid this accusation? 

Historically, a lot of white people have gone down to Africa and done sketchy things with the music. A lot of African musicians who I have spoken with have felt that in the past they’ve been exploited. In the digital age with blogs the way they are, every band wants to get big and to get big they send music up promotionally through the mp3 blogs. I feel that if the playing field has been leveled technologically and globally – it’s still not level, but it’s getting closer – then the amount of promotion that an artist can get through being featured on the blog which reaches more than 30,000 unique visitors every month can outweigh a lot of the other complexities that come into play.

But I do realize that it is a bit of a catch-22. As an ethnomusicologist you feel like you are taking, because people spend a lot of time and share a lot of stuff with you and at the very least, I wanted to find a way to give back, to show people what Africa can really be like, filled with talent not just war and famine and trouble.

In parts of Ghana different communities are distinguished by their drum rhythms. I was wondering whether there are political tensions between these groups and whether this is reflected in the music?

It’s really hard to generalize even within a specific genre. For example hip-life; some of it can get a little bit political, or it makes oblique references to stuff that’s happening in parliament or amongst the people in society. But a whole bunch of it is just about love and relationships and growing up and being cool, the way that a lot of American hip hop can be.

In other types of popular music, highlife has often been very political but in a really artful way using proverbs. There is a lot of internal tension all over the continent from what I can gather which has a lot to do with the way that colonialism divided up the nations into these bits where communities that have different languages and different customs are forced to be part of the same nation-state.

With this split in languages and customs in mind, and aware that talking even about West Africa is to generalize hugely, what are the repercussions of calling the blog Awesome Tapes From “Africa”?

I know I feel really lame about that, because I don’t even like to say the words “in Africa this or that”. I’m really glad you mention that because I think it’s really important to be sensitive to the fact that Africa is not this monolithic thing, and even Ghana I have a difficult time speaking about because there are 100 language groups in that one relatively small country. And dudes in Mali aren’t listening to records from South Africa in large part.

There are certain musical genres in Africa that have currency across several nations, especially amongst the Francophone countries, for example like Soukous music. There’s very few artists in Africa that are famous or well known or listened to in each country. But it’s not because there is tension I think it’s just to do with language and distribution systems.

The influence of the internet probably also means that musical influence goes both ways – that we are interested in music coming from Ghana, but that Ghanaian’s are both interested and heavily influenced by music coming from America or the UK – especially with regards to hip hop for example.

Yeh, that’s a really important thing to point out. What happened really in the early 90’s in Ghana was that they privatized the airwaves which allowed less restrictions on what percentage of foreign music could be played. So ever since then every young guy in Ghana loves Tupac and loves Biggie. Hip hop there is ubiquitous.

Why do you think there has been such a boom in compilations [Shangaan, Ethiopiques, Soundway Records, Sublime Frequencies, Strut Records] from specific African regions over the last few years?

Mainly it’s that we as listeners have opened our ears, we as listeners want to keep finding new stuff, we as listeners are constantly looking for inspiration, we as listeners can just go on Google and find a lot of other stuff. So it just makes sense that intrepid diggers would make their way into corners of the world to try and find micro-movements and subcultures. This proliferation of compilations is only going to continue.
The thing that is a little bit annoying to me sometimes is that a lot of the compilations just take one or two really crazy tracks from a record that don’t really sound like what the rest of the artist was actually doing. They put those in a compilation and then it creates this image, when maybe it wasn’t really quite like that. My approach is to show what the music would sound like if you were in this particular place at that particular time.

And that is pretty much the idea behind the label isn’t it, putting out full albums rather than compilations?

Absolutely, that’s a huge part of what I do, from almost the very beginning on the blog. I don’t want to select, I don’t want to decontextualize or disembody these statements.


But you are in contact with the artists whose records you are bringing out?

Yes. My ideological, lofty goal is to hopefully take inspiration from the great labels like World Circuit from London who work together closely with the artists and do everything legitimately. I’m licensing recordings, so this is an economic boost in a small way for an artist who has already spent the money on the record that they made. “Here’s some more money upfront to show that I’m serious and you’re going to get this distributed worldwide in an efficient way and any money that I make back, you’re going to get 50% of after the costs are fulfilled”.

What’s the reaction been to the first release by Nâ Hawa Doumbia?

The reaction has been very very positive. I fell in love with this record immediately. Here’s a really great artist who is super accomplished, she’s been around for several decades and this is a really great snapshot of what she was doing pretty early in her career and the production sounds really rich and organic and beautiful.
It’s out on vinyl, it’s out on limited edition tape and it’s on CD – the dying format. If you put out really great music, people are going to respond to it, and this an album that is just absolutely amazing and so it’s gotten the attention it’s deserved.

You also DJ with tapes. How does that work out for you?

It’s been really fun, it keeps me busy on stage and it works out fine for the most part. Every once in a while a tape gets a little funky in the middle and starts to fuck up but I don’t plan the stuff in advance. I typically go with whatever the vibe is and what I feel like playing. You know there is a bit of beat matching, more and more because I know the tapes better and better.

Do you have a box of pencils at the ready to wind them back up in emergencies?

No, you see there’s a misconception that the tapes get chewed up a lot, it’s not even that, I think it just gets worn out play after play. But I feel like life is too short. I can’t go around Europe playing copies of tapes. The tapes themselves sound shitty enough. If I made copies of them it would sound pretty bad.
How many tapes would you take on tour with you?

Around 75 or so, and then I always also have my laptop set up so I can play mp3’s of tapes, but I’ve always kept it limited to tapes because there is just too much music out there. You have to give a limitation somewhere.


icrates.org

Awesome Tapes … the hunt for Africa's lost treasure trove of music!

This Tunisian butcher's shop has a sideline in cassettes.
Photograph: Guenter Rossenbach/Corbis



It's been six years since Brian Shimkovitz last visited west Africa, and yet this bespectacled resident of New York has done more than most in recent times to uncover a seam of mind-boggling music from the continent – operating chiefly out of his bedroom. Shimkovitz is the driving force behind a blog called Awesome Tapes from Africa, a repository of cassette tapes from artists who remain almost wholly obscure in the west but are screaming out for greater attention. Visitors to the site are greeted with the scanned images of the cassette artwork and links to MP3s of all the music, as well as Shimkovitz's own pithy commentary.

One week it might be the squelchy Kenyan disco of Prince Khonjo, the black-and-white sleeve of whose album Binadamu Hatosheki shows a figure in feathered headdress (the prince himself?), who might have stepped out of one of east London's hipster hang-outs. "File under: bizarre/mind-blowing," Shimkovitz notes. "This simple dance of drum machine and determined vocals generates something particularly ill." Or it might be an eponymous release from a singer called Ouobraogo Charles, from Burkina Faso ("On a scale of dull to wild I'd give it a 'bananas++'"), or a cassette of hunters' music from Mali by Sékouba Traoré ("The tape swings harder and rawer than most").

It's easy to see why none of these recordings have previously surfaced outside their primary markets: for one thing, the production in most instances is incredibly raw, with none of the polish that bestselling world music albums enjoy. And before the web with its long tail came along, who could have known that there'd be an audience for such stuff, never mind a means of distributing it? One nice irony is, of course, that Shimkovitz needs the internet, but in one way his blog is a homage to a very analogue object.



"I've always been a tape guy," he says. "It's a more durable medium than the CD, and I prefer the quality of the sound, plus cassettes have their own aesthetic quality. The only advantage that a CD has is that you can skip the tracks, but I think we should all be more patient in our listening anyway."

The 30-year-old Shimkovitz grew up listening to the Grateful Dead ("on cassette") and was studying ethno-musicology at Indiana University when he was played some Fela Kuti and "it completely changed me". So much so that in 2002, he hightailed it to Ghana to research highlife music. The dominant sound on the streets of Accra and elsewhere was, however, hip-hop – not just the likes of Tupac and Biggie Smalls, but locally produced examples of the genre, the existence of which came as a complete surprise to the budding musical explorer. On a subsquent trip to the region in 2004-2005, he discovered an even greater mix of genres, often bizarre hybrid creations that saw indigenous styles trammelled through cheap electronic equipment or which seemingly bore the influence of the latest western sounds, even if the protagonist had arrived at that point after a parallel journey.

Returning to New York with piles of cassettes, he asked himself, "How can I do something with all this?", and as blogging was becoming increasingly popular – this was 2006 – he decided that he'd simply put it out on the internet. "And the positive response I received just overwhelmed me," he says. The first cassette that he posted on his blog as a series of MP3s was by a singer called Ata Kak, which he'd picked up on the street in Cape Coast in Ghana. "I knew nothing about this guy, and I still don't, really… but there was something about that tape that grabbed me, because it sounded almost like Chicago house music. It's still one of the cassettes that people ask me about most."

For some time, running the blog was just a hobby. By day, Shimkovitz worked as a music publicist in New York, working with acts on the World Circuit label such as Orchestra Baobab and Toumani Diabaté, and also with the likes of Peter Frampton and Pat Metheny. But gradually, he became consumed by the project, and now he devotes himself to it full-time, first by DJing around the world ("It can be problematic: people like the novelty, but not many clubs have a cassette deck in their back-line set-up"); now, in what might amount to an aesthetic volte-face, by releasing records the old-fashioned way, through a label of his own. This month, he is putting out on vinyl and CD and as a digital download – and inevitably as a limited edition cassette – a record by Malian singer Nâ Hawa Doumbia called La Grande Cantatrice Malienne Vol 3 made in Abidjan in Ivory Coast in 1982.

In this, Awesome Tapes is emulating other independent labels to have championed maverick sounds from around the world such as Sublime Frequencies, Analog Africa and Soundway. The latter's Miles Cleret, whose latest release is a batch of recordings of Afro rock and funk from "Nigeria's soul brother number one" Joni Haastrup, describes the challenge of rescuing such material from obscurity. "It can be a minefield," he says. "The contracts are lost, old squabbles start again, the labels have disappeared, the artists have disappeared… I've gone door-to-door in Ghana, trying to find who owns the rights to a particular record. But if you're doing something commercially" – as Shimkovitz is now – "you've got to try to do it legitimately."
One second irony that Cleret points out: forget the internet, it was the advent of the cassette in the 70s and early 80s that wiped out a lot of labels in Africa – making his detective work harder – because it made copying music so easy. "I imagine that a lot of the artists whose recordings have surfaced on Awesome Tapes from Africa never made a lot of money from them anyway – they've always been used to piracy. So the idea that someone somewhere else is bootlegging their material: it's not new to them. But they'll recognise the benefits of any exposure."

Sensitive to any suggestion that he has exploited artists through releasing their material without permission, Shimkovitz says: "When I travelled in Africa, I was struck that every artist, however big or small, wanted more than anything to know whether anyone had heard of them abroad. It's not, in the first instance, a question of getting paid – which is a good thing because I've not been able to pay the artists whose music I've posted online." There is, instead, a simple message on his site: "This is music you won't easily find anywhere else – except perhaps in its region of origin. But if you're an artist/etc and wish for me to remove your music, click above and email me."

"It's not a way we could ever work," says Nick Gold, boss of World Circuit and producer of classic albums by the likes of Ali Farka Touré. "We work closely with our artists and we can only release two or three records a year, whereas there's a mass of material on Awesome Tapes. But Brian is still really picky – there's some incredible music there. I love its complete immediacy."

It is with the release of La Grande Cantatrice Malienne that Shimkovitz is moving to a more professional footing: proceeds from the record will be split 50/50 with Nâ Hawa Doumbia. And while Shimkovitz says she was initially surprised that anyone should be interested in such an old record – Doumbia is not entirely unknown in the west, with several albums available on iTunes, even if she's never enjoyed the profile of her peer from the Wassoulou region of southern Mali, Oumou Sangaré – she has warmed to the project. (Unfortunately, Doumbia, who "lives a ways from Bamako and doesn't speak much French", was not available for comment on this article.)

One example of what might be achieved: no one had much heard of Syrian dabke singer Omar Souleyman outside the north-east of the country, and the bulk of his albums were recordings made at weddings and presented to the married couple before later being copied and sold at local kiosks; but then Sublime Frequencies chanced upon him, and the resultant compilation Highway to Hassake became a slow-burn success, so much so that Souleyman has played Bestival this summer and remixed Björk's last single.
Shimkovitz is warm in his praise for all these competing labels, and is friends with other ethno-musicologists engaged in similar pursuits, such as Christopher Kirkley, who runs the blog sahelsounds.com, an account of his exploration of music in the Sahel region of Mauritania, Senegal and Mali. (Last year, Kirkley posted on his blog a compilation of tunes that he'd collected from cellphones in that part of the world, where swapping music on Bluetooth is common.) "It's an increasingly crowded field," he says, "but the more the merrier."
One advantage is that Awesome Tapes is a crowd-sourced enterprise: some of the tapes he celebrates are ones he's found himself ("via an excellent grocery store on Flatbush Avenue" in Brooklyn, in the case of Introduction by Nigerian Abass Akande Obesere); others are sent to him by those who've met him or stumbled across the blog. For instance, one tape was given to Shimkovitz by someone called Malene whom he met in Copenhagen, the cheaply printed cover of which showed a man in outsized convict garb.

Shimkovitz couldn't read the accompanying script. What he did know was that this tape was, as he described it on the blog, "full of leftfield soulful insanity, the kind for which I live". If anything, he undersells the strangeness of the recording: it's bananas+++ music. "Doing this blog might never get old if I keep coming across gems like this," he continued, and posted the plea: "Please help me identify the tape."

On the blog, Malene came back to him to identify the artist as Kweysha Seta, adding: "When I showed the tape to my friends in Addis Ababa, they told me that he is still alive and he is begging in the streets. A friend of theirs has a copy shop in the area Piazza, which he visits regularly and they always buy him food and take care of him." Another correspondent, writing from Ethiopia, provided more information: "A quite sad, but funny story for many people down here is from when Kweysha Seta was offered a contract for this album. Being illiterate, it was said he was fooled into signing it, not understanding that he would only earn 500birr (about $100 in 1991, rough guessing) for it. It became a big hit, maybe even bigger than expected, and the cover was reprinted several times."

I suggest to Shimkovitz that this could be a contender for his next official release. Possibly, he says, but first he must go back to Africa in person. "This interest in this sort of music from around the world that at first sounds really wacky, it could just be a passing trend," he says. "But it's still what gets me excited." All the time? "Well, I have pretty catholic tastes," he admits. "I love Tchaikovsky and the Wu-Tang Clan. Sometimes I do just want to dance around my bedroom to Lady Gaga."


theguardian.com

Collect and Disseminate: An Interview with Brian Shimkovitz

 

Originally published @ students.brown.edu 

I met Brian Shimkovitz, the charming founder of Awesome Tapes from Africa (ATFA), a couple of summers ago. He was an agent at the PR firm where I was the summer intern. After his departure, we got coffee at a Ukrainian diner and he told me of his impending move to Germany and his plan to tour as a DJ and spin Awesome Tapes into a proper label. Nearly two years later, Brian is still touring the world playing cassettes through large speakers, with new releases pending. We sat down over Skype to chat about the collector impulse, charges of exoticism, and why academics forget just how good music can feel.

The Independent: You were in Africa on a Fulbright when the Awesome Tapes from Africa project began. What’s the story here?

Brian Shimkovitz:  I started ATFA in 2006, shortly after moving to NYC after a year doing ethnomusicology fieldwork in Ghana. I moved to NYC to get a job in PR because I realized after doing fieldwork that academia wasn’t going to help me communicate about what I’d learned in a very useful or efficient way.

I grew up playing music, being obsessed with music, and wondered how I could make a career out of my interests. So when I found out Indiana University had one of the best ethnomusicology programs in the country I had a total epiphany. I spent my final year taking all grad courses in ethnomusicology so I was able to get a sense of what the field would entail if went for a PhD.

Indy:  That’s cool. Turning to the moment when you first started collecting tapes­—what was that about?

BS:  I was always a tape guy, even before I visited West Africa. But when I went to Ghana the first time I saw that the widest selection of music was available on tape. So I started going to the shops and areas of the big outdoor markets where tapes are sold. I searched for parts of town where foreigners lived, so I could find music from other regions. I was sending packages home to Chicago so I could collect as much as possible while I was there.

Indy: Who were these tapes originally meant for? What is their original market?

BS: They are generally commercially available sounds, everything from local radio pop highlife to rap of all kinds to traditional music. Many of the things I bought I heard first on the radio.

Once I learned to speak Twi, one of the local languages, I was able to impress people and show them how serious I am.

It’s the language of the Ashanti people. It’s not the indigenous language of the capital where I was based, but it’s the lingua franca.

Indy:  Cool. Glad to learn that. Awesome Tapes became a thing in your life largely because it met blog success. What’s the story here?

BS:  After bringing home so many tapes I thought it would be cool to do something with them.  When I started Googling some of the more obscure or exciting recordings, I realized there wasn’t much info, and this sparked excitement in me. It felt like a nice way to relieve the stress of my PR job during the weekends.
So as I started posting this stuff and sharing it with my friends it somehow got popular, largely from other blogs including it in their blogrolls. Not quite sure how it happened but I suddenly felt encouraged by other peoples’ interest and feedback. I realized I was doing what I wanted to learn about toward the end of school, “public ethnomusicology”, although in a much less dense, much more fun and accessible way.

Indy: On the topic of “public ethnomusicology,” could you speak more about the relationship between Awesome Tapes and academia?

BS: Scholarly pursuits related to cultural practices in general tend to be narrow in their impact beyond journals and libraries and conferences. ATFA was a reaction to the boredom I felt existing in this theoretical realm where music is over-analyzed to the point where it loses the power it holds among the people who make it.

Broadening the definition of ethnomusicology is something that sort of makes me cringe though I don’t wish to denigrate the deep and important work social and cultural scientists are doing worldwide. Nonetheless, the artists whose music I’ve made available to more diverse ears than otherwise imaginable would probably find the blog more useful and vital than scholarly journal articles few people will read or remember.

Indy: It seems to me that there is a strange and populous community of blogs all engaged in some kind of unprecedentedly specific collector effort. I’m thinking of the blogs that feature vinyl rips of Kollywood electronica, old cassettes of Nigerian funk, or South American Psych Rock. What do you think? Do you feel like Awesome Tapes fulfills some sort of collector impulse writ large? Or is this an over-intellectualization?

BS: Personally, I have always been a collector. And I think the Internet and blogging is ripe for showing off one’s collection. Further, the Internet and blogs have helped give a voice to esoteric things of all kinds.
Many of these tapes may no longer be in print and almost all are nearly impossible to find in shops outside Africa, in NYC, Paris, Brussels, etc. Many African expats I meet who know about the site are excited to find old recordings that they can’t find any more ring featured on ATFA.

That said, this is no exclusivity claim. Quite the contrary. I am fascinated by the mass produced nature of this as opposed to the vinyl nerd mentality we see among many DJs and music tastemakers.

Indy: Recently, upon seeing me wearing my Awesome Tapes shirt, a peer of mine said that the blog sounds exoticizing. Thoughts?

BS: Well, listen. This blog is for people who haven’t experienced this music and won’t be able to go to Africa. If people interpret the blog and use it as their own way to…what does it even mean to exoticize something? I’m treating the music in a respectful way.

There are probably a lot of people who have gotten that reaction. But people who check it out realize it’s not there. When you look at early ethnomusicology and anthropology, there is a view of inhabitants of non-western cultures as savages. I am not doing this.

There are definitely people who think African music is involved in some sort of hipster trend. They think we’re trying to co-opt something to garner some semblance of authenticity in our lives because we are ostensibly upper-middle class white kids from the suburbs. I am friends with a lot of people who think this.
Ultimately, if you look at the blog, it becomes pretty clear what my intentions are. This blog is meant to pull away all of the attachments and baggage surrounding this stuff that we talk about in relating to Africa and instead focus on how great the music is. I’m specifically trying not to be the douchey guy who exoticizes something and puts it on his mantle. I remember what it means to be in university and look at the world with a lot of skepticism. I might have said the same thing. People are haters.

Indy: So who do you think is the blog’s audience?

BS: I am writing for my friends and other people who like the music. When I look at the traffic statistics of my blog I see people coming from Pitchfork, Polish hardcore metal message boards, Greek art magazines, and Jazz message boards. A wide variety of people, or whatever.

Indy: On the Awesome Tapes from Africa blog, the music has always been available for free download. How do you think about and manage ownership of the music, especially now that Awesome Tapes from Africa has become a record label?

BS: I am not posting ads on the site so there is no direct profit coming from these downloads. I launched the label to find a way to generate an extra revenue stream for some of my favorite artists. As all profits are split 50/50 and I take on significant risk in terms of investing money and time in the manufacturing and promotion of these commercial releases, I feel the label is quite fair. Following the research I did on the music industry in West Africa, it is apparent to me that this deal is better than what the majority of musicians received when they first made these records. My hope is that further profits will go to the artists by way of touring and licensing opportunities.

Ultimately my goal is get people to hear and enjoy this music. The fact that I am white and the music is made by mostly black African musicians should not make a difference. The criticisms I have received for my perceived profiting through this project have come from a mixture of ignorance about the music distribution process across Africa and misplaced white guilt. Yes, this digitized way of distributing the music isn’t as accessible to the musicians themselves but assuming that Africans don’t hear music via globalized, mediated formats is condescending. Most people I know in Africa aren’t listening to or downloading music they can hear locally when they go online. They are accessing music from outside their countries. Are they exoticizing Jay-Z or does this process only move in one direction?

Indy: Do you see a difference between what you do with Awesome Tapes and with labels like Soundway? Correct me if I’m wrong here but it seems to me that Soundway has guys who pretty much go in to abandoned major label studio catalogues in places like Lagos or Accra and mine the archives for new songs for their compilations. What do you think about their work? How does it relate to Awesome Tapes?

BS: They are going out and finding music that sounds like certain things: Funk, Garage Rock, etc., whereas I’m more interested in the music people there are into:  specific micro-musics, subcultural delicacies. Compilations necessarily disembody the track from the context it came from. Many of these funk tracks are really good but they miscommunicate what an artist was going for. From day one I didn’t want to post a track here or a track there. I wanted to post the whole recordings. I wanted people to hear it the way you’d hear it in Africa.

I see this preference as furthering the mission the blog has had from its beginning which is to make people realize how much cool talent and diversity and creativity there is in every corner of Africa. The message can be garbled by whatever generalizations. What is Africa? It means a lot of different things!
But at the end of the day it’s pretty rewarding for me and the people who have had doors opened up for their music. When I was doing my research, everybody asked me how to get their music to North America. I’ve been able to apply what I know to putting the music out there.

Interview conducted by Houston Davidson.

Brian Shimkovitz (Awesome Tapes from Africa)

Collateral Damage: Awesome Tapes From Africa's Brian Shimkovitz

Digital transparency has revealed dimensions to African music beyond Western received ideas. But how to market it sympathetically, asks Brian Shimkovitz.

I started Awesome Tapes From Africa (ATFA) as a way to make artefacts available from the cassette based music economy I have encountered around Africa. Something that began quite innocently as a means of filling the wide gaps in international music distribution – nearly every musician and producer I’ve met in West Africa wants to find a way to get their music beyond their borders – has become a spark in the often fiery debates surrounding suspected post-colonial tendencies of the Western music industry vis-à-vis the developing world.

My fascination with tape culture in West Africa led to the rather ironic activity of spreading analogue recordings via digital technology. It’s a pursuit that adds to outsiders’ appreciation of the breadth of musical subcultures in myriad African regions, many of which have been passed over by the otherwise excellent labels which have released music from the continent.

Cassette technology has made a massive impact on music distribution in Africa since its introduction in the early 1980s. The movement has been characterised by a difficult duality from the start. The popularity of tapes coincided with an explosion of piracy, which helped bring an end to vinyl LP manufacturing across the continent – it was no longer commercially viable for international record labels like Decca and Philips. At the same time, it created a situation where recorded music of all kinds – not limited to local movements – became available to anyone through the ubiquitous stereos found in markets, shops and vehicles. The portability and durability of the medium contributed a large part of this transformation.

However, the aftertaste of the historically exploitative roles of Westerners in African music industries is still palpable. In evolving ATFA from a blog into a commercial record label over the last year, there have been risks. The artists featured on my site, whose music has been freely downloadable, have gained pockets of fans outside Africa. A crucial thing for me has always been finding a way to promote the music among people who would not normally have access to it. ATFA has thus far been efficient in achieving this goal.
Digitization can be liberating for African musicians. It has given rise to numerous fascinating and vital new music movements within Africa – bongo flava, hiplife, kuduro, coupé-decalé, etc – and has helped African music reach further into clubs, living rooms and festivals around the world. The influx of non-African music into the ears of African youth has been a catalyst for change among musicians there, and shaken the core of what Westerners expect African music to sound like. Giving away free music by African artists has helped create a fanbase that was not previously there for an untold number of creators.

How to take my enterprise to the commercial level and provide some of the artists with career-enhancing opportunities through selling the music, while maintaining a free-for-all approach to the under-distributed sounds still yet to appear on the blog? Would people pay for what they’ve already grown accustomed to grabbing for free? This part brings up many issues. Is the enterprise merely a post-colonial thievery corporation hiding behind the thin veil of millennial digital exploration? I know my mission comes from a place of wanting to provide a global promotional window to listeners who yearn for more flavours.
In the same way that young artists from Bristol to Brooklyn to Brisbane are making their music available for free as a means of injecting spurts of visibility in an over-saturated marketplace, I see African artists making major headway with their localised approach to using the web and digitized media. Not only are young people in Africa making beats in their bedrooms and posting them on Facebook and Soundcloud. Not only are elder statesmen of African music finding new revenue streams via CD and MP3 reissues and digital-only recataloguing of their songs. Not only are African urbanites even more connected to the world’s music scenes through the internet, thereby continuing the circle of influence and inspiration that has been critical to music’s evolution since humans began singing songs. Not only are nomadic peoples trading tracks on mobile phones via Bluetooth technology (see Chris Kirkley’s magnificent Music For Saharan Cellphonesseries). I view the overall digitization of African music as a facet of globalisation, a process from which I now believe it is completely unfair and quasi-racist to shield African art and music.

The difficulty of most African regional musics in making it to neighbouring countries (let alone a record shop in Nebraska) has as much to do with the stunted system of physical distribution as it does with differences in language and creative sensibilities among varying culture groups. Bola, a musician from northern Ghana whose record just came out on ATFA, has had to take the bus down-country eight hours or more to singlehandedly distribute his music to shops that might consider carrying music sung in a language of a faraway region. Even if language wasn’t a stumbling block, there is no real national music distribution company in Ghana to handle such pursuits. It is done piecemeal for the most part, by individual musicians and their colleagues.

Regardless of whether it’s heard outside Africa, wonderful recordings are being made every day across the continent. Digitized music is already breaking down geographical barriers that once made regional music forms so damn… regional. Which, of course, is good and bad. In any event, Nigerians are rocking to Ghanaian music. Ghanaians are even more conscious of what’s happening in Côte D’Ivoire than ever before. And the connection between Congolese rappers and the latest sounds from Paris is tightening. One could go on and on.

I want to find a way to give a nominal fee to each artist whose tracks have been downloaded on ATFA. Anyone who has been to Africa knows this is nearly, if not entirely, impossible. In the meantime, should we, due to post-colonial guilt, not include African music in the global process of discovery taking place on screens and MP3 players around the world? Those who have never travelled to Africa feel rightly concerned about technology-fuelled (un)fairness. It’s something I think about daily. However, the marginal push to make sure music gets paid for has not done anything to stop digital sharing. And the people who see the issue as black and white often wear a damaging paternalist badge on their sleeves, as if we (the non-Africans) have a responsibility to protect the ‘helpless’ musicians. Rather, musicians growing up in Africa are aware of what is happening and deserve to be a part of it. As ATFA grows into something larger, I grapple with the future of marketing the current and back catalogue of sublime sounds in a fair way, without losing the power within that physical piece of vinyl or plastic cassette.

thewire.co.uk 

 

Africa High-Tech: Christopher Kirkley

 

In 2008, Christopher Kirkley went to Africa in hopes of capturing sounds rarely heard by the rest of the world. Traveling southwest from Morocco, carrying little more than a backpack, an acoustic guitar and a digital recorder, the shaven-headed Portland native, then in his late 20s, recorded every form of regional music he encountered, from urban dance bands to nomadic Tuareg singers. As he pushed into the Sahara, though, a trend developed. At night, Kirkley would frequently sit around a fire, drinking tea with other young musicians. He’d strum a tune for the locals, then hand the guitar over and ask them to show him a song from their own culture. Often, they’d put the instrument aside, pull out a cellphone, and play him a tinny MP3—usually by an artist they couldn’t identify, and featuring elements of Western-style production, such as drum machines and Auto-Tuned vocals.

“It was really annoying,” Kirkley says. “My first thought was, ‘These cellphones have ruined everything.’”

But as he continued to explore the Sahel—a vast geographic belt covering parts of Senegal, Mali, Mauritania and Niger—Kirkley began to hear many of those same songs emanating from phones all over the region. It soon dawned on him that he had stumbled upon precisely what he’d come to Africa to find: a rich, self-contained, largely undiscovered musical tradition. Only, instead of an old, possibly fading tradition like he expected, he’d come across a new, wholly modern one.

While other technological advancements, such as personal computers, have been slow to arrive in West Africa, cellphones, specifically of the cheap, off-brand variety, are even more integral to everyday life than they are in America, Kirkley observed, functioning less as communication devices than as pocket-size storage units containing photos, videos and, especially, eclectic music libraries. As in other parts of the world, the digital music collections of those living in the Sahara are built primarily through file sharing, except instead of taking place anonymously in cyberspace, the exchange happens face-to-face via Bluetooth. In a region without reliable Internet connections, the people there had, inadvertently, created a kind of ambulatory, regionalized peer-to-peer network. “Instead of fiber-optic cables,” Kirkley says, “you have highways, and people on buses with phones.”

Five years later, Kirkley, 32, is an internationally recognized authority, not just on contemporary African pop but on the role of cellphones in West African society. Since returning to the United States in 2010, he’s put together two compilations of songs copied from SD cards during the year he spent in Mali. Initially available only as a cassette and through his blog, the online popularity of Music From Saharan Cellphones—wildly divergent mixes showcasing everything from Malian hip-hop to Mauritanian synth music—inspired Kirkley to start a label, Sahelsounds, through which he’s released several more albums of rare African music. He’s been interviewed by the Guardian and the BBC, and gave presentations at the Time Based Arts Festival and the WW-sponsored Portland Digital eXperience. Recently he flew to France to speak at a tech conference in Paris. He’s even been contacted by phone companies looking for advice on opening up the Saharan market. And all for uncovering a thoroughly offline culture and bringing it online.

“It’s crazy how things happen on the Internet,” he says.

For his first four months in Africa, Kirkley lived in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, where he recorded primarily vaguely bluesy, amplified wedding bands. It wasn’t until he got to Kidal, in northern Mali, that Kirkley became aware of the crucial role cellphones play in disseminating a broad variety of music throughout the Sahel. A small, dusty border town miles from the nearest paved road, Kidal’s proximity to both Algeria and Niger nonetheless makes it a well-traveled “desert port” of sorts. As such, the phones in Kidal offer especially dynamic surveys of West African popular music, the result of MP3 trading between the local population and the truckers, drug smugglers and sub-Saharan migrants passing through on their way elsewhere. Along with outdated rock and pop hits from the United States and Europe, the collections Kirkley gained access to ran a spectacularly wide gamut, from the Ivory Coast’s stuttering dance genre coupé décalé to electronic updates of the Algerian folk style of raï to the entrancing, psychedelic assouf music made globally popular by Mali’s own Tinariwen.

Kirkley was especially drawn to music born seemingly from odd cross-cultural exchanges, such as that of Mdou Moctar, a guitarist from Niger whose self-recordings feature the prominent use of Auto-Tune. But as Kirkley explains, “He wasn’t, like, this Tuareg kid who heard T-Pain.” Rather, he went to Nigeria and became exposed to the country’s Bollywood-obsessed film industry, in which producers utilize pitch-correcting technology in an attempt to mimic Indian movie soundtracks. So Moctar is, in fact, a kid filtering Tuareg guitar through Indian-influenced Nigerian film music with distant, unintended echoes of current American pop radio. “It’s a very weird web,” Kirkley says.

Of course, the image of a white man going into Africa and emerging with a trove of uncopyrighted music carries some negative connotations, and Kirkley’s had to deal with them from the moment he made his first compilation available for download. A few blogs misreported that Kirkley had scavenged the songs from discarded SD cards. In truth, he traded for them directly, usually in exchange for a Townes Van Zandt or Elliott Smith album. And when he decided to press Music From Saharan Cellphones to vinyl and sell it, Kirkley burned through international phone cards trying to track down each artist and sign them to a contract, agreeing to split the revenues evenly. Besides, just because the musicians come from impoverished countries doesn’t mean they lack business sense. After all, they’re the ones who took the technology available to them and turned it into a distribution model, which some have used to build lucrative touring careers. Some even turned down Kirkley’s contract offer, considering the money too paltry. In a way, Kirkley says, the artists of the Sahel understand the current music economy better than a lot of record executives do.

“Music wasn’t always a recorded thing that was commercialized,” he says. “Recorded music is pretty new in the history of music. So it’s not like music is going to stop being made. It was made before there were commercial recordings, and it’ll be made after. And I think these kids are more on top of it than people are here.”

But the phenomenon Kirkley observed may have been a fleeting one. In the five years since he first visited the Sahara, things are already starting to change. On return visits to the region, Kirkley found Internet speeds, once grindingly slow, gradually improving, along with the speed of culture: Formerly enthralled by the likes of the Scorpions and Dire Straits, people in West Africa are catching on to au courant pop stars almost as soon as they break here. Even though he knows firsthand the way the Web can transform lives, Kirkley regards the encroachment of the Internet in the Sahel—with its tendency to absorb everything it touches into a homogenous monoculture—with trepidation.

“The whole landscape is going to change drastically,” he says. “The idea of this closed network—once Internet speeds are quick enough to allow uploading songs, and kids can make their own websites and have their own version of SoundCloud, it’ll change everything. So the Internet’s coming there. It’s just taking its time.”

The Cassette Archaeologist: Kidus Berhanu

Curiosity and frustration can take you far. It has for Kidus Berhanu. Better known as DJ Mitmitta or Vemund Hareide as he is titled in his Norwegian passport, these virtues have taken him all the way from Oslo to the Ethiopian countryside. For Kidus, it all started with a frustration with the uniformity of Western music. A frustration that fed his curiosity to discover the yet undiscovered musical treasures of Ethiopia and led to a commitment to archive and spread the joy of Ethiopian music. This has since materialized in countless travels across the country to collect cassettes with traditional Ethiopian music and the Ethiojazz of the 60s and 70s, and in the founding of Mitmitta Music Shop in 2010 (The shop is currently closed but Kidus is hoping to reopen in a few months at a new location in town.)

This is a journey not unlike others. Awesome Tapes’ Brian Shimkovitz, Sahels Sounds’ Christopher Kirkley and labels such as Soundway, Analog Africa and Sublime Frequencies have embarked on similar voyages. But what distinguish the musical odyssey of Kidus is not only its East African focus. It is also its material character and the focus on the local market opposed to international distribution. For Kidus, the modus operandi has not been spreading the music through a blog nor through reissuing old vinyl records. Not yet. The approach has instead been one of collecting, cataloguing and digitalizing.

The Archaeology of Cassettes 

More than anything, Kidus’ project is an endeavor into musical archaeology and ethnography. And it’s a project focused on and redeemed through tapes (his cassette collection now numbers more than a thousand different Ethiopian tapes). As he explains: “Vinyl is hyped. And tapes are still a popular format. In Ethiopia, a lot of the good old music was never issued on vinyl or on CD.”  However, the predominance of cassettes also makes Kidus’ point to one of several caveats in the music industry and to an irony in his own project. Because while the cassette is his preferred format, it was exactly the spread of the cassette in the late 70’s and onwards that exterminated numerous record labels in Ethiopia and on the rest of continent and gave way for cheaper productions and musicians being replaced by a single synthesizer.

In Ethiopia, the record producers and music shop owners could buy one master tape and then easily duplicate this via cheap blank tapes. An early form of musical piracy that resulted in low quality recordings, unduly low prices and a situation where great Ethiopian artists such as Tilahun Gessesse or Mahmoud Ahmed received only a one-off payment and no benefits of potential future distributions. This however can possibly change with the introduction of a new copyright law in Ethiopia in 2010 that led to many music-shop owners being jailed for copying music for piracy purposes.

Ethiopian Music as off-limit for Ethiopians

Another and somewhat bizarre consequence of the functioning of the Ethiopian music industry prior to the 2010 copyright legislation is that today only very few Ethiopians have access to legal copies of the old Ethiopian recordings. Alemayehu Eshete, Muluken Mellese, Getachew Kassa and other of the artist that have become globally renowned through the Ethiopiques series are simply not legally accessible for the majority of Ethiopians.

Kidus is hoping this will change. He spends lots of time nagging the distributors to re-distribute their old releases, trying to convince them that these records will sell again. The problem is often that the covers are out of print and to make it profitable for distributors they would need to reprint at least 1-2000 covers. But his mission of making Ethiopian music available for both the foreign and the Ethiopian music audience does not stop here. He will soon be releasing a recording of Amharic wedding music from 1973 on both cassette AND vinyl. At the same time he dreams of expanding the geographical focus of his work by collecting, sustaining and distributing old Eritrean, Somali and Sudanese music.



The Regionalization of Ethiopian music
While music from the rest of Africa has a strong appeal to Kidus, there is and will probably never be something quite like the tunes of Ethiopia for him. After spending part of his childhood in Ethiopia, he returned to Addis briefly as a teenager. The past few years he has spent travelling back and forth between Norway and Ethiopia, between studies, work and cassette hunting. He now spends most of his time in Ethiopia and is fluent in Amharic, the official Ethiopian language. His fascination of Ethiopian music has several roots, as he describes: “The Ethiopians really value their music and even today Ethiopian music is closely linked to the cultural traditions of the country. In addition, the great variation in the music of Ethiopia’s different regions really appeals to me.”

The vast regional difference in Ethiopian musical tradition is something that also poses a challenge to his ethno-musical investigations. The best music of Tigray or Oromiya is not found in Addis but in the music shops in provincial Ethiopia. Kidus highlights the Tzeta music shop in Dessie and the Negarit shop in Dire Dawa as the best music shops outside and the places to find respectively old Tigray, Amhara and Oromo music. He further explains the initial reception of the old music shop owners when a young pale Scandinavian walks into their domain and asks for cassettes with old – and for many Ethiopian also forgotten – artists: “At first they are quite suspicious. But quickly suspicion turns into excitement and appreciation. Mutual appreciation of and gratitude for a joint effort to preserve an important heritage.”

The Faranji Connoisseur
Many of these grand old men of Ethiopian music – collectors, producers and music shop owners – have since become close friends of Kidus. And Kidus himself has become a renowned connoisseur of Ethiopian music. The go-to-guy for advice and expertise on the music and the music scene of Ethiopia. A position very few faranjis (meaning foreigners in Amharic) can credibly claim. And not an easy position to achieve taking into consideration the relative isolation of Ethiopia and its music during the past century. Nevertheless, Kidus still sees himself as a foreigner in Ethiopia and its music industry and he is aware of the challenges that this poses to him.

Although the emphasis in Kidus’ efforts has mainly on the Ethiopian artists of the past, he has also witnessed on first-hand the changes in the contemporary music scene in Addis (link to Jazzamba article). Changes of both the encouraging and less positive kind. The revival of Ethiojazz has led to an explosion of live music in Addis the last few years: “All clubs want their own band now and there is a lot of talent out there, which is good. Unfortunately, many of the new bands are afraid of experimenting. This is also the case for many of the European or American bands that have started playing Ethiojazz. Many of them are simply trying to copy the success of Mulatu Astatke.” 

 There are of course exemptions to this trend and Kidus points to the Nubian Arc as one of the most experimental and forward-looking bands around (see further recommendations from Kidus below).
Kidus concludes by highlighting a more remarkable effect of the renewed interest in Ethiopian music. According to Kidus the new golden era of Ethiopian music has substantially changed the image of Ethiopia and provided the outside world with a new impression of what Ethiopia is in cultural terms. And Kidus is here to make sure that the insight of foreigners and Ethiopians into the unique musical treasures of Ethiopia will grow and proliferate for years to come.


Kidus recommends
3 old artists yet to receive deserved recognition

• Ali Birra (Oromo star! 60s-00s  http://soundcloud.com/mitmitta/sets/ali-birra-1969-vol-01)
• Beharu Kegne (Traditional singer playing mesinko with deep lyrics, from Wollo, 70s-80s)
• Gebre Tsadik (A great mesinko player and singer, from Tigray, 80s)

3 fusions between Ethiopian and Western musicians that work

• The Ex & Getachew Mekuria (www.terprecords.nl)
• Trio Kazanchis (www.myspace.com/triokazanchis)
• Le Tigre des Platanes & Etenesh Wassie (www.myspace.com/tigredesplatanes)

3 new Ethiopian artists

• Gennet Masresha (New traditional music, great voice)
• Samuel Yirga (Solo piano album, also member of Nubian Ark)
• Omar Suleeyman (Oromo singer from the 90s-00s, 10 albums vol.1-10)

addisrumble.com
By Andreas Hansen;Photos by Kidus Berhanu

Modern Photo: A golden age of popular music in Ghana as seen through the lens of S.K. Pobee by Samy Ben Redjeb

Originally published @ thisisafrica.me, written by Samy Ben Redjeb

 
African brothers @ Accra Airport circa 1976 (Photo: S.K. Pobee)

I´m scanning the negatives I received from Modern Photo, a laboratory in Accra that had built its reputation by taking pictures of political figures and musical events some 40 years ago. Those musical events are what I am interested in.

Until that point I hadn't really been able to picture the magnitude of what had been going on musically in Ghana during those days. All I had were tales and legends of what seemed to be forgotten times, but now, each developed frame feels like an additional piece to the puzzle. That musical scene I admired so much is taking shape, revealing itself in the form of pictures taken by one of the pioneers of modern photography in Ghana, Samuel Kobian Pobee (S.K. Pobee for short).

While working on the first instalment of Afrobeat Airways, I had found photographs with the stamp of the modern photo company and started asking around. It might well have been producer Max Boateng, now manager of Nana Ampedu of the African Brothers, who directed me there. In response to my question, he exclaimed "Modern Photo? Of course I know the place; it is just in front of what use to be the legendary Tip Toe night club - we can go tomorrow morning."

Max couldn’t make it the next morning but told me to call him as soon as I found a cab, so I did. "Let me speak to the driver,” he said. The cellphone that I handed over disappeared between the ear and the shoulder of the cab driver who, while speeding through Accra´s busy traffic, was trying to understand Max´s instruction while the radio was blasting the latest cheesy hiplife hit.

Once we got there, I knew I had arrived at the right place; photos of K.Gyasi, Papa Yankson, Pat Thomas and many more, all nicely framed, had been neatly hung around the main entrance of the store. I entered and asked if I could speak to the manager, not forgetting to say that it was Max who had sent me. I was taken to the offices of Sam Pobee, son of S.K. Pobee, the founder of the company.

I sat down and after handing him the first volume of Afrobeat Airways, explained that I had come to continue working on the series and was now looking for liner notes material to document the second volume. Sam, slightly unimpressed by "my labour of love", nonchalantly looked at me and said “Follow me.” I was taken to the store room where the negatives where stored. The place didn't have air conditioning and a part of the room had been exposed to dust and heat so I was wondering about the condition of these treasures. “Here is a box with pictures of K.Frimpong,” said Sam. That box was stored with others of the same kind, all written on with a thick black marker: ‘Fela Kuti at Napoleon Club’, ‘Uhuru Dance Band 1970’, ‘African Brothers at Accra Airport 1976’ and a few hundred more. "We had serious flooding few years ago and a good part of the our archive was destroyed", he lamented.

 
Uhuru Dance Band, circa 1970 (Photo: S.K. Pobee)

With two of Sam´s employees we started selecting photos of interest, and while doing so, I started to think that the pictures in good condition might become the basis of a beautiful book documenting what has to be described as one of Africa´s most vibrant musical scenes, something equal or beyond anything found in a major European or North American city. That’s a personal opinion, based on my taste perhaps, but even so, I can’t think of many places in the northern hemisphere that could be compared to, nor compete with, what was happening musically in cities like Accra, Cotonou, Kinshasa or Luanda in the ‘70s. After about three hours, some 400 negatives had been selected.

Only now did I start to understand the cultural legacy that the synergy between one of the best photo studios and one of the most important venues in the country had produced. I was curious and wanted to understand what had happened in this place. Here’s what Sam had to say:

"When Modern Photo was created in 1955, the Tip Toe night club just opposite of our offices was already operating. The manager was Mr Page, an American. My father S.K. Pobee, the founder of Modern Photo, wasn't too much into music then; he was mainly taking pictures of political figures. It wasn't until 1966, when he leased the Tip Toe, that his interest in all cultural things began to grow. 

 
At the Tip Toe night club (Photo: S.K. Pobee)

The first thing he did when he took over was to modernise and renovate the whole place. He bought new furniture, and ordered a new set of modern musical equipment. At that time every club had a residential band. For example The Lido night club, a few blocks away, had Broadway Dance Band, Napoleon club had Basa-Basa and Bunzu Soundz. Tip Toe had the Uhuru Dance Band and the Blue Monks, a group my father had formed and sponsored.

 
Gyedu Blay Ambolley circa 1975 (Photo: S.K. Pobee)

To keep up with the demand, every club had to invite bands from other parts of Ghana and also from abroad to stand a chance of surviving the fierce competition. One of the first groups my dad invited to Ghana was Fela's Koola Lobitos. They were followed by Victor Uwaifo, who had a big following here in Ghana, and then Ignace de Souza, a fantastic musician from Benin, just to name a few, but there were many. However, he was most impressed by a powerful band from Congo Brazzaville, Les Bantous de la Capitale, who stayed here for 6 months - by the time they left they were playing and singing Twi highlife perfectly. One of my dad´s main qualities was his sense of innovation; he started organising boogaloo competitions influenced by James Brown´s ‘mashed potato’ dance style. The people were dancing while the band were playing soul tunes, and we had bands who played that style incredibly well - especially P.P Dynamite and also the Hougas (with Gyedu-Blay Ambolley on bass). We also organised ‘Miss Tip Toe’, contests and the girls really looked nice in their mini skirts and their Afro hair. Today it’s all artificial.

 
Miss Tip Toe  (Photo: S.K. Pobee)

Additionally to the highlife and big band concerts, my father introduced another event called ‘Jazz Night’, on which he would have two drummers competing against each other. The most memorable one was between Kofi Ghanaba (a.k.a. Guy Warren) and Uhuru´s percussionist, Max Amah. Oh, you would have loved it, I tell you. That day Kofi took a beating.

 
Tip Toe dance competition circa 1971 (Photo: S.K. Pobee)

You know my father was also someone who was into advertising and promotion and he knew how to convince the musicians to be loyal to the Tip Toe night club. He would tell them "after the sound check come to the studio, I will make a picture of you and place an advert in the daily graphic to promote your next show". This is what made Tip Toe stand above the other clubs, the fact that we had Modern Photo. The promotion tools we used worked so well that on Saturday afternoon, when we had what we called the ‘Afternoon Bump,’ starting at 6pm. If by 1pm you were not inside Tip Toe you wouldn't come in - sold out. That’s the reason why so many bands and musicians wanted to work with my father and that’s what made our success.

 
Hedzolleh Soundz (Photo: S.K. Pobee)

My father left to the United States between 1973 and 1977 to improve his skills. When he returned, he found the place was going strong; I had perpetuated his work. But unfortunately my efforts would not be rewarded because in 1979 we were hit by a second curfew. It was serious. The first one, which took place in 1966, didn't last too long. It didn't hit us too hard, but it was the third that knocked us out. It killed social life and the music industry in this country. Everybody had to be home by 10pm: no parties, no concerts, no boogaloo, no Miss Tip Toe. When after two years that crazy curfew was over most of our musicians had already left the country and DJs had replaced the bands. Live music was dead."

 
Name unknown (Photo: S.K. Pobee)

I left Modern Photo and crossed the street to see what was left of the legendary venue. I wasn't too surprised to find that the place that had once hosted legends such as E.T. Mensah and The Black Santiago had now been bought by one of the many churches that had mushroomed all over the country. I entered the place and was shown around by a kind gentlemen who was trying to convince me that there were an infinite number of paths to accept Jesus as my personal saviour. Little did he know that my "saviours" had left the stage many years ago.

I walked back to the meeting point with my cab driver, 5pm sharp in front of the Lido Night Club, as I was told. Since the word “sharp” takes on a less uptight meaning in this part of the globe, I decided to take a walk through the nearby market. Crowds of people thronged the food stands, wandered past music and clothes stores, vegetable and fruit stands and breathed in the scents of tomato and spicy chilli sauce. Music was blasting from all corners and unlike the delicious gravy that was to be consumed with fufu and banku, the music I was hearing was all but hot. The frequencies reaching my ears were sterile and artificial - cleansed of sweat, breath and passion. Where had that “sweeter than honey” sound of Highlife gone?

Although everyone would like to blame the curfews, piracy and political mishaps - certainly a big part of the issue - producers and musicians might have been partly responsible for using technologies that did not do justice to the nature of West African music. In the early 80s, some instruments, especially horns and percussions, were sacrificed and replaced by the drum machines and synthesizers that were in vogue at the time. In turn those were replaced, a decade later, by midi and computers. If curfews were a bludgeoning darkness on the local music scene, the light at the end of the tunnel was stuffed with a big fat digital keyboard. The harvest of this dispassion is three decades of sonic mediocrity.

The 60s & 70s generation of Ghanian musicians had birthed unique sounds based upon principles of excellent musicianship and recording techniques, with deep respect for traditional music. They had excelled to such an extent that the new hybrids of music they created still command respect all over the globe 40 years later. They provided an example to follow. The music created in “the old days” is not, as I was so often told, “grandma and grandpa” music but world class music.

As Ambolley liked to say: “It doesn't surprise me that our music is finally travelling because, you know, if you do something good, it will be remembered forever. That's right, brother."

With the support of Eleonore Sylla and Robert Sobotta of the Goethe Institute in Accra, the Analog Africa team, comprised of Paula Adank Montanez (Label Manager), Vikram Sohonie (Analog Africa’s editor) and myself, we made our way to Ghana to interview some of the legendary artists and producers of what has to be described as “the golden age” of Ghanaian popular music.

Their memories on paper, their music saved, our hopes are to be part of a movement - created by dedicated labels and music collectors - that will make sure this music is be remembered for generations to come. Amen!

My hope with this essay is to generate interest for the pictures of SK Pobee and to find people that might be interested in exposing them in galleries. If you’re interested in exhibiting these photographs, please contact me at info@analogafrica.com.

Uchenna Ikonne Speaks about Nigerian Vinyl

Back in the fall, we had a chance to sit down with the founder of the legendary African music blog - Combs & Razor - to tap into his infinite knowledge about the Nigerian music scene...which we thought we'd share in advance of his insane Nigerian compilation: Brand New Wayo: Funk, Fast Times & Nigerian Boogie Badness 1979-1983...

As you'll see, our discussion was exhaustive - and you're guaranteed to discover more about Nigerian music than you ever thought existed. Just sit back, relax, and enter the world of Comb & Razor.

Q: Most of us became acquainted with your superb musical taste through your Comb & Razor blog.  How long have you been collecting music and what inspired you to actually start blogging?

Thanks for the compliment! I’m always grateful and somewhat mystified when people tell me how much they appreciate my humble (and admittedly inconsistent) blogging efforts. It was something I did primarily for my own gratification, so I never expected so many people to so readily come along for the ride!

I’ve been an avid music fan since I was about nine years old but I think I only seriously started collecting records in the mid-1990s, shortly after I moved to the United States from Nigeria. At the time I was mostly collecting hip-hop, boogie and soul records that I had heard growing up in the 1970s and 80s but for whatever reason had never gotten to own. From there I started buying a lot of deep soul and funk from the 60s, as well as jazz, rock, reggae and Latin stuff. While I’d always been into a wide range of music, my tastes and knowledge were expanded exponentially by years spent working in record stores… back when we still had record stores.

My journey to music blogging was almost accidental. I started the With Comb & Razor blog as a journal documenting the production of a movie I was shooting in Nigeria. The style and content of the movie drew heavily from the last half-century of Nigerian pop culture: Drum magazine, old pulp novels and fotonovelas, forgotten TV shows, vintage fashion, and lots of highlife and pop music from the 60s, 70s and 80s.

When the production wasn’t proceeding as smoothly as we would have liked, we decided to take a break to regroup and then come back to complete the shoot. During this hiatus, just to keep the blog going, I started posting up some of the music I was planning to use on the soundtrack… just my way of trying to keep the dream of the movie alive. Plus, it was a bit of a therapeutic thing; I was so bummed out about the failing production and there was a certain comfort to be found in just immersing myself in the music of what seemed to be simpler, happier times. To my surprise, people seemed to dig it a lot and I started getting more page views than I ever did with my movie diary, so I kept doing it. I started spending more time researching the stories behind the records, and then record labels started contacting me to write liner notes for reissues, and somehow, alas, I never did get around to completing production on that movie! I intend to get back to that one of these days, though.

Q: I know your knowledge of African music is ridiculous. How did you become so knowledgeable about Nigerian music?

I came up in 1980s Nigeria, which might have been the most dynamic period in the history of the country’s music industry. The economy was pretty buoyant and there were so many labels releasing tons of music in so many different styles. Nigeria’s record market was so fertile that it drew musicians from all over Africa and beyond, so we were constantly exposed to a rich smorgasbord of sounds and I just soaked it all up.

Plus, we had a lot of good writing about the music scene in newspapers, magazines, and books. I read it all as a snot-nosed third-grader, and somehow managed to retain a good deal of it even when it seemed like the entire era and its music vanished from collective memory.  It was almost like a mass amnesia fell over the populace: I would say to people “Hey, you remember this record that was a big hit in 1983? Remember how we used to rock that at parties?” The only reply I got was blank looks. They sincerely lacked any idea of what I was talking about! Years later, when I started tracking down some of the musicians, I would sometimes have to remind them of some of their records that they had completely forgotten!

Q: For those of us looking to explore Nigerian music beyond Fela, do you have any suggestions?

There’s so much Nigerian music that the mind boggles trying to access it all. Obviously, a lot of these records are quite hard to come by in the West and when they do show up on eBay or other record markets, they are prohibitively priced. That’s why I think it’s great so many labels are putting out compilations and reissues that allow a wider audience to experience this music. I’ve been concerned that most of these reissues lean a bit too heavily towards funk-oriented material at the expense of all else, but I’ve seen some encouraging diversity on more recent releases. And of course, I look forward to adding to that myself!

Q: You wrote some liner notes for a Soundway Records compilation: The World Ends: Afro Rock & Psychedelia in 1970s Nigeria.  How did you first become involved in this project?

I've had a relationship with Miles Cleret of Soundway Records for a number of years, as most of us in the African record digging community do know each other. He had wanted to collaborate with me on something for some time but never really found the right project until The World Ends came around. Incidentally, I was already doing a lot of research on the 1970s afro rock scene at the time, so the Soundway comp gave me a ready outlet for stuff I was already working on.

Q: Can you give us a little background about how rock inspired Nigerian artists?

Like most kids around the world, Nigerian youths first encountered rock & roll via Elvis Presley, quickly followed by "the British Elvis," Cliff Richard, who was arguably even more popular in Nigeria. This was the beginning of youth culture in Nigeria. For the first time, teens and young adults had music that was aimed squarely at them and their experience, unconcerned about appealing to the adult audience. These kids called themselves “hepcats” and started forming regional fan clubs where they listened to and traded their favorite records amongst themselves Out of these fan club gatherings, the hepcats started to form rock & roll bands of their own. So you got the first wave of Nigerian pop groups like The Spiders, The Harmonaires, The Cyclops, The Hykkers, The Postmen and The Figures.

As the 1960s wore on into the 70s, these local pop groups imbibed more influence from The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks and The Jimi Hendrix Experience, but the most influential foreign rock act might have been Santana. Because that group had such a strong Afro-Latin flavor to their sound, they illuminated the potential of infusing rock with African rhythms. And that led to the development of afro rock.

Q: I understand that most of the artists recording rock in Nigeria came from the eastern part of the country. Can you explain this phenomenon?

It’s true that most of the noteworthy Nigerian rock bands came from the east, but there were also plenty of groups in the southwestern metropolis of Lagos, which at that time was the country's capital. For various reasons, though, the Lagos groups tended not to last very long. I have a few theories as to why this happened.

In Lagos, rock mostly remained an underground scene patronized by university and high school students and some young adults. The mainstream, however, stayed devoted to more indigenous pop styles like juju and apala. So already, you have a gaggle of groups scuffling for the spotlight within this relatively small subculture. And while Lagos today is an enormous megacity, it was not quite as big then as it is now. Competition was fierce, and the stakes were close to all-or-nothing: If you had a major act playing a big show at one spot, just about everybody who was anybody in Lagos would be there and at venues across the city, other bands would be performing to an audience of empty seats. So musicians went to great lengths to sabotage each other’s sets and even to try to force one other out of the market altogether.

Furthermore, Lagos can be a very tough place to live for anybody, and especially so for artists. A big part of the reason that someone like Fela was able to thrive in Lagos (apart from the fact that he had a huge, forceful personality and his music was, you know, pretty brilliant) was because he was to some degree a native son; he came from a middle-class background and his family owned property in the city. So he could comfortably sit down to compose and cultivate an audience without worrying about keeping a roof over his head. For a lot of musicians who didn't have the same luxury and might have come to Lagos from other places, they had to desperately scramble to keep their heads above water. If they didn't see any significant rewards—which most didn't—sooner or later they would probably have to pack up and go back to their hometowns. Or they just disappeared into the masses of the disenfranchised in slums such as Ajegunle and Mushin and were never heard from again. And then the ones who might have been native Lagosians, if they stayed with music, ended up joining juju and highlife bands. So you find a lot of Lagos rock groups recording just one or two records and then completely dropping off the radar.

In the east, however, the scene was not concentrated in one urban center but spread over a wide network of cities and towns across the region. There was more room to breathe, and bands could ply their trade within their respective turfs without stepping on each other’s toes. There was still competition, but a lot more camaraderie. Also, it seems that people in the east, for a number of reasons, were just more into this kind of music than the folks in Lagos. Even the Lagos-based bands spent a lot of time touring eastwards because that was where the real audience was.

Q: What happened to the whole psychedelic rock scene in Nigeria? It seems to have vanished.

Well, what happened to the psychedelic rock scene in America or the UK or Germany or Mexico? It was a style that captured the zeitgeist of a particular period in history, but time marches on and people move on to the next popular sound. In Nigeria in particular, the audience began to want to ”get down” more than they wanted to “freak out” and so there was the demand for much more direct dance music like funk, disco and guitar-band highlife, then pop and reggae and Congo music and hip-hop and the wheel keeps on turning.

Q: You have some other projects coming up with Now & Again Records, as well as your own label. Would you mind giving us a sense of what to expect from you in the future?

Yeah, I’m collaborating with Egon of Now Again on a compilation of Nigerian rock and funk. This is of course a subject that’s been visited by a few compilations lately but we hope we can bring a new twist to it. I’m also working with Luaka Bop Records on an anthology of the Nigerian avant garde funk musician William Onyeabor.

In addition, you can look forward to some releases from my own Comb & Razor Sound label. The first one will probably be available in February 2011: it’s an overview of Nigerian boogie music from the 1980s with an 80-page mini-magazine featuring lots of exclusive photos and information. We have similar examinations of other genres coming after that, as well as a full-length book chronicling the development of the post-war eastern rock and pop scene. Also, more collaborations with Voodoo Funk and AfricanHipHop.com

Q: Who would you say are your favorite artists from yesteryear?

Nigerian artists? Wow… Too many to choose from! I really like the funk-rock groups The Hygrades and The Funkees. I’m a big fan of Jake Sollo, who was a member of The Funkees before going on to become a prolific and influential producer in the 80s.  I love a lot of highlife artists like Sir Victor Uwaifo, Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe, The Oriental Brothers, Dr. Victor Olaiya and Etubom Rex Williams. I used to be a big, big(!) fan of William Onyeabor too, but I must admit that my personal interactions with him have dulled my enthusiasm for his music somewhat. I guess I still dig his records, though.

Q: How about your favorite find on vinyl?  Do you have any that you're particularly proud of?
I come across so many records of different types that it’s hard to isolate any particular one (or five, or ten) as my favorites. They all appeal to me for different reasons—sometimes on a sentimental level, sometimes because they’re just so rare, sometimes because they fill in the gaps of a story that I’m researching. And sometimes it’s that they just offer mindblowing music. Some recent finds I’ve been fond of include:

1. Shango Dance Band, 6^th Infantry Brigade – S/T LP (EMI, 1974)
This is a pretty rare and heavy afrobeat album by this group led by Ojo Okeji, formerly a sideman in Fela’s Koola Lobitos group. There’s some similarity to Fela’s sound, but it’s a bit more relaxed and less raucous. And with song titles like “I Need Your Love” and “Women Are Great,” you know he’s got loving on his mind more than political agitation!

2. The Front Page – Sparkle In Your Eyes/Gimme Some Time 45 (Anodisc, 1975)
This is one of those records that I don’t necessarily think is musically superlative though it’s still quite enjoyable. But I was pleased to find it because it’s not all that often you come across 45s from the Anodisc label. The Front Page was a relatively obscure soul group from my hometown of Aba. I think they released just two singles, this one and another, “You Can’t Change Anything.” The group would re-record both singles with a heavier, funkier sound about a year later under the new band name The Friimen Muzik Kompany.

3. The Semi-Colon – Ndia Egbuo Ndia (Afro-Jigida) LP (EMI, 1976)
Semi-Colon is one of my favorite Nigerian music acts and this little-seen LP is considered the group’s best album. A lot of heads have mixed feelings about Semi-Colon albums because the styles usually fluctuate radically from funk to pop to rock & roll to reggae, but this one is lean, fierce psychedelic afro rock from end to end.

4. The Hygrades – Baby/Jumping Cat 45 (EMI, 1971)
Debut single from the influential eastern rock group, The Hygrades. “Baby” is a nice light pop tune, though not particularly compelling. The real winner is the wild guitar instrumental on the flip.

5. Stone-face & Life Everlasting – Love is Free/Agawalam Mba 45 (EMI, 1973)
Excellent single from former Hygrade Stoneface Iwuagwu. The a-side is a beautiful psychdelic pop rock song with beautiful vocals. The b-side? One of the heaviest, most aggressive and relentless funk tunes I’ve ever heard!

6. Charles Duke – Send Them Back/Suk Usan Idang 45 (EMI, 1973)
Two sides of groovy funk-rock from Duke, formerly of The Ceejebs. I count myself really lucky to have found this one as it’s almost completely unknown. Even Duke himself had forgotten about it when I asked him!

7. The Doves – Ewat Udem/Akan Anwan Isong Idung 45 (BEN, 1974)
The Doves were a very popular pop-rock group throughout the 1970s and early 80s, but this early work from them has a deeper, more rugged vibe. The a-side is a delightfully unruly highlife number and the other side is wiry native rock. Total gem.

8. Foundars 15 – Fire Woman LP (EMI, 1977)
Foundars 15 was one of the more sophisticated funk-rock groups of the 1970s and this is their most satisfying LP. The sound is heavy and distorted and the arrangements are audaciously complex for the time.

9. The Apostles – Down Down The Valley/Battery Rock 45 (BEN, 1973)
This was the first record by The Apostles of Aba, one of the east’s biggest groups. It was the pleasant pop of the a-side that put them on the map, but the organ-driven instrumental b-side is the real winner for me. While it’s clearly derivative of “Acid Rock” by The Funkees, it goes much further than that track. It sounds pretty futuristic by today’s standards, so I can only imagine how far-out it must have been in 1973!

10. Mary Afi Usuah & the South Eastern State Cultural Band – Ekpenyong Abasi LP (SESCULT, 1975)
Mary Afi Usuah is one of Nigeria’s unsung national treasures. She trained in opera singing in Italy and sang on the score of a couple of movies there, such as Demofilo Fidani’s spaghetti western And Now Recommend Your Soul to God. She also happened to be my music teacher for a while in the early 80s, but I didn’t know at the time that she had recorded this amazing album with highlife bandleader Dan Satch Joseph. It’s so rich and deep and spiritual, with notes of rock, jazz, traditional rhythms and European film music. Soundway included a track from this LP, “Ima Mma Nyem” on the Nigeria Special 2 compilation, so you should check that out.

Q: By the way, what are your thoughts about the musical FELA?

I've really not had the chance to see it, unfortunately. From the bits of it I have caught on the Tony Awards and elsewhere, it does seem like quite an exhilarating aural and visual experience! But I have to admit feeling a bit dismayed at the apparent lightness of its libretto. It seems to me that there isn’t much focus on storytelling beyond a few bullet points of the man’s life. I was really hoping the upcoming Steve McQueen-directed Fela biopic would deliver a more fleshed-out portrait, but I recently read that the producers had scrapped the screenplay written by Nigerian playwright Biyi Bandele and opted for a looser, more abstract, music-driven narrative approach. Which to me sounds like they might be looking to draw inspiration from the musical. And that’s okay, I guess… It seems to be a fantastic concert party and scads of fun, but I’d really love to see a well-done, sufficiently nuanced examination of Fela and, perhaps more importantly—to me, anyway—of the society that shaped him.

Q: The other day I was listening to nothing but Afro Funk on Pandora...and I found myself wondering how come we don't get this caliber of musicianship anymore.  Do you think there's hope for the African music scene?  Are there any contemporary artists that you listen to from back home?

Does Pandora have a good afro funk selection? I’ve never really tried programming for any of that stuff on there! I should probably check that out…

Anyway, the music industry in Nigeria is more vibrant right now than it’s been in a long time and I’m very excited about the progress that’s been made. I mean, for the first time—in my lifetime, anyway—most Nigerian youths support and identify with homegrown music more than they do stuff from overseas! That’s a pretty big deal, considering how enamored Nigerians have always been of foreign sounds.

That said, while I listen to and enjoy a lot of the contemporary Naija pop music, I really can’t say there’s too much of it that really grabs me and shakes me to the soul or dazzles me on a consistent basis. I think the reason that I’ve been unable to connect with it on a deeper level is because of, as you said, the paucity of the musicianship. And mind you, when I say “musicianship,” I don’t even necessarily mean it in the traditional sense of live instrumentation; I think there are some incredibly inventive musical things that can be done with computers and sampling and sequencing. The problem is that the basic concepts of musical construction have largely been abandoned.

Q: What sort of concepts are you talking about?

Well… Just the structure through which we create and listen to music. In the past, in appreciating a piece of music, you had any number of features you might observe. Beyond fundaments like melody, harmony and rhythm, you might listen for tone, texture, syncopation, voicing, phrasing, and so on. But now, through a gradual process of reductionism, this array of musical elements has been boiled down to the binary formula of “beat” and “lyrics.” And the lyrics are given primacy of place in the equation, with the “beat”—the actual musical component—being relegated to a background role. People dance to the “beat,” but they don’t really listen to it per se. When’s the last time you heard a commercially-released instrumental track? That idea barely makes sense now because music on its own has little value; it’s just the hodgepodge of sounds that act as a cushion for the words.
Mind you, none of this is unique to the Nigerian situation—it’s pretty much the status quo for most contemporary pop music almost anywhere in the world. And I don’t want to come off as the old geezer shaking my fist and grumbling about how these darn kids have destroyed music, because these trends were actually initiated by my generation.

To make a parallel, look at what's happened in Congolese music. The classic Congo songform was like a three-course meal: you had your lovely, melodic verse, then your lilting chorus, then you get your verse again, maybe served with a dollop of countermelody. Then you have another chorus. Then, you get the moment everyone's waiting for, the sebene.  That's the breakdown section where the tempo accelerates, the rhythm changes direction and the guitars start playing hypnotic, interlocking rhythm patterns. That's the dessert portion of the meal—when all the dancers get to throw down and show out. And then maybe you’d cool done with another verse before the band hit you with another helping of sebene on the way out.

If you listen to the direction a lot of soukous music went in the 1990s, this measured sense of dynamics was largely thrown out the window. Tracks started out with the sebene and rode that sebene all the way to the end of the song. It’s like nobody had the patience to make their way through the “courses” of a song, they wanted to proceed directly to the dessert and eat only dessert. And hey, I’ve got a massive sweet tooth myself but if I eat nothing but cake and ice cream all the time, eventually I’ll get sick!

Now in Naija you don’t have the sebene, but what you have is the hook. A lot of the popular songs are really all hook. The primary concentration seems to on fabricating an insanely catchy lyrical refrain, preferably one that’s built on a trendy catchphrase, or has the potential to create a new one—“Kini Big Deal!” “Gongo Aso!” “Ginger Ur Swagger!” “Wa Wa Alright!” And if you can score a big enough hook, you barely even have to write verses.

Of course, I don't rule out the possibility that perhaps I'm too old to truly "get" it because it's not really made for me to "get." Just like the highlife generation never understood the hepcats in the 1960s because they made music that was not designed to be “got” by the old squares. I guess I’m one of those old squares myself now. While I may listen to the new music and come away disappointed because it’s not meeting my expectations of what music should be, the kids really feel that this music is expressing their unique experience and worldview, then I think that’s cool. Music should not stay in one place… It’s got to keep moving, and if that alienates some dusty old geezers, so be it. Time marches on!

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