NIGERIA SPECIAL: MODERN HIGHLIFE, AFRO-SOUNDS& NIGERIAN BLUES 1970-6 (SOUNDWAY)
CLASH MANDINGUE: MANDING DANCE MUSIC OF THE 60’S KANTE MANFILA AND SORRY BAMBA (ORIKI MUSIC)
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These guys have been into African music for their entire careers, if not their entire lives, and their knowledge of it is unimpeachable. And admittedly even top-shelf African artists have rarely enjoyed wide distribution in the West, so it’s not like those labels are just flogging material everyone’s already heard. What bothers me isn’t that Christgau acknowledges them but that he doesn’t acknowledge any of the smaller imprints that make it their business to dig up stuff not even the experts know about yet. In the past five years some of the greatest African music I’ve heard has come from labels like this—tiny European operations like Soundway, Analog Africa, and Oriki Music that release material in danger of being lost to history, regional records whose occasional brilliance never reached a broad audience even in their native lands.
“For me it doesn’t matter whether I’m in Bombay or Ghana or New York or London or wherever, I’ll have a look for records if they’re around,” says Englishman Miles Cleret, who runs Soundway. He was inspired to launch the label on a 2001 vacation in Ghana, where a friend of a friend, a local DJ in Accra, led him to caches of old 45s.
But the series isn’t just educational—most of the music kicks ass, too. On Nigeria Rock Special the wiggy guitar sound of psychedelia is transplanted into ultrapropulsive grooves far funkier than what most Americans would consider rock; the best comparison I can make would be Funkadelic, but even that doesn’t take into account the African-language vocals and native polyrhythms. The Western-inspired material bears a passing resemblance to its models, but you’re not likely to find it familiar. Whether by accident or design, the artists went way off course, and that’s what makes this collection—and its companion, Nigeria Disco Funk Special—so compelling.
Only one of the artists collected here, Benin’s wonderful Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou, had ever crossed my radar before. Redjeb figures he spent seven months in Benin, searching for records, researching local music history, and tracking down label folks, producers, and musicians. (He prefers to make licensing deals with artists, since in his experience they need the money most urgently.) The gorgeous packaging includes a 44-page booklet featuring colorful essays for every song; most detail Redjeb’s searches and reproduce his artist interviews. “For two and [a] half weeks everybody I knew who had to do with music was looking for Ouinsou Corneille, yet there was still no sign of the guy,” begins the piece about the singer. “I was starting to get nervous and decided to make a radio announcement.”
Upstart labels play an important role in the world-music ecosystem: they disrupt the dichotomy that’s developed in the public mind, where the only categories of African artists that exist are international superstars making records with Ry Cooder and unreconstructed traditionalists who’ve never seen the inside of a studio. “My ultimate concern is ideological,” Villanova says. “I want to show modernity and sophistication in Africa. I refuse to consider ‘genuine’ or ‘authentic’ African music versus ‘alienated’ African music. ‘Authentic’ sounds like they want Africans to play music strictly on acoustic instruments, butt naked in the village. Africans can use whatever they want to create. They’re not trapped in an ethnic black hole—they’re as free as any Western artist to play with whatever they want.”v
