In July 2008 guitarist Nathaniel Braddock was backstage at the Pitchfork Music Festival, waiting to go on with his group the Occidental Brothers Dance Band International, when he got an unexpected phone call from Samba Mapangala. They’d never met or even talked before, but Braddock knew exactly who Mapangala was. The veteran singer, born in the Congo, had been a major star in Africa for nearly four decades, most of them as the leader of Orchestra Virunga—one of the most revered practitioners of the golden-age African guitar-band music that the Occidental Brothers were trying to re-create. “It was a good day,” Braddock says.
Braddock started listening to African music while he was in high school in the late 80s—about the same time he picked up the guitar, and long before Fela Kuti reissues became de rigueur in the collections of broad-minded indie rockers. He soon began dabbling in the music, mostly by trying to duplicate parts he heard on records, but it would be years before he convinced himself he could play it seriously.
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Born in Michigan in 1971, Braddock grew up in Midland, a small town near Flint and Saginaw that’s home to the corporate headquarters of Dow Chemical. “My parents were liberal-arts educated, lived in Europe when they first married, and traveled, while on the whole most of the other families were very conservative,” he says. “The culture was one of looking outside of what was immediately there to find your identity.” In 1988 he discovered the new syndicated radio program Afropop (now Afropop Worldwide), and it immediately struck a chord. “When I started listening to African stuff I was learning how to play the guitar,” he says. “I could identify that it was a different approach to the instrument, and since I felt different I just decided to go with it and see.”
Braddock spent four months in Chicago in 1993, working at the Newberry Library and researching a thesis on the historic town of Pullman, and the welcoming feeling he got from the city’s free-jazz community helped persuade him to move here after he graduated the following year. He hung out at the Fireside Bowl and spent a year rooming with Tim Kinsella (Joan of Arc) and Ryan Rapsys (Euphone). He desperately wanted to join a band and pored over the Reader‘s classifieds looking for opportunities. “I was driving all over the city and suburbs,” he says, “and it was all terrible for the most part.” Braddock auditioned for the alt-rock band Squash Blossom; he didn’t get the spot, but their singer, Chiyoko Yoshida, recommended he contact drummer Tim Stevens and guitarist Vito Greco, formerly of the postpunk trio Table (whose old bassist, Warren Fischer, would soon cofound Fischerspooner). They formed a short-lived trio called Virginia in 1996.
In the 90s, before moving to Chicago, Asamoah and Cromwell had both played in the Western Diamonds—at the time one of the best-known highlife bands in Ghana—and the vintage style of Braddock’s group appealed to them in a way that Ghanatta’s more contemporary sound didn’t. Though Braddock says the enthusiasm of native-born Africans is the most single important kind of encouragement he’s received, he held off on asking Cromwell and Asamoah to join—he didn’t want to overhaul the Occidental Brothers’ lineup before capturing the group’s carefully rehearsed instrumental sound in the studio.
It was on North American tours in 1996 and 1997 that Mapangala began thinking of leaving Africa. “I lived in Kenya for 20 years, and in the early 90s I was not selling many of my records because of piracy,” he says. “People would buy my music, but I wasn’t earning anything from it. I thought about going to England, but when I toured in the U.S. and Canada I saw that a lot of African musicians were living over here, and I spoke with some of them and they said it wasn’t bad.” He lives in Jessup, Maryland, with his wife and four kids.
Next on the schedule, though, was the fund-raiser in Minneapolis for the American Refugee Committee. The Occidental Brothers had been offered a pretty generous paycheck for the concert, and they didn’t want to play it as an instrumental band. Braddock called Mapangala, looking for advice or suggestions—and with the thought that, just maybe, he would agree to fill in himself. Which of course he did.
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