--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------AFRICA 100: THE INDESTRUCTIBLE BEAT7xCD box set hand-assembled by Joe Tangari--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Creator and Author: Joe Tangari Released: April 4th, 2005 Chicago, IL

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------TABLE OF CONTENTS--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I. Introduction to Afrobeat[1] Intro: The Indestructible Beat[2] From Sea to Shining Sea: African Music in West and East Africa (a disclaimer)[3] Highlife Time: A Bit of History[4] Fela: Music Is the Weapon[5] More Than One Man's Music[6] Around the Horn: Afrobeat Outside of West Africa and Related Styles[7] Ethiopiques: The Wonderful and Strange Sound-World of Swinging Addis

II. An Afropop Buyers' Guide[1] A Guide to Reliable Afropop Labels[2] Essential Recordings

III. Africa 100: The Indestructible Beat: Track-by-Track[1] Disc 01 [Tracks 101-116][2] Disc 02 [Tracks 201-214][3] Disc 03 [Tracks 301-312][4] Disc 04 [Tracks 401-415][5] Disc 05 [Tracks 501-514][6] Disc 06 [Tracks 601-615][7] Disc 07 [Tracks 701-713][8] Vinyl-Only Bonus Track

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------LINER NOTES--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

First appeared as a feature titled "The Indestructible Beat" at Pitchforkmedia.comhttp://pitchforkmedia.com/features/weekly/05-04-04-the-indestructible-beat.shtml

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I. INTRODUCTION TO AFROBEAT--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

>> [1] Intro: The Indestructible Beat

Afrobeat is a sound and a movement, music and a state of mind. It's the joyous awakening of a continent from a colonial nightmare and the crushing realization that the nightmare isn't over yet, anguish and happiness whipped together with traditional drums, cheap guitars, and even cheaper amps.

Afrobeat is a term with no solid definition, like punk, rock, or soul, although it may be all three of those things. No one knows who first used the word, but as far as history is concerned, it belongs to Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the late Nigerian giant through whom any understanding of the sound of 1970s Africa must pass. In the most limited sense, you could say that Afrobeat is the cinematic, polyrhythmic, symphonic funk sound that Fela developed with superhuman drummer Tony Allen, but it's much more than that.

This article isn't an attempt to tell the whole story of African music; it's an account of the time I've spent exploring the popular sounds of 1960s and 70s Africa. It's not the easiest music to fall deeply in love with, in part because it comes from a place most Westerners aren't close to understanding, a continent obscured by our misconceptions, prejudices, and expectations of "world music." The other difficulties are more practical: The most fertile period for African funk, soul, rock, and jazz lasted from 1965 to 1982, a time of great upheaval in Africa, and much of this music wasn't recorded. Of that which was put to tape, if the masters still exist, they're likely significantly degraded by decades of neglect.

For what has been recovered, distribution can be spotty, and the shop that has two things you're looking for is usually missing four other things you want to check out. Compilers of these sounds must track down the musicians, hunt out masters in forgotten, crumbling pressing plants, and sift through bins of scratched, dusty vinyl in the markets of Accra, Conakry, and Lagos looking for the lost slab of brilliant funk or the 45 with the highlife A-side and the totally unexpected fuzz-rock B-side. The rewards of those efforts have been huge, though, and I'm pleased this music is increasingly getting the spotlight it deserves.

>> [2] From Sea to Shining Sea: African Music in West and East Africa (a disclaimer)

Afropop was a wide-ranging phenomenon, but the primary geographic area I've been exploring extends from Senegal in West Africa, along the Atlantic coast to Nigeria and Cameroon, and then over to Ethiopia and Kenya, with a detour or two to South Africa. This is an immense area and a huge number of countries, and the flavor in each one is a bit different, from Kenya's rough-and-tumble funk to South Africa's sleek sophistication to the wild experimentation of Ghanaian funk and fusion bands.

The decision to leave out most of Central and North Africa is partly practical and partly a matter of taste. The sound of central Africa is focused on variants of soukous, the Congolese form of Cuban rhumba that dominated popular music there for much of the 20th Century, and I haven't really had enough time to hear an appreciable amount of it. It also bears little resemblance to either Fela's Afrobeat or any other tangentially related African pop music. Similarly, topography-- namely the Sahara Desert-- separates Mediterranean Africa from the rest of the continent, and the culture there is more Arabic than African. Rai, Andaluse, and other North African styles are singular, and though a bit of cross-pollination is inevitable, it's really an altogether separate world.

I'm also leaving out a discussion of African hip-hop, which is blowing up big time at the moment. The best scenes are in Senegal, Nigeria, and Tanzania.

>> [3] Highlife Time: A Bit of History

The antecedents of Afrobeat are numerous-- it's fusion music in the truest sense, incorporating elements of essentially any available source material. Loosely speaking, the Afrobeat of Fela and other early practitioners like Orlando Julius Ekomode was a modernization of the dance-band highlife that dominated the popular music of Anglophone African countries such as Ghana and Nigeria. Highlife was a general term given to several styles of music that were themselves fusions of Western ballroom and swing music, Trinidadian calypso, Liberian sailors' songs, palmwine guitar music (so called because of the drink imbibed at events where it was played), and-- most importantly-- local rhythms. The greatest highlife star was E.T. Mensah, whose tours of West Africa with his Tempos Band spread the music far and wide. He's credited with introducing it to Nigeria, and his concerts with Louis Armstrong are among the earliest seeds of Afrobeat.

These new musical hybrids emerged at the same time as the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. and the decolonization of Africa by European powers, beginning on March 6, 1957, with the independence of Ghana under the pan-African prime minister Kwame Nkrumah. American jazz, soul, and funk became outlets for politics and expressions of black pride. James Brown visited the continent several times, and a listen to any Afrobeat compilation reveals his influence. By the end of the 60s, the optimism spurred by independence had dimmed considerably as some initially democratic governments calcified into autocratic regimes, as economies stagnated, militaries took power, and currencies plummeted in value. Nkrumah, a great thinker and activist, wasn't adept at governing and was overthrown in a coup in the wake of some disastrous economic policy decisions and a declaration of himself as president-for-life.

It was against this backdrop that Fela took his band, Koola Lobitos, to Britain and the U.S., where he read the writings of Malcolm X and befriended members of the Black Panthers. When he returned home, his band had been renamed Africa '70 and he embarked on the long, wild course of loud, unflinching criticism of corruption and ineptitude in African government that cemented his legend and kept the Nigerian authorities exasperated until his death from AIDS in 1997.

>> [4] Fela: Music Is the Weapon

Overstating Fela's position in African music is impossible-- his contemporaries lived in his shadow, and newspapers referred to him on a first-name basis. Fela frequently fought with Nigeria's military governments, believing that inept or cruel local government was no better than inept, cruel governance from abroad. In Stephane Tchal-Gadjieff and Jean Jacques Flori's great 1982 documentary Music Is the Weapon, Fela-- sat in a tattered chair in his communal home-- expressed his belief that blacks oppressing blacks in Nigeria is worse than whites oppressing blacks in South Africa, because it's more insidious: It's more difficult to comprehend your oppression when the obviousness of racism is removed from the equation, he theorized.

So much has already been written about Fela that it seems fruitless to rehash his biography, as fascinating as it is. Though he made huge sums of money from his music, he chose to live in a dilapidated Lagos compound-- his Kalakuta Republic-- with his wives and band members, and he disdained the Nigerian elites who ignored the city's massive slums and rampant crime. He also saw Christianity and Islam as destroyers of an African way of life and predicated his lifestyle, including his controversial polygamy, on a return to African spirituality. His album art spills over with these ideas: The imams and priests on the cover of Shuffering & Shmiling lord over piles of money near the words

"Why Not African Religion?", while he blows bubbles containing the words and phrases "Pan-Africanism," "Total Emancipation," "Freedom," and "Justice" from his sax on the cover of No Agreement.

Fela sang most of his epic songs in pidgin English to reach as wide an audience as possible-- Nigeria's Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, and Fulani communities could all understand it, and it exported easily to other English-speaking countries. And of course, there's his sound: Eighteen-minute epics riding endless polyrhythmic grooves, massive horn sections and choirs, incessant guitar ostinatos, and Fela's furious baritone. The arrangements were intricate, but left room for the accomplished soloists of the Africa '70 and his later band the Egypt '80. Fela's stage presence was mesmerizing, whether he wore his lime-green or aqua blue jumpsuits or just his underwear, his pink, cowrie-shell encrusted sax glistening as it hung from his neck.

Singing in pidgin English had other advantages for Fela, as he was a great lover of wordplay and fluently bilingual-- he claimed in an interview with guitarist Keziah Jones that English is Yoruba "wrongly spoken." "Society" is just another way of spelling the Yoruba "so si ayiti," loosely translated as "tied in such a way that it appears free," he claimed. Often he was less subtle: The cover of his V.I.P. album has "Very Important Persons" crossed out and replaced with "Vagabonds in Power" and he repurposed the acronym of multinational information conglomerate I.T.T. to stand for "International Thief Thief."

Fela's outspoken stance made his life difficult and often tragic. In 1975, police arrived at his house intending to plant marijuana on him and book him for possession, but he confounded them by eating the joint. When they arrested him to get an incriminating stool sample, he merely swapped with another prisoner and walked away a free man, detailing the whole ordeal on Expensive Shit. His 1977 album Zombie, a furious critique of the military, prompted an attack on his compound that destroyed his home and left his mother with fatal injuries. Instead of backing down, he delivered her coffin to an army barracks and wrote Coffin for Head of State, a scathing indictment of the militarys brutal repression. On his defiance in the face of tyranny, he had this to say in Music Is the Weapon: "They cannot kill me, because my name is Anikulapo." Fela replaced his given middle name Ransome with Anikulapo in the late 70s. Anikulapo means, roughly, "he carries death in his pouch."

About the only thing keeping Fela from a lifetime in prison was the instability of the Nigerian government itself. Whenever he was jailed, a new regime would release him when it came to power. He remained an activist to the end of his life, never compromising his beliefs or positions to accommodate anyone. It's said that more than a million people attended his funeral, but whatever the numbers, Fela was the king of Afrobeat, and no one else comes close to that claim.

>> [5] More Than One Man's Music

Though Fela obviously looms large over African music, there were literally hundreds of great African funk, soul, and rock bands, with incredible scenes in Ghana and Nigeria in particular. The modernization of West Africa's other great traditional music, Juju, was concurrent with Africa's funk explosion, and though Fela was revered by many, he was easily outsold by Nigerian Juju master King Sunny Ade, who released as many as 100 albums before he was ever heard on record outside of Africa, on 1982's Island/Mango album Juju Music. Nigeria, by virtue of having Africa's largest population-- and a hugely diverse one at that-- was a hotbed of new styles, from Orlando Julius' "Super Afro Soul"-- immortalized on his classic 1966 album of the same name-- to the deeply Islamic Hausa funk of Ofo

the Black Company and Sahara All Stars to the heavy, disco-informed groove of Fred Fisher and Thony Shorby Nyenwi.

Nigerians also had the benefit of a highly professional music industry, and Decca (and its subsidiary Afrodisia), EMI, and Polydor all had massive operations there. Ginger Baker, who had become a great friend of Fela's and often sat in on drums on his early-70s shows, built the 16-track ARC Studios in Ikeja, the first of its kind in Africa. It soon had competition.

While money flowed well in Nigeria, things were more difficult in other countries. Ghana's music industry was a web of shoestring operations that succeeded solely due to the raw talent of those involved, while countries like Ivory Coast and Benin produced far fewer groups than their neighbors. (Although Benin's Orchestra Polyrhtymo was one of West Africa's greatest bands.)

In Guinea, the music industry was controlled by the government of president Sekou Toure, who set up a system of regional orchestras. Cubano son and rhumba heavily influenced the music of the West African coast, and most of the bands in Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau-- along with Mali, further inland-- played some local spin on it. In Guinea, the Orchestre de Beyla was so amazing that it was elevated to the status of national orchestra. Known from that point forward as Bembeya Jazz National, the band was remarkably innovative for a government-controlled entity, with guitarist Sekou Diabate's searing, psychedelic tone and the band's Afro-Cuban fusion so thoroughly mixed it became its own style.

Senegal's Orchestra Baobab was Bembeya's greatest counterpart, but Gambia's Super Eagles-- who played a style of Afro-Cuban music called Ndagga that was a precursor to Youssou N'Dour and Etoile de Dakar's mbalax music-- briefly garnered a lot of notice for their Sgt. Pepper costumes and energetic stabs at deep soul and British Invasion rock. Many of the bands that recorded soul or funk singles or albums weren't exclusively soul or funk bands. Highlife and Afro-Cuban bands frequently wrote and recorded one-off stabs at Afrobeat or American soul, and groups like the Yahoos or Ghana's African Brothers Band released a slew of singles touching on just about every sound you could name. The resulting swirl of styles is exhausting to research and exhilarating to take in.

>> [6] Around the Horn: Afrobeat Outside of West Africa and Related Styles

While Afrobeat was primarily a West African phenomenon, it put down roots elsewhere, with a few nearly unheard bands popping up in the Soukous strongholds of Congo and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). Zambia's Zamrock was largely indebted to the Congolese soukous sound, as well as South African township jive and mbaqanga, while Kenyan funk bands Matata and Mombasa were overshadowed by the popularity of the upbeat soukous offshoot benga. South Africa produced a number of remarkable funk bands, most arising from the prolific fusion and jazz scenes, but it was always peripheral music there.

A limited number of African or part-African groups had success on other continents in the 60s and 70s, including Ghanaian/Caribbean prog-funk band Osibisa (the name means "criss-cross rhythms that explode with happiness"), based in London, whose albums were adorned with Roger Dean cover art. Exiled South Africans Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masakela, who were briefly married in the 60s, became minor stars on the U.S, folk and jazz scenes, respectively, while Nigerian drummer Babatunde Oltunji's 1960 Drums of Passion album is widely regarded as the recording that created the world music industry. It's also the album that inspired countless jazz musicians to look to Africa for rhythmic

inspiration, and was a direct influence on Coltrane's A Love Supreme, as well as Carlos Santana, who covered "Jin-go-lo-ba" and actually exerted a big influence on Afrobeat himself. And of course, there's Manu Dibango, the saxophonist/marimbist from Cameroon who recorded frequently in New York and scored a minor club hit (#72 R&B) with the tough funk track "Soul Makossa".

Not surprisingly, Afrobeat had a huge influence on American funk in the 70s, and many Afrobeat compilations include American groups like Oneness of Juju and Lafayette Afro-Rock Band. Today, American groups such as New York's Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, Kokolo, and Akoyo Afrobeat Ensemble and Ypsilanti, Mich.'s Nomo keep Afrobeat alive. In Africa itself, the funk explosion died in the early 80s, killed by worsening economic conditions and the withdrawal of major Western record labels and their funding, which increasingly went to lighter Afropop fare and traditional recordings. By 1982, only two studios remained in Ghana: Ghana Films and the open-air Bokoor Studios, the last refuge of the country's electric highlife scene.

Today, talk of so-called world music and even specific discussions of the history of music in individual countries tend to gloss over Afrobeat or ignore it entirely, something I feel is a reflection of how Westerners want to perceive the world than anything else. The fact is that funk and psychedelia were worldwide movements, and black consciousness spanned the whole of the African diaspora, from Brazil and Peru to the U.S. to Jamaica, Britain, and of course Africa itself.

>> [7] Ethiopiques: The Wonderful and Strange Sound-World of Swinging Addis

I've intentionally held off on discussing Ethiopia's "Swinging Addis" music scene of 1969-1975 because, though I consider it to be a thrilling and important part of the Afrobeat experience, there is nothing else like it. Other local scenes produced distinctive sounds, but the difference between Ethiopia and virtually everywhere else is that country was almost totally isolated. One of the world's oldest nations, Ethiopia was the only African country never to be colonized. Apart from a brief, limited occupation by Mussolini's Italy, the country remained untouched by European mismanagement, and for most of the 20th century remained under the rule of Haile Selassie, the negus negast, or king of kings.

Ethiopia had no tradition of symphonic music and no real popular music to speak of in the immediate post-war era, but the country had adopted military marching bands, and Selassie's government kept tight control over the makeup and repertoire of the few institutional bands that did exist-- most of which were tied to the National Theater. Beginning in the late 1950s, the musicians and arrangers of these bands branched out and took steps toward incorporating Western sounds into their music. But it took all the way to the late 60s for this experimentation to find its way to the people, with the founding of the first independent bands. The institutional groups, like Police Band and Body Guard Band, diversified their sounds to compete, and Swinging Addis was born.

Though record distribution by non-government entities was prohibited by a 1948 imperial edict, an enterprising young man named Ahma Eshete set up his own label, Ahma Records, anyway and proceeded to document a period of incredible creativity and resourcefulness in the Ethiopian music community. Only one member of the entire scene, Mulatu Astatque, had received formal training in composition and arranging outside of Ethiopia. The only known Ethiopian vibraphonist, Astatque was a hugely important figure in Ethiopian music, arranging countless records and helping to craft the utterly distinctive "Ethiopique" sound, which has been well-documented in the last decade by France's Buda Musique Records, on a series by the same name.

Ethiopian music can probably best be described as dark, psychedelic funk and soul. It's as though a group of highly skilled musicians were told what funk, rock, soul, and jazz sounded like without hearing any examples and then went and played all of those styles at once on whatever instruments were around-- horns, vibes, electric organs, electric guitars, piano, harp; all of it was fair game. The singing is mostly done in a melismatic head voice, but you get the occasional James Brown grunt from Alemayehu Eshete (no relation to Ahma) or a whispery, uncharacteristic singing style like that of Girma Beyene.

The Ahma recordings have lo-fi warmth, but they're positively hi-fi compared to those on the Kaifa label, which rarely had the use of more than two microphones. The catalogues of Ethiopia's two local independent labels-- as well as that of Philips Ethiopia, the only foreign company to get significantly involved-- are a treasure trove of strange, inscrutable music that sounds like nothing else on the planet. Despite its uniqueness, it's mostly very accessible music to non-Ethiopians, and it's some of my favorite stuff.

Unfortunately, the scene didn't last, and Haile Selassie's reign was brought to a brutal end with Mengistu Haile-Mariam's Soviet-supported coup in 1975. The curfews of the derg period, as Mengistu's reign became known, put the breaks on Swinging Addis, and several of the most important musicians went into exile, mostly in the U.S. Recording activity lingered on into the late 70s, but by the 80s, one of the world's most vital and vibrant music scenes had all but died.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------II. AN AFROPOP BUYERS' GUIDE--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

>> [1] A Guide to Reliable Afropop Labels

As I mentioned earlier, this isn't the easiest music to collect. Part of it is the frustration of reading names like Jimi Solanke and Psychedelic Aliens in liner notes and then not being able to find any recordings by those bands, because none exist outside of Africa, or sometimes at all.

Most African music is found in the U.S. on compilations, and these tend to go in and out of print (though more out than in) as small boutique labels fold or bigger labels can't be bothered with keeping a low seller in print. There are a handful of very reliable labels, and there are also a few huge, general world music labels that offer a few African recordings in their vast catalogues. Here are a few to look out for:

1. Sound WaySimply put, Brighton, England's Sound Way equals quality. The label is run by passionate people who do things the right way: Every track on a Sound Way compilation is meticulously remastered, sometimes from vinyl if the masters aren't around anymore, and I've never noticed a drop in sound quality on any of its releases. More than that, the track selection on its multi-artist comps is nothing short of astounding and the label fills its liners with tons of information, including bits of input from the original artists when available. Its single-artist releases are equally rigorous and generally very comprehensive. Also, Sound Way carefully licenses all of the music it releases, which is noble. It's a young label with only five releases, but it may be the best one.

2. Retro Afric'Retro Afric' is another great UK label, specializing in slightly more traditional music. It's responsible for two great E.T. Mensah highlife compilations, the Super Eagles retrospective Senegambian Sensation and a modest catalogue of interesting soukous records, including Vintage Verckys, a superb look at Congo's Orchestre Veve.

3. Buda MusiqueParis label Buda Musique is one of the world's great imprints, with a massive back catalogue stretching from traditional tribal music to the outstanding, ongoing Ethiopiques series. You want liner notes? The liners in a Buda Musique release cannot be beat. Full track notes, biographical information, historical contextÉit's all there, along with tons of photographs and lyrics translated from their original languages into English and French. The remastering is always amazing, although sometimes the sources are not easy to work with. The five-part Angola series is also intriguing, covering Angolan popular music from the entire post-war era, with each volume covering a different span of years.

4. ShanachieShanachie is another label with an unfathomable back catalogue, and it has released such a wide variety that you never really know exactly what you're getting, though the quality is likely to be high. It's no good for an off-the-cuff purchase-- I've wound up with a few records that were really not my kind of thing-- but if you've done your research, you'll be treated with good sound and usually lots of information. Shanachie keep its back catalogue in print on its website, and I highly recommend Alemayehu Eshete's 1989 album Addis Ababa, one of a very few post-1975 Ethiopian records to gain wide release.

5. Stern's/EarthworksYet another behemoth, Stern's and its Earthworks subsidiary have labyrinthine catalogues that require research. The Stern's Africa reissues of Orchestra Baobab's early 80s albums are great, as is the recent Bembeya Jazz compilation The Syliphone Years, but once again, the labels' outputs are too diverse to assume you know what you're getting. Earthworks is the label responsible for bringing South Africa's township music to light on the epochal 1985 compilation The Indestructible Beat of Soweto.

6. Honest Jon'sDamon Albarn's label is a beautiful thing, and though its Afrobeat output is limited to a double reissue of two albums by Fela sidemen Tunde Williams and Lekan Animashaun, along with the excellent Mali Music, it's worth mentioning just for its sheer excellence.

7. Afrostrut/Strut/HarmlessStrut is a triumph and a tragedy. Forced into liquidation in 2003, the label was the best going during its too-brief existence. Anything with the Strut, Afrostrut, or Harmless logo on it is worth buying, no questions asked. Despite its whole catalogue being out of print, Strut also warrants a mention here for being one of the first labels to really tackle Afrobeat, and doing it so incredibly well.

8. OthersObviously, there are tons of other labels, many of them majors, who have at least dabbled in Afrobeat. Rough Guides can be a mixed bag, but it also uncovers some interesting things and is worth a listen. I've checked a bunch of them out of my local library. The best I've heard are the Ethiopia volume (it borrows heavily from the Ethiopiques series) and retrospectives of Youssou N'Dour & Etoile de Dakar and Manu Dibango. Labels like Naxos World and Nonesuch Explorer tend to be focused on a more

ethnomusicological mission, but the quality is always tops, and newer labels like World Village are starting to break groups like the great Saharan guitar band Tinariwen.

Smaller labels like Afrodisiac and Evolver have some interesting comps out, but haven't done enough to give me a feel for them (Afrodisiac's lack of liners is infuriating, too). And of course there's always David Byrne's Luaka Bop, whose African forays have been few so far, but whose releases are usually up to high standards. It has recently released World Psychedelic Classics 3: The Funky, Fuzzy Sounds of West Africa, which is a great comp. Also worth mentioning is Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra's Rope-a-Dope label, which has an interesting stable of artists, though it's not wholly focused on the revival Afrobeat sound that the band does so well.

>> [2] Essential RecordingsThis is a list of 12 releases that would make what I view to be the perfect introductory Afropop collection, with a few notes on each (extensive notes on some of the tracks are in the mix that follows).

1. and 2. Anything by FelaFela released more than 50 albums in his tumultuous lifetime and approaching his catalogue is intimidating to say the least. To put a broad point on it, his most fertile period was the latter half of the 70s, but it's genuinely difficult to come across a Fela record that doesn't make the grade. Thankfully, Fela is also the exception that proves the rule: Thanks to an extensive and extremely well-done reissue campaign by MCA/Universal, nearly all of Fela's recordings are currently available with great sound, original artwork, and good liners. Most albums are paired with another, and albums that get their own disc always include a few previously unreleased extras. I started with Expensive Shit/He Miss Road, a twofer of 1975 albums, and if I had it to do over, I'd start there again, because it's a great introduction to Fela's big sound and epic track lengths. Consisting of five tracks, all more than 10 minutes long, it's a monster disc, and though "Expensive Shit" is phenomenal, the original LP flip side "Water No Get Enemy" is even better, one of Fela's best tracks. For a second Fela disc, you can't go wrong with Zombie, a powerhouse record and a defining moment for Afrobeat.

3. Ghana Sounds: Afrobeat, Funk & Fusion in '70s Ghana [Sound Way; 2003]I reviewed this for Pitchfork, and I credit it as the recording that got me into Afrobeat. There is no weak track among the 14 gems of Ghanaian funk here, some seeing release for the first time ever, and many of them are among my absolute favorite songs. Unremittingly funky and covering a ridiculous breadth of sounds and approaches, this is not to be missed. Volume 2 is almost equally amazing, and I hope there's more on the way.

4. Nigeria 70: The Definitive Story of 1970s Funky Lagos [Strut; 2002]This is one of three items on this list that's currently out of print, and I apologize for that, but it's such an incredible compilation that I'd be remiss not to mention it. This covers the full range of Nigerian funk and soul in the 70s, from Fela's early progressive highlife to ultra-heavy Hausa funk to the funky psychedelia of Blo and Joni Haastrup. Two discs packed solid with outstanding music and a beautiful, informative book of liners apparently weren't enough, though, as the compilers included a third disc of audio documentaries about Fela, Afrobeat, Ginger Baker (the interview with him is downright hilarious), and Nigeria in the 70s. I lucked into a $17 dollar copy at Amoeba Music while visiting friends in San Francisco. If you see it, pay any price.

5. Ethiopiques 8: Swinging Addis [Buda Musique]Volumes 1 and 3 are excellent and cover the same period and different songs by many of the same artists, but Ethiopiques 8 is perfect from front to back. Girma Beyene's "Ene Negn Bay Manesh" gets things going with an entrancing horn arrangement, but the music here is all over the map, from Lemma Demissew's Fats Domino-ish piano rock to Ayalew Mesfin's biting garage funk, with plenty of points in between. This disc makes a good case that Addis Ababa had one of the best scenes in the world from 1969-1975.

6. Afro-Baby: The Evolution of the Afro-Sound in Nigeria 1970-79 [Sound Way; 2005]First, Sound Way unearthed a motherload in Ghana, and now it's meticulously working on Nigeria. The songs here range from spare, almost traditional-sounding funk to thumping, gritty disco, with an especially nice early Fela track. Liners are superb, and though the label apologizes for having to master certain songs from vinyl sources, you'd have to be listening with a stethoscope to notice. Bring on Volume 2!

7. Orlando Julius & His Modern Aces: Super Afro Soul [Phonogram Nigeria; 1966; r: Strut]This is a defining album, and one of the first African pop records to break away from the highlife/Juju/soukous molds. Strut's reissue is simple and informative and crucially adds the "Ijo Soul" and "Olulofe" singles, defining pieces of African pop. It's said that "Ijo Soul" helped inspire James Brown's late 60s material, and it's not hard to believe it. It's a great record that needs to be back in print as soon as possible.

8. Afro-Rock, Volume 1 [Evolver/DMI/Kona; 2002]The spotty liners try to be informative, but plenty of basic information is missing. Not a big deal, though, because the music rips. "Heavy Heavy Heavy", the only track I've been able to find by Sierra Leonan superstar Geraldo Pino-- who with his Heartbeats band was one of Africa's first homegrown funk/soul stars-- makes it worthwhile alone, but there's plenty of other great stuff, much of it by bands that only took one or two stabs at Afrobeat, funk, or rock. You get a bit of dub, some aggressive soul, walloping funk, and some extremely amped-up highlife-- and it's all glorious.

9. Bembeya Jazz National: the Syliphone Years [Stern's Africa; 2005]Guinea's Bembeya Jazz were one of the greatest dance orchestras of West Africa, and though only a few of their songs could really be considered Afrobeat, their music was so unique it definitely fits the spirit. I can't say enough about guitarist Sekou Diabate's sinuous playing, but the rhythm section deserves equal props for creating a mysterious, thrumming vibe for the horns to soak in. The 2xCD compilation focuses on their early recordings, which have a beguiling, roomsound ambience that's easy to get lost in.

10. Ethiopiques 4: Ethio Jazz & Muzique Instrumentale 1969-1974 [Buda Musique]This Ethiopiques volume concentrates on Mulatu Astatque's instrumental music, and it's a trip. The textures on this record, drawn mostly from two different albums released in the early 70s, are out of this world, and the funk is deep, dark, and full of rough edges and unexpected twists.

11. AfricaFunk: the Original Sound of 1970s Funky Africa [Harmless; 1998]Harmless was the original label of the people responsible for Strut, and this compilation is excellent. A few American funk artists found their way into the tracklisting, but no complaints: Lafayette Afro-Rock Band, Ice, and Oneness of Juju all have great songs on here. The actual African selections are just as great, with two corkers from Manu Dibango, Fela's "Expensive Shit", a great Peter King track, and "Talkin' Talkin'" by Matata, the best Kenyan funk track I've heard.

12. Booniay!!: A Compilation of West African Funk [Afrodisiac; 2003]I'm almost loathe to include this, because there's next to no information in the liners and the remastering is somewhat questionable-- it's over-compressed, for one thing-- but the music on this disc is outstanding. Several tracks from Ghanaian eccentric Gyedu Blay-Ambolley form the meat of it, but Bright Engelberts & the B.E. Movement (not sure where they're from on account of the lousy liners, but they're obviously from an Anglophone country) get in two colossal funk tracks that have me thirsting for more. The liners situation could be worse, though: Explosive Entertainment's budget Afro-Funk compilation gives no information at all beyond the artist and song title, and I suspect that none of it properly licensed. Afrodisiac have at least gone to the trouble of properly crediting the original publishers.

I'd also like to mention two recent charitable compilations that I think are both worth listening to and important for the funds they provide to relief organizations. The first is Red Hot & Riot (MCA, 2002), a Fela tribute that benefits small organizations in Africa trying to fight back the grim tide of AIDS (infection rates are near 50% in many southern African countries and recent trends in Uganda show that even countries with successful anti-AIDS programs are susceptible to backsliding). It features a huge cast of stars from all over the world, from Tony Allen and Fela's son Femi, an important modern Afrobeat exponent in his own right, to Jorge Ben, Blackalicious, Archie Shepp, Mixmaster Mike, and Senegalese rappers Positive Black Soul.

Just released is ASAP: The Afrobeat Sudan Aid Project (Mobida), an excellent mix of American Afrobeat bands like Antibalas and Kokolo and modern African artists like Dele Sosimi and Keziah Jones. Proceeds benefit Darfur aid initiatives.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------III. AFRICA 100 BOX: TRACK-BY-TRACK--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you're knee-deep in funk records, you have to test them on the road, so I made seven mix CDs for the car-- 99 tracks and almost nine hours of music, plus a vinyl-only bonus track make up this mix. Only two of these songs aren't by African musicians-- Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra's "Big Man" and Kokolo's "Mister Sinister" may be by American bands, but they fit too well to deny them a place on these discs. I've offered some notes on every track, along with country of origin and year of production, when it's available to me. I've also tried to note many of the places the song has appeared up on records available outside of Africa. Enjoy.

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>> 101. Fela Anikulapo Kuti & Africa '70: "Zombie" (Nigeria, 1977)Available on Zombie (MCA/Universal), The Best Best of Fela Kuti (MCA/Universal), Music Is the Weapon: The Best of Fela Kuti (MCA/Universal) and Black Man's Cry (Shanachie)

"Zombie" is top-flight Afrobeat, with Fela at the peak of his powers and Africa '70 sharp as daggers. The interlocking guitars stay on the same ostinato for more than 12 minutes as the horns surge around them. Fela's brilliant arrangement is full of unexpected gaps, blindsiding avalanches of sax, a hypnotic choir, and manic energy. His baritone growl drips with spite for Nigeria's junta and its loyal army, but he still injects biting humor when he wraps up the first verse by singing, "Zombie no go turn unless you tell him to turn/ Zombie no go tinkle unless you tell him to tinkle."

The verses grow increasingly frantic as the song progresses, building to Fela's wild drill sergeant commands: "Fall in!/ Fall out!/ Fall down!/ Get ready!" Tony Allen's brilliant drumming deserves a blurb to itself-- the kick drum is almost completely independent from everything else he's doing, and he accents so many strange parts of the beat that it's a wonder he even knows where he is, but without his technique, the song wouldn't get anywhere. The Africa '70 was coming apart at the seams in 1977, but you can't tell as Fela leads the band into the final swell with a mocking rendition of "reveille Some protest music skirts around the issue with poetics or makes whining pleas for generic change; "Zombie" hits like a satirical hammer you can dance to. Perfect and absolutely essential.

>> 102. Girma Beyene: "Set Alamenem" (Ethiopia, 1969)Available on Ethiopiques 8: Swinging Addis (Buda Musique)

This is the sound of smoke wafting through the air in some Addis Ababa nightspot-- you can almost hear the drinks clinking in the background. The organ could have fit on Pink Floyd's A Saucerful of Secrets, but the song's dark, luxuriant sprawl is different from a traditional understanding of psychedelia-- it's altered states via ancient Coptic churches carved in solid stone, with the bass strangely mixed almost as high as the vocals. Beyene's whispered vocal delivery burns with quiet intensity and Mulatu Astatque's vibes wrap them in dense, unhurried atmosphere.

>> 103. Marijata: "Mother Africa" (Ghana, 1976)Available on Ghana Soundz: Afrobeat, Funk & Fusion in 70's Ghana (Sound Way) and Pat Thomas Introduces Marijata (Gapophone)

This is about as thick and pure as funk gets, a sweet syncopated horn arrangement riding a hard groove, some tasteful lead guitar, and a bit of solo trading. It could give the JB's a good run for their money any day. I'd get into the intricacies of the composition or something, but really, this just slams, and there's nothing better in the world to drive to.

>> 104. Segun Bucknor & His Revolution: "La La La" (Nigeria, year unknown)Available on Nigeria 70: The Definitive Story of 1970s Funky Lagos (Strut) and Poor Man No Get Brother: Assembly & Revolution 1965-1975 (Strut)

Strut's amazing Bucknor retrospective went out of print when the label went out of business, but he deserves another look. "La La La" is a simple soul number with a booming bassline and catchy "la la la" chorus, but Bucknor's delivery of the lines "My heart is filled with rain/ All I've got is shame" is devastating."

>> 105. Oscar Sulley & the Uhuru Dance Band: "Bukom Mashie" (Ghana, 1973)Available on Ghana Soundz: Afrobeat, Funk & Fusion in 70's Ghana, (Sound Way)

There aren't many songs where just the drum fill is awesome, but this is one of them. A clattering pile

of percussion starts at a frantic tempo, and then that simple fill ushers in a staggering bass line. Saxophones dart from side-to-side avoiding stabbing, voluminous horns; the funky beat swings, bobbing up and down like a car with soft suspension. Sax and flute solos and chanting vocals are all swept up in Sulley's wild arrangement, a sort of miniaturized take on Fela's cinemascope big-band funk.

It's amazing that it was never released until 2003, when the Sound Way folks scooped the weathered masters off a pressing plant shelf. Sulley now leads Ghana's national symphony orchestra and teaches percussion to poor children in Accra.

>> 106. Geraldo Pino: "Heavy Heavy Heavy" (Sierra Leone, year unknown)Available on Afro-Rock, Volume 1 (Evolver)

Sierra Leone's Geraldo Pino was one of the first successful West African musicians to pattern himself on American soul and funk, touring with his Heartbeats band across the region and inspiring dozens of young bands. "Heavy Heavy Heavy" is just that-- heavy funk full of slamming kick drum, deep bass and whirring organ that rockets along, modulating unexpectedly for the choruses. It's a crime that this is the only Pino track available.

>> 107. Super Eagles: "Love's a Real Thing" (Gambia, 1972)Available on Viva Super Eagles (Decca), World Psychedelic Classics 3: Love's a Real Thing, The Funky Fuzzy Sounds of West Africa (Luaka Bop), Senegambian Sensation (Retro Afric')

Gambia's Super Eagles were one of many West African bands who specialized in an older style of music that tried their hand at rock, funk, or soul, and "Love's a Real Thing" is a fantastic slice of psychedelic soul that earns the Sgt. Pepper's uniforms they were famous for wearing. More typically, they played a style called Ndangga, a Cuban-influenced precursor to Youssou N'Dour and Etoile de Dakar's mbalax music, but the layered lead vocals and screaming chorus of this song make for their finest moment to my ears.

>> 108. Orlando Julius & His Modern Aces: "Ijo Soul" (Nigeria, 1966)Available on Super Afro Soul (Strut)

Orlando Julius' Super Afro Soul is a milestone of African popular music and is said to have influenced some of James Brown's late 60s output. Listening to this contemporaneous single, which Strut helpfully appended to the album on their excellent reissue, it's hard not to notice the structural similarity to Brown's "I Feel Good", or the fact that one of the horn riffs essentially predicts Sam & Dave's "Soul Man". This is good-time early African funk and one of the most important songs that almost nobody's ever heard.

>> 109. Matata: "Talkin' Talkin'" (Kenya, 1973)Available on AfricaFunk: The Original Sound of 1970s Funky Africa (Harmless)

Sweet mother popcorn, funk does not get any grittier than this. The bass and drums are tough as rawhide and the lead vocal is a dirty, filthy, nasty delight. The thousand-watt horns blare so brightly you can feel the air passing over the curved brass. Kenya only produced a few notable funk bands in the 70s, but Matata were truly world-class.

>> 110. Ayalew Mesfin: "Hasabe" (Ethiopia, 1973)

Available on Ethiopiques 8: Swinging Addis (Buda Musique)

There's no sense beating around the bush: This song rips, with a nasty fuzz guitar riff presaging a filthy funk throwdown full of stabbing horns and Mesfin's uniquely Ethiopian vocals. The rhythm guitarist is sick on this track-- to think that this came from a government-controlled orchestra is mindblowing.

>> 111. Super Mambo 69: "Sweeper Soul" (country unknown, 1972)Available on Afro-Rock, Vol. 1 (Evolver)

I've heard it said that Super Mambo weren't typically a soul band, but you'd never know it from listening to this frantic rocker. The song's funky undercarriage is like some sort of perpetual motion machine, and the track gains energy as it goes along, the barking vocals piling up on top of light-speed guitars. The weirdest thing about it is the lead guitar, though, which sounds like it's being piped in from Neptune, dripping in reverb and tremolo.

>> 112. Babatunde Olatunji: "Jin-Go-Lo-Ba" (Nigeria, 1960)Available on Drums of Passion (Columbia/Legacy)

People are more likely to know this one from Santana's cover version, but Olatunji's traditional version is every bit as thrilling, despite coming up much shorter on ingredients. You could say the most important ingredient isn't even one you'd find in the liner notes, and that's enthusiasm. Well, enthusiasm and rhythm. Gobs of ecstatic, unstoppable rhythm.

Drums of Passion is the record that many credit with inaugurating the "world music" industry, and it was hugely influential in jazz circles, turning luminaries like John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, and Miles Davis on to the music of their ancestors.

>> 113. Dick Khoza: "African Jive" (South Africa, 1976)Available on Afrika Underground Jazz, Funk & Fusion Under Apartheid (Counterpoint) and Afro-Funk Explosion: Motherload from the Motherland (Explosive Entertainment)

Something about South Africa makes the music it produced in the 70s very different from the rest of the continent. Apartheid was no doubt a part of it, but I think money was a bigger part-- the South African music industry was much better-funded than those in other African countries. As a result, even speedy funk like Khoza's "African Jive" has a smoothness that can be off-putting. The scrappy guitars, floods of Fender Rhodes, and blaring horns on this instrumental do plenty to offset that, though, as does the track's overwhelming kinetic energy.

>> 114. Orchestra Baobab: "Mouhamadou Bamba" (Senegal, 1980)Available on Bamba (Stern's Africa) and The Rough Guide to Senegal and Gambia (Rough Guides)

Usually, Baobab were one of the best of the West African Afro-Cuban dance bands, but this title track from their 1980 album, named for a revered Islamic figure (Bamba was the founder of the Mouride sect and is esteemed before Mouhammed by many in West Africa), is a brooding slab of hip-deep psychedelic funk coated in Barthelemey Attisso's shimmering, volcanic lead guitar. The vocals are layered and deeply reverent, floating in leagues of reverb.

>> 115. Os Bongos: "Kazukuta" (Angola, 1974)Available on Angola 70s: 1974-1978 (Buda Musique)

"Kazukuta" is the name of a traditional Angolan carnival dance, but this is one of the few Angolan tracks I've heard that incorporates experimental elements. OK, "experimental" is perhaps a bit of stretch, but it is incredibly odd nonetheless to hear a bizarre interlude like the reverb and delay-drenched vocal pile-up that dominates the middle of this song, which is unusually funky for Angola to begin with. A curiosity perhaps, but a very good one.

>> 116. Getatchew Mekurya: "Yegenet Muziqa" (Ethiopia, 1972)Available on Ethiopiques 14: Getachew Mekurya, Negus of Ethiopian Sax (Buda Musique)

Getatchew was something of an oddity in Ethiopia's Swinging Addis era, and that's really saying something. His saxophone style is based on an improvised, melismatic Ethiopian war chant called Shellela. The result is something akin to Albert Ayler, but with the strange underpinning rhythms and electric organ of Ethiopian funk backing it up. Mekurya played in several of Ethiopia's orchestras and is heard backing the country's big stars on numerous recordings, but his solo material is some of the most unique music in the world.

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>> 201. Brigth Engelberts & the B.E. Movement: "Get Together" (country, year unknown)Available on Booniay!!: A Compilation of West African Funk (Afrodisiac)

About the only thing I know about Brigth Engelberts is that he was one funky dude. I can't find any decent information on the guy or his band, but "Get Together" is a solid rocket ride from the opening horn fanfare all the way to its final reprise. The guitar and sax solos are sweet and economical, but it's the weird, ring-modulated analog synth solos and interjections that give the instrumental its strange, quasi-futuristic edge.

>> 202. Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra: "Big Man" (United States, 2004)Available on Who Is This America? (Rope-a-Dope)

On last year's Who Is This America?,. Antibalas began to move beyond an easy tag as near-religious Africa '70 revivalists, and this is one of their best songs to date. The New York band have so thoroughly subsumed Fela's aesthetic into their collective being that they're now building on it, and "Big Man" is a masterful casting of the class divide between rich and poor in terms the king of Afrobeat would no doubt appreciate.

Fela was never afraid to criticize the very people he was speaking in favor of, and likewise, Antibalas aren't afraid to admit that consuming the products that enrich the wealthy helps keep them in power. The groove is feisty and the playing rich in detail-- it would be easy to simply imitate vintage Afrobeat and come up with something halfway decent, but these guys are the real deal.

>> 203. Oscar Sulley & the Uhuru Dance Band: "Olufeme" (Ghana, 1973)Available on Ghana Soundz: Afrobeat, Funk & Fusion in 70's Ghana (Sound Way)

Another Sulley track from the vaults, and I hope there are a lot more where it came from. The massive horn arrangement sways and dives like a ton of bricks set teetering on a precipice, while Sulley's vocals belt with rough soul. Uhuru Dance Band was a long-running, successful dance orchestra specializing in highlife, but as this and their own recordings without Sulley (they were a band in their own right from the mid-60s to mid-80s) attest, they were hugely versatile. Sulley, meanwhile, deserves a volume to himself if there's enough material to fill it.

>> 204. Thony Shorby Nyenwi: "No Wrong Show" (Nigeria, 1978)Available on Afro Baby: the Evolution of the Afro Sound in Nigeria 1970-1979 (Sound Way)

In spite of Nyenwi's understated, wah-drenched "Voodoo Chile" guitar intro, it's all about the beat on this one. The scratchy guitars and thumping drums do all of the heavy lifting for his odd, slurred vocal, and it's the kind of thing that probably would have been sampled about 80 times by now were it not for its total obscurity. Disco made major inroads to African funk in the late 70s, and this song is a good example of that influence making itself felt.

>> 205. Ogyatanaa Show Band: "Disco Africa" (Ghana, 1976)Available on Ghana Soundz 2: Afrobeat, Funk & Fusion in 70's Ghana (Sound Way)

Ogyatanaa (Burning Torch) was the outlet for the compositions of Kwadwo Donkoh, one of Ghana's greatest producers and musical innovators-- his fingerprints are on dozens of the best Ghanaian Afrobeat and funk records and he's responsible for both the first instrumental LP released in West Africa (Keyboard Africa by Ray Ellis), as well as the only known album of African Christmas songs. "Disco Africa" rides a killer break and keeps the vocals low in the mix, just letting the groove do its thing. Incredibly, Sound Way is the first label ever to issue it.

>> 206. Wallias Band: "Muziqawi Silt" (Ethiopia, 1977)Available on Ethiopiques 13: Ethiopian Groove (Buda Musique) and The Rough Guide to Ethiopia (Rough Guides)

If James Bond were named Alemayehu and worked for the Negus instead of the Queen, this could be his theme song. Wallias Band was led by Girma Beyene and was one of a few outfits that managed to have creative success in the Mengistu years, lasting all the way through the extremely tumultuous 80s. This is a killer Ethio-groove instrumental with a perfect, unique mix of sleek soul and deep, dark horns only Addis Ababa seems capable of turning out. The nagging guitar and bobbing rhythm section exude icy cool, and the lo-fi recording (two microphones, max) shrouds it in a mysterious, majestic veil that no slick recording could ever capture.

>> 207. Lemma Demissew: "Astawesalehu" (Ethiopia, 1968 or 69)Available on Ethiopiques 8: Swinging Addis (Buda Musique)

Lemma Demissew was a pianist for several of the Ethiopian institutional bands, and on his own he has a bizarre resemblance to Fats Domino. "Astawesalehu" is an Ethiopian "Ain't That a Shame", with Demissew's motoring piano powering a piece of sweet, old-timey rock'n'roll that was likely created with only the barest of knowledge of what that actually sounded like. The call-and-response vocals are infectious and unusually sunny for Ethiopian music, and if American radio conglomerates were willing to overlook the fact that it's sung in Amharic, this could slot in pretty well on any oldies station's playlist.

>> 208. Apagya Show Band: "Kwaku Ananse" (Ghana, 1974)Available on Ghana Soundz: Afrobeat, Funk & Fusion in 70's Ghana (Sound Way)

"Kwaku Ananse" has all the hallmarks of great Ghanaian Afrobeat: Big, crashing cadences, hovering electric organs mixing with tight horns, and an urgent, propulsive beat designed to hold and release tension as needed. The rhythm comprises dozens of small components, like the ultra-simple, repetitive bassline, a ton of percussionists mingling in polyrhythmic conversation, and the song swaggers swiftly along for an economical three minutes, incredibly brief by Afrobeat standards. Apagya was something of a Ghanaian supergroup, featuring Ebo taylor, Bob Pinado, Gyedu Blay-Ambolley, and member of the Uhuru Dance Band.

>> 209. Fela Ransome Kuti & Africa '70: "Roforofo Fight" (Nigeria, 1972)Available on Roforofo Fight/The Fela Singles (MCA/Universal), The Best Best of Fela Kuti (MCA/Universal), Music Is the Weapon: The Best of Fela Kuti (MCA/Universal), Two Sides of Fela: Jazz & Dance (Barclay), Music Is the Weapon of the Future, vol. 1 (Exworld), Essential Afrobeat: The Very Best of Afrobeat 3CD Mix (Family Recordings), and AfricaFunk, vol. 2: Return to the Original Sound of 1970s Funky Africa (Harmless)

"Roforofo Fight" is one of Fela's early masterworks, riding one of his trademark infinite grooves, with claves and shaker guiding Tony Allen's across-the-beat drumwork. Muted guitars insist on forward motion and even the horns settle into riffs, with an especially catchy sax ostinato backing up the melodic solos at the end.

Fela's vocals are twitchy and frenetic, spilling out in scat passages and ignoring the boundaries between English and Yoruba. The narrative basically speaks of how two men fighting makes a fool of both men, and Fela uncharacteristically takes the mic at the beginning of the song, presaging the powerful horn themes with a strange bilingual monologue about trousers and pants that he would later build into a full-bodied metaphor for colonial oppression on Original Suffer Head's "Equalisation of Trouser and Pant".

>> 210. Monomono: "Tire Loma Da Nigbehin" (Nigeria, 1974)Available on Nigeria 70: The Definitive Story of 1970s Funky Lagos (Strut)

Monomono was led by the great Joni Haastrup, and they played deep funk full of harmony vocals, bubbling organ, and sharply strummed guitars. "Tire Loma Da Nigbehin" rides that deep funk base, coloring the edges with psychedelic flourishes in a prime example of the melting pot that West African popular music was in the 70s.

>> 211. Ofo the Black Company: "Allah Wakbarr" (Nigeria, 1972)Available on World Psychedelic Classics 3: Love's a Real Thing, the Funky Fuzzy Sounds of West Africa (Luaka Bop) and Nigeria 70: The Definitive Story of 1970s Funky Lagos (Strut)

Ofo's biggest hit may feature lyrics exalting God, but the holy racket they churn out here is more commonly associated with the man downstairs. This is ridiculously heavy, riding a distorted guitar figure and pounding drums and the lead guitars and organ wail away. It's crushing, funky acid rock and truly amazing stuff.

>> 212. Joe Mensah: "Africa Is Home" (Ghana, 1975)

Available on Ghana Soundz 2: Afrobeat, Funk & Fusion in 70's Ghana (Sound Way)

Joe Mensah's jazz influence is clear on "Africa Is Home", and both the drums and congas play fast and loose with the rhythms. The horns are right out in your face, though, and the female backing vocals' intonation of "home sweet home" has a nearly doo wop feel to it. That epic horn arrangement is what really makes this cook, though.

>> 213. Lijadu Sisters: "Orere Eljigbo" (Nigeria, 1979)Available on Nigeria 70: The Definitive Story of 1970s Funky Lagos (Strut) and Essential Afrobeat: the Very Best of Afrobeat 3CD Mix (Family Recordings)

"Get Out/ Fight/ Trouble in the streets" is the rallying cry the Lijadu Sisters use to open this disco-influenced song. The sisters had toured with Ginger Baker's Salt and can be heard on a great many Nigerian recordings of the 70s and 80s. This song, whose story of a couple attempting to have a child without success is typical of many African popular songs in its use of everyday drama to point out inadequacies in society at large, amply demonstrates that they were capable of striking gold on their own.

>> 214. Bembeya Jazz National: "Petit Sekou" (Guinea, 1976)Available on The Syliphone Years (Stern's Africa)

Bembeya cut a huge number of stunning records, but this may be the best. An instrumental featuring Sekou Diabate's guitar front and center, it slinks through bluesy verses and cuts on a dime into unexpected swing passages. In the blues sections, Diabate's guitar burns with the tone of Robert Fripp and the intensity of Eddie Hazel, even more remarkable given that it's unlikely Diabate knew who either man was. This is a jaw-dropping piece of music, and it's a wonder it hasn't shown up in more places.

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>> 301. Gyedu Blay-Ambolley & the Steneboofs: "Simigwado" (Ghana, 1973)Available on Ghana Soundz: Afrobeat, Funk & Fusion in 70's Ghana (Sound Way)

Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to transcribe all of the funky little vocalizations Gyedu Blay makes on "Simigwado", nor his Fanti rapping, so it's difficult to convey just how infectious this song is. The song was banned for being obscene by Ghanaian authorities, though they had no idea what it was actually about. Turns out anyone who speaks English will learn pretty quickly that it's a dance, because Gyedu spells it out pretty clearly: "1,2,3, baby/ Oh-ah-oh can you dance?/ We call it Simigwa/ I'm gonna show you how to do it, yeah" before the colossal horn arrangement kicks in.

>> 302. Jingo: "Fever" (country unknown, 1974)Available on Afro-Rock, Volume 1 (Evolver)

"Fever" puts its polyrhythm right out front, layering a 6/8 chakachas beat over a thumping 4/4 funk groove. The vocal melody, bassline, and horn arrangement are all syncopated differently, giving the song undeniable forward momentum. Between the verses, a grunting, screaming Jingo duels it out with the free-flowing solos of one his sax players, and the listener comes out on top.

>> 303. Joni Haastrup: "Greetings" (Nigeria, 1977)Available on Nigeria 70: The Definitive Story of 1970s Funky Lagos (Strut)

Joni Hasstrup (I've also seen it spelled Johnny) was a well-traveled individual, leading several Nigerian rock and funk bands during the 60s and 70s and joining Ginger Baker's sadly short-lived Salt project, a half British/half African band that attempted to wed UK rock to Afrobeat, which wasn't actually as big a stretch as it might sound. On his own, he was a sharp songwriter, and "Greetings" is an absolute dancefloor killer with a monster bassline. Haastrup's soulful vocals tower over the recording, dripping with reverb in an otherwise dry mix. It's sung in Yoruba, but this still could have lit up an American disco in '78.

>> 304. Honny & the Bees Band: "Psychedelic Woman" (Ghana, 1973)Available on Ghana Soundz: Afrobeat, Funk & Fusion in 70's Ghana (Sound Way)

"Psychedelic" was a world-wide buzzword in its day, and on one of his few solo tracks, Ghanaian session keyboardist Ernest Honny runs down the exploits of the psychedelic men and women of Accra in all of the hottest nightpots, including the Apollo and Star Hotel. His organ solo is spectacular, but the song is probably most notable for slipping from a slow Afrobeat verse into a massive mod chorus, with big harmonies that could have fit nicely on a Yardbirds record. It's a stunning collision of Western and African music in which both get their big moments, and it's even more incredible when you consider that the song is a full quarter of all his recorded output.

>> 305. Yahoos: "Mabala" (country, year unknown)Available on Afro-Rock, Volume 1 (Evolver)

This is one of only a couple vintage African dub tracks I've heard, which is kind of surprising given that Jamaican music otherwise had a broad influence on West Africa. Strange swirling noises and a disembodied woman's voice hover over the band's solid base of breezy funk, but we're not quite in Lee Perry territory-- aside from the effects and samples, the recording is straightforward midtempo funk with impressive sax and guitar solos, with a minimum of stereo trickery and other deep dub trademarks.

>> 306. Blo: "Blo" (Nigeria, 1972)Available on Phases: 1972-1982 (AfroStrut), Afro-Funk Explosion: Motherload From the Motherland (Explosive Entertainment) and Blo: Chapter One (EMI Nigeria)

Blo's Phases retrospective is sadly out of print now (RIP Strut), but hopefully somebody will resurrect it soon. The Nigerian band played a distinctly hard brand of psychedelic funk, and their signature song is drenched in organ and wah pedal. The arrangement is full of clever details and unexpected start/stop passages, and guitarist Berkley "ike" Jones' solo positively rips.

>> 307. Tlahoun Gessesse: "Alegntaye" (Ethiopia, 1973)Available on Ethiopiques 17: Tlahoun Gessesse (Buda Musique) and Ihe Rough Guide to Ethiopia (Rough Guides)

Tlahoun Gessesse was one of Ethiopia's biggest stars, having performed with all the big institutional bands in the 50s and 60s, and he had one of the country's most prolific recording careers in the years leading up to the overthrow of Haile Selassie and the death of Ethiopia's most vitally creative period. "Alegntaye" means "My Hope", though Western ears would have a tough time reading a tender song of yearning into Gessesse's mind-blowing melismatic vocals and Mulatu Astatque's inky arrangement. Astatque's midnight funky aesthetic is deeply alluring, though, and the sputtering, wah'd-out guitar works nicely as a searching sonic analogue to Gessesse's pleas: "Where can I find you?/ I am all mixed up/ Where are you hiding, my love?/ Show yourself, I miss you."

>> 308. K. Frimpong & His Cubano Fiestas: "Hwehwe Mu Na Yi Wo Mpena" (Ghana, 1977)Available on Ghana Soundz: Afrobeat, Funk & Fusion in 70's Ghana (Sound Way)

Cuban music had more of an impact on Africa's far western coast than it did along the southern coast of West Africa, but it shows up now and then. K. Frimpong was one of Ghana's most innovative guitar players, slyly funky and a skilled, fluid soloist. His "Cubano Fiestas", as they're credited here, were actually Vis-à-vis, a prolific and quite capable band in their own right. The song's Cuban feel comes mostly in the vocals and chord progression, while the bounding, anti-gravity rhythms are all Ghanaian Afrobeat.

>> 309. Fela Anikulapo Kuti & Africa '70: "Gentleman" (Nigeria, 1973)Available on Confusion/Gentleman (MCA/Universal), The Best Best of Fela Kuti (MCA/Universal) (edit), Music Is the Weapon: The Best of Fela Kuti (MCA/Universal) (edit) and Music Is the Weapon of the Future, Vol. 2 (Exworks)

Fela was sent by his parents to Britain to study medicine, but he was more interested in playing jazz and highlife and we're all better off for it. His jazz influence comes through very strongly on "Gentleman", the title track from one of his 1973 albums, where he solos on his tenor over most of the song's nine-minute intro, including a beautiful solo passage where the rhythm section lays out entirely. He switches to his ever-present Rhodes piano during the vocal sections, and the instrument's mellow tone in its lowest register has a strangely cooling effect on the hot midtempo groove the band generates.

Fela's lyric is one of his many anti-colonial ruminations decrying Africans' adoption of Western cultural norms. "I no be gentleman at all," he sings, ridiculing Europeans' concept of social class, "I be Africa man original." To drive home the point, the album cover features an ape in a three-piece suit.

>> 310. Manu Dibango: "African Battle" (Cameroon, 1973 or 74)Available on AfricaFunk: The Original Sound of 1970s Funky Africa (Harmless), Uncle Junior's Friday Fish Fry, mix by DJ Djinji Brown (Uncle Junior) and Afro-Funk Explosion: Motherload From the Motherland (Explosive Entertainment)

You can't get much more upbeat than this tune from Cameroon's greatest star. An instrumental featuring a massive horn arrangement and a cliff-diving bassline, "African Battle" features trumpets blaring at the top of their range and Dibango's own flashy sax work as well as an army of conga players. It's over in less than three minutes, but what a ride.

>> 311. Alemayehu Eshete: "Addis Ababa Bete" (Ethiopia, 1989)Available on Addis Ababa (Shanachie) and The Rough Guide to Ethiopia (Rough Guides)

Ethiopia's Swinging Addis scene came to a sad close in the 70s, but many of its exponents continued

on. Alemayehu Eshete was one of Ethiopia's biggest stars and best performers during the golden years of Ethiopian music, but this track from his 1989 album Addis Ababa is crazier than anything he did in his heyday. The song rides a positively evil piano part, with drums functioning merely as a rhythmic guide. The horn section plays a repetitive, tense figure that nags at Eshete's twisting, wildly melismatic vocal part, splitting up at the end into crazed, simultaneous solos. A lot of French prog tried really hard in the 70s to be this frightening, but this beats it all.

>> 312. Shina Williams & His African Percussionists: "Agboju Logun" (12-inch mix) (Nigeria, 1984)Available on Nigeria 70: The Definitive Story of 1970s Funky Lagos (Strut)

Does ZE Records know about this Shina Williams track? Because not only would it fit pretty nicely on any of their Mutant Disco compilations, it would also be the best track. This is actually the 12-inch mix of a 1984 song, and it features former members of Monomono, Africa '70, and Orlando Julius' Afro-Sounders, making it something of a Nigerian super-session. Williams himself was better known as Juju star King Sunny Ade's manager, but the groove here is an irresistible post-disco lockgroove stuffed with muted guitars and breathy female vocals. Talking drums exhale along with sleek horn sections, adding extra funk to what amounts to a killer African New Wave track.

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>> 401. Bob Pinado & His Sound Casters: "Me, You, One (Means I Love You)" (Ghana, 1976)Available on Ghana Soundz 2: Afrobeat, Funk and Fusion in 70s Ghana (Sound Way)

"Me, you, one, baby, means I love you," sings Pinado, and it doesn't get much more straightforward than that. The song has a chilled, subtly funky groove that blows up when he gets to the huge refrain. Pinado had a powerful, distinctive voice, and he uses every bit of that power on this track.

>> 402. Koola Lobitos: "Highlife Time" (Nigeria, 1965)Available on Koola Lobitos/The '69 LA Sessions (MCA Universal)

Being familiar with his later material, it's almost amusing to hear Fela singing, "I jump for joy in the swinging club," but, then why wouldn't he jump for joy? It is highlife time after all. Fela hadn't yet been introduced to black radicalism, nor been disillusioned by the Biafran War, a brutal conflict that nearly tore his country to shreds, and it's fascinating to hear how exuberant he was on this formative material, when the post-colonial promise still hung in the air and highlife still ruled in West Africa.

>> 403. 3rd Generation Band: "Because of Money" (Ghana, 1973)Available on Ghana Soundz: Afrobeat, Funk and Fusion in 70s Ghana (Sound Way)

The 3rd Generation Band's "Because of Money" is extremely blunt in its criticism of monetary greed-- a few minutes in, the singer announces "I am gonna' speak English now/ For the benefit of everybody." And then he launches into a diatribe about money's corrupting influence. This is a killer Afrobeat track laid over a bed of hypnotic percussion, but this band was actually a highlife group affiliated with the

Ghanaian army! Even if they were (ironically) just cashing in on Fela's massive popularity, they did a damn good job of it.

>> 404. Mercury Dance Band: "Envy No Good" (country, year unknown)Available on Afro-Rock, Vol. 1 (Evolver)

Much like the track that precedes it on this disc, "Envy No Good" is a highlife orchestras stab at Afrobeat, undertaken after the band took in a concert by Fela and the Africa '70. "Envy No Good" is naturally a pidgin English bit of stern moralizing, very common in the genre, but this song is all about the thick, crashing horn arrangement, a positively gargantuan orchestration that saturates the tape when it comes in.

>> 405. Mahmoud Ahmed: "Mar Teb Yelal Kafesh" (Ethiopia, 1975)Available on Ethiopiques 8: Swinging Addis (Buda Musique)

"Mar Teb Yelal Kafesh" is Ethiopian funk-pop at its best-- skillfully composed, catchy as hell, and brilliantly arranged. The horns emphasize the offbeats in the A section, offer a countermelody in the B and crash the gates in the rumbling transitions between sections. The arrangement makes skillful use of rhythmic variation and modulation to make it feel like each verse is more exultant than the last, and Ahmed's voice is more than up to the task, ornamenting the honey-sweet melody with that characteristic Ethiopian melisma.

>> 406. E.T. Mensah & His Tempos Band: "205" (Ghana, late 1950s)Available on Day By Day (Retro Afric')

E.T. Mensah was the king of highlife, and songs like "205" make it clear why. He's singing in Twi, one of about a dozen languages in which he recorded, but it sounds utterly effortless and the horn arrangement is a bouncy, fruity thing that bounds along on a peppy Caribbean/jazz beat complete with a swinging bassline.

>> 407. Bembeya Jazz National: "N'Garokomo" (Guinea, 1973)Available on The Syliphone Years (Stern's Africa)

Bembeya gets funky and the result is a 10-minute odyssey through a sort of alternative reality Afrobeat world, with plenty of solo trading and a mind-bending guitar part from Sekou Diabate, a part that cycles over and over like a spinning wheel, leaping off into flights of melodic fancy with seemingly no effort.

>> 408. Tamrat Ferendji & Sensation Band: "Antchin Yagegnulet" (Ethiopia, 1977)Available on Ethiopiques 13: Ethiopian Groove (Buda Musique)

This is one of a handful of Kaifa Records recordings to see release in Ethiopia's early derg period, an era of horrible repression by Mengistu's communist government. The song riding a pounding, four-on-the-floor beat topped with fluttering organ and a swaying horn section, culminating in a rare, excellent flute solo. Ferendji's vocal style doesn't go as frequently to the billowing melisma of many of his colleagues, something that may make it easier from a lot of Westerners to dig his stuff straight off.

>> 409. Matata: "Wanna Do My Thing" (Kenya, early 70s)Available on Afro-Funk Explosion: Motherload From the Motherland (Explosive Entertainment)

Another burning chunk of nasty funk from the Kenyan masters, this one catchier and poppier than "Talkin' Talkin'". It's still got a hard horn arrangement, dirty groove, and completely unhinged lead vocal, though, and you've got to think James Brown would have been proud to call this one his own.

>> 410. Lekan Animashaun: "Serere" (Nigeria, recorded 1979, overdubs 1986, released 1995)Available on the split release Lekan Animashaun: Low Profile/Mr. Big Mouth: Tunde Williams Plays with Africa '70 (Honest Jon's)

Baritone saxophonist Lekan Animashaun was Fela's most loyal sideman, providing the crunching low-end for every one of Fela's bands, from Koola Lobitos to Egypt '80, which is now fronted by Fela's son Seun. His only album under his own name has a convoluted history: Composed in the mid-70s, it was partially recorded during the turbulent days at the end of the decade, after the Africa '70 had dissolved and Fela had set about gathering the musicians for Egypt '80.

Recording was finished in 1986, but Fela served an extended prison term on trumped-up currency charges in the mid-80s and Low Profile was finally released in 1995, though it promptly went out of print. Thankfully, Honest Jon's has brought it back now, and "Serere" is the truly stunning track from side two. The horn arrangement is bold and dramatic, featuring call and response phrases that Fela then imitates on his Rhodes piano. "If you want to get justice/ You must practice justice" he sings, and it's clear that Fela's musicians shared more than just musical direction with him.

>> 411. Dick Khoza: "Chapita" (South Africa, 1976)Available on Afrika Underground: Jazz, Funk & Fusion Under Apartheid (Counterpoint) and Afro-Funk Explosion: Motherload From the Motherland (Explosive Entertainment)

"Chapita" features a pretty nasty beat for a South African funk track, and the contrast with the smooth sax lick is welcome. Khoza's vocal is a weird, baritone drawl, and he talks more than he sings, backed by a long, drawn-out recitation of the title by his backing singers. The instrumental bridges are nice crawling funk workouts, but it's the unexpected harmony vocals that deliver a totally new verse nearly five minutes in that complete the song.

>> 412. Tesfa Maryam Kidane: "Yetesfa Tezeta" (Ethiopia, 1969)Available on Ethiopiques 8: Swinging Addis (Buda Musique)

This instrumental is sort of an Ethiopian spin on the blues-based instrumentals of early rock'n'roll. Frequently, those early instrumentals are just the band playing the blues progression and maybe soloing a bit over it. If you think about it, that's all "Wipe-out" is. This adds a bit of funk to that equation, but otherwise, it's a big band playing round with a blues progression and evidently having a lot of fun doing it. Kidane was a well-traveled session saxophonist in Ethiopia, but he actually takes a shorter solo than the guitarist, perhaps not wanting to show off too much.

>> 413. Mulatu Astatque: "Kasalefkut Hulu" (Ethiopia, 1972)Available of Ethiopiques 4: Ethio Jazz & Instrumentals (Buda Musique)

Mulatu Astatque's instrumental music has a sound all its own-- dark but undeniably funky. This one rides a buoyant, repetitive bass line, layering tightly scored horns on top of it, and the effect is like Duke Ellington dropping in on an Addis Ababa nightclub with an armful of charts.

>> 414. Kokolo: "Mister Sinister" (United States, 2004)Available on More Consideration (Ray Lugo), ASAP: Afrobeat Sudan Aid Project (Mobida Productions)

The lead vocals don't really convince me, but they're passable, and the backing vocals are spot-on, along with everything else about this track. The New York-based Afrobeat revival is full of musicians who obviously have listened to every detail of every Fela record they could get their hands on, and "Mister Sinister" rides a galloping beat with an elastic horn arrangement, grounded by a truly righteous baritone sax part.

>> 415. Tlahoun Gessesse: "Aykedashem Lebe" (Ethiopia, 1974)Available on Ethiopiques 17: Tlahoun Gessesse (Buda Musique)

Gessesse really cuts loose on this song, an uptempo Ethio-funk banger that answers his falsetto howls with stabbing horns and tweaked-out organ interjections. The drum break is low in the mix as usual with Ethiopian recordings, but it's a hell of a beat and together with the scratchy rhythm guitar, it's a concrete-solid groove.

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>> 501. Manu Dibango: "Soul Makossa" (Cameroon, 1972)Available on dozens of releases, including Dibango: Soul Makossa (Unidisc), Africadelic: The Best of Manu Dibango (Wrasse), Anthology (Eagle), Very Best of Manu Dibango: AfroSoulJazz (Manteca) and various artists compilations such as Essential Afrobeat: The Very Best of Afrobeat 3CD Mix (Family Recordings), Get Down Tonight: The Disco Explosion (Shout! Factory), The Beginner's Guide to World Music, Vol. 2 (Nascente) and Crooklyn, Vol. 2 (MCA)

With its nasty, fractured sax line, thumping beat, and tight rhythm, "Soul Makossa" was a decent-sized hit in the U.S.-- a rarity for an African artist-- and still gets a spin now and then in the clubs of New York. Afrika Bambaataa covered it and sampled it on his last record, and it's truly a classic slice of funk. Mostly instrumental, it nevertheless features the infectious "mama-soul mama-ma mama-makossa" chant, and it still sounds fantastic all these years later.

>> 502. Ebo Taylor: "Heaven" (Ghana, 1977)Available on Ghana Soundz: Afrobeat, Funk & Fusion in 70's Ghana (Sound Way)

"Heaven" is the most weightless funk track I know, sounding almost as though it's floating up to its titular destination. The emphasis is all on the upbeats, with congas and cowbell bobbing in a current of electric organ. Taylor's guitar is placed low in the mix, with opposing parts playing in the left and right channels, one a squelchy, wah'd-out funk part, the other a clean-toned, highlife-ish part. In fact, Taylor's four albums are all split between popular highlife fare on side one and his totally unique brand of Afrobeat on side two. This track features a percussive horn attack and some great call-and-response vocals-- they're so tight that the backing vocals almost sound like chorused delay at times.

>> 503. Hugh Masakela & the Union of South Africa: "Dyambo" (South Africa, year unknown)Available on Club Africa 2 (Strut) and Hugh Masakela & the Union of South Africa (reissued Motown)

I'm a little unclear on when exactly this song was first released, but it had to be the 70s, because funk hasn't sounded this good in any other decade. The South African ex-pat's fluent trumpet playing is a highlight, and the band offers a propulsive funk backing for Masakela's always-melodic flights. The vocals are taken in a loose group-- not so much harmony as a big sing-a-long, and by the end of the jam that swallows the middle of the song, they're subsumed into the mix in such a way that they become another part of the texture.

>> 504. Sweet Talks: "Kye Kye Pe Aware" (Ghana, 1976)Available on Ghana Soundz 2: Afrobeat, Funk & Fusion in 70's Ghana (Sound Way)

The Sweet Talks' Kusum Beat album deserves a reissue to itself, because the two tracks I've heard are jaw-dropping. The band's rhythmic attack in the 70s was sickÐtheir drummer was a breakbeat maniac and they augmented it with a ton of traditional percussion, slathering huge, sinewy electric organ on top. A.B. Crentsil's vocals slid coolly into the rhythmic sluice of the music, and the band loved to just lay back and vamp on these killer grooves they created.

>> 505. Rob: "Make it Fast, Make it Slow" (Ghana, 1977)Available on Ghana Soundz: Afrobeat, Funk & Fusion in 70's Ghana (Sound Way)

Rob is apparently a pastor now, and I have to wonder what he thinks about his obscene vocal performance on this humid, trunk-rattling slow jam. His heavy breathing, punctuated by thrusting horns, leaves no ambiguity as to the meaning of "Make It Fast, Make It Slow". Its rhythm is so measured and languid that the bass, snare, and organ virtually take turns at emphasizing different beats. Something makes me bet that this is the only 70s Ghanaian sex jam you're ever likely to hear, but that's what the repeat button is for.

>> 506. William Onyeabor: "Better Change Your Mind" (Nigeria, 1978)Available on World Psychedelic Classics 3: Love's a Real Thing, the Funky Fuzzy Sounds of West Africa (Luaka Bop) and Nigeria 70: the Definitive Story of 1970s Funky Lagos (Strut)

The title of this song isn't about reversing a decision-- as Onyeabor makes clear through his lyrics, which admonish various world powers about their arrogance-- it's about changing the way we think about the world. The chunky beat marinates in a heavy sauce of trebly synthesizer, and the guitar has a truly odd, chorused tone that makes me wonder if it's actually two guitars playing roughly in sync with each other.

>> 507. Bahta Gebre Heywet: "Tessassategn Eko" (Ethiopia, 1973)Available on Ethiopiques 8: Swinging Addis (Buda Musique)

This is an exceptionally breezy Ethiopian pop song, with doggedly consonant horn arrangement and a laid-back vocal by Heywet. Most Ethiopian songs can't be casually hummed, but this one flows easily from the back of the throat at odd times of the day. The solo trumpet melody blows in on the quickly shuffling beat like a lazy summer day, a reminder that funk doesn't have to be all nasty.

>> 508. Ayalew Mesfin & Black Lion Band: "Gud Aderegetchegn" (Ethiopia, 1977)

Available on Ethiopiques 13: Ethiopian Groove (Buda Musique)

Black Lion Band were a powerhouse rhythm band, and this song rampages on a swaying guitar riff and driving bass drums while Mesfin's vocal melody plays directly against the groove. The song has a totally unstoppable chorus, with Mesfin singing the title over and over, syncopating it differently each time. For a scene that was being strangled to death in 1977, Addis managed quite a few interesting recordings, and this is one of the best.

>> 509. Sahara All-Stars Band Jos: "Enjoy Yourself" (Nigeria, year unknown)Available on Nigeria 70: the Definitive Story of 1970s Funky Lagos (Strut)

Sahara All-Stars, based in the northern Nigerian City of Jos, essentially ran Nigeria's Hausa funk scene and were its greatest exponent. The beat is spare and spacious, with a lacerating guitar part and a steady drum-and-conga break joined by an almost incongruously soft Rhodes piano. The lyrics are in pidgin English, and feature heavy use of the word "quench," which in the dialect is directly akin to "die."

Pidgin English is a fascinating evolution of language, and it's interesting to hear how the grammatical structure of sentences differs from what we're used to, not to mention the use of separate, unconjugated "go" verbs placed before other verbs. Anyway, "Enjoy Yourself" warns listeners to get as much out of life as possible before the inevitable strikes, and then helps them do it.

>> 510. Christy Azuma & Uppers International: "Naam" (Ghana, 1976)Available on Ghana Soundz 2: Afrobeat, Funk & Fusion in 70's Ghana (Sound Way)

Female stars are very rare in Afrobeat, and it would actually be kind of hard to call Christy Azuma a star-- her records weren't even released in her own home country of Ghana, as the Ghanaian Hausa community they were aimed at was generally too poor to won record players. She sings in a traditional head voice as the Uppers thrash along behind her with a tight, percolating funk rhythm, and if the rest of Ghana didn't want to listen, well, it was their loss.

>> 511. Mahmoud Ahmed: "Kulun Mankwalesh" (Ethiopia, 1973)Available on Almaz (Ahma) and Ethiopiques 6: Almaz (Buda Musique)

"Kulun Mankwalesh" is actually a traditional wedding song that received numerous intriguing interpretations by various constituents of Swinging Addis. This one is from Almaz, Mahmoud Ahmed's first of an unequaled (in Ethiopia) four albums. The record has an interesting suite-like structure where the songs flow easily into one another, and all are brimming with wah-drenched guitar and psychedelic flourishes of flute and organ. Ahmed's second album, 1975's Ere Mela Mela, became the first Ethiopian record distributed outside of the country when it was finally issued in Europe in 1985, bringing the first glimpse of swinging Addis to an unsuspecting world.

>> 512. Alemayehu Eshete: "Eskegizew Bertchi" (Ethiopia, 1974)Available on Ethiopiques 8: Swinging Addis (Buda Musique)

"Eskegizew Bertchi" is a funky, horn-fueled rock tune that Eshete has his way with, splattering his wild vocals all over it. It's a shame Ethiopia has become a Sally Struthers grotesque in the minds of so many Westerners, as it's a deeply complex nation and hardly the repository for starvation that most people associate it so closely with. Part of the joy of getting into the music and exploring the varied work of a guy like Eshete-- who was also a session bassist and a decent guitarist-- is getting inside the mind of

someone from a country whose population you're not expected to identify with. You think Ethiopia's just a miserable den of anonymous poverty where photographers go to win their Pulitzers? Well, here's a song about a guy in love. Suddenly we're closer than we seemed.

>> 513. Salif Keita: "Mandjou" (Mali, 1978)Available on Salif Keita: the Best of the Early Years (Wrasse), 1969-1980 (Sonodisc), Best of Salif Keita, the Golden Voice of Mali (Wrasse)

Keita is often referred to as the Golden Voice of Mali, and he does have a pretty impressive set of pipes. He's descended from royal lineage but was born albino, considered a sign of bad luck in Mali, and found himself left outside of the trappings of privileged life. He gravitated to music and wound up as a regular in Super Rail Band de Bamako, Mali's greatest band in the early 70s. He cut "Mandjou" with his second band, Les Ambassadeurs Internationale, in 1978, and it's an acknowledged classic of African music, riding a subtly funky groove and some beautiful lead guitar work. The horn arrangement is deeply Cuban, which puts it in a strange light next to Keita's instantly recognizable tenor, a voice that sounds as steadfastly Saharan as possible. Frankly, I haven't liked a thing Keita has done since Les Ambassadeurs-- it's got that drum machine/Kawai preset Afro-pop sound that I can't stand-- but his work in the 70s is powerful stuff, all the better for its raggedness.

>> 514. Assagai: "Cocoa" (country unknown, 1971)Available on Afro-Funk Explosion: Motherload From the Motherland (Explosive Entertainment) and Assagai (Vertigo)

Assagai are named for a spear generally associated with the Zulu militaries of the early colonial era, but their sound is a bit more relaxed than the name would have you believe. The horn arrangements are slow and slurred, the vocals just as slow and perhaps as slurred-- I can't tell because I don't know what language they're in. They called their music Afro-rock and even released an album under that title, but to my ears, this is slow-motion funk with an unusual piano underpinning and it's a good comedown from some of their more frenetic colleagues.

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>> 601. Lourdes Van Dunem: "Ngongo ya Biluka" (Angola, 1972)Available on Angola 70s: 1972-1973 (Buda Musique)

Women in the Western music industry certainly have it tougher than men, but at least we accept the very thought of an independent female performer. It wasn't like that when Lourdes Van Dunem began her singing career in Angola, then still under Portuguese rule (as it would be until 1976). And it didn't get any easier-- she was imprisoned for a time by the colonial government, and if the music industries in countries like Benin and Cote D'Ivoire were underprivileged, then Angola's was outright deprived. Still, there are lots of interesting recordings of the country's signature semba music (a quick-paced variant on Brazil's samba) and this is a personal favorite. The rhythms are tight, the melody is infectious, and there's even some mildly inventive lead guitar around the edges, the only sound covered

in reverb on an otherwise utterly dry recording.

>> 602. Guerilla: "La Popo" (country, year unknown)Available on The Danque!! (Afrodisiac)

This intro is just to die for-- two minutes of careening rhythms and frenzied but melodic organ that exude cool. The rest of the song is almost a different beast entirely, carrying over only the intro's disco hi-hat. The vocals are so rough they occasionally sound like a roar, and the guitar solos are interested in melody only insofar as it can lead to a freak-out. It's too bad the intro never reprises, but this is still a sweet piece of rock-tinged funk.

>> 603. Peter King: "Mystery Tour" (Nigeria, 1976)Available on Shango (AfroStrut)

Peter King was a highly educated musician, and today he runs a music school in his native Nigeria. He has songs that I almost think there are songs that were held back by his extensive schooling, which may have caused him to smooth the compositional edges too much. "Mystery Tour" is not one of those songs. His sax playing darts and dives like it came off a bop record and the rhythm is pure, gutbucket funk that's miles into the jungle groove. The Shango in the album title was the Yoruban god of thunder and the mythical ancestor of all Yorubans, and it's not difficult to hear that King was trying to bring a little of his own thunder on the record, one of his rawest.

>> 604. Samuel Belay: "Aynotchesh Yerefu" (Ethiopia, 1973)Available on Ethiopiques 8: Swinging Addis (Buda Musique)

This song is a good example of the perils of translating Ethiopian phenomes into words Westerners can theoretically pronounce. From what I can gather, the Ethiopian alphabet is much like Hebrew or Arabic, in that vowels don't get their space, acting instead as modifiers on consonants. Amharic and Oromo-- the country's two main languages-- are also fairly guttural, and as a result the phonetic interpretations we use are destined to be imperfect. When Belay belts out the title of this filthy funk tune, it at first sound like at least four words, and then you realize that "Yerefu" is being pronounced "Ee-yair-eh-foo" and it makes sense. I've reached the point now where I can sing along to certain songs in Amharic, and it's a blast-- even if I have no idea what I'm saying.

>> 605. Ebo Taylor: "Atwer Abroba" (Ghana, 1977)Available on Ghana Soundz 2: Afrobeat, Funk & Fusion in 70's Ghana (Sound Way)

This is more stratospheric funk from our man Ebo-- this time with a far more dramatic and pronounced horn arrangement. The thing kicks in with a quick hit on about 14 instruments at once, and the horn theme rides roughshod over Taylor's trademark beat, building to big, crashing cadences and then heading back to zero gravity. Taylor seems like a guy whose full albums would be worth a long look if a sufficient source for remastering can be located.

>> 606. Tony Allen & His Afro Messengers: "No Discrimination" (Nigeria, 1979)Available on No Accommodation For Lagos/No Discrimination (Evolver), Nigeria 70: the Definitive Story of 1970s Funky Lagos (Strut) and Eager Hands & Restless Feet: The Best of Tony Allen (Wrasse)

Tony Allen is nearly as important a figure in Afrobeat as Fela; his drumming style was the engine of Africa '70, pushing Fela's arrangements and providing the pulse for his protests. Allen's solo material is

mostly not on the same level as his work with Fela, basically on account of the fact that he wasn't as accomplished at songwriting. Still, he produced some thrilling stuff on his own, crowned by "No Discrimination", a song that's owned by his innovative beatmaking. The muted rhythm guitars and big choral call-and-response of Africa '70 are here, but the whole thing is looser, allowing Allen's drum kit to ground everything.

Candido Obajimi's vocal ranges from jazzy scatting to declarations of "Civilization" (answered by a chorus of "now him we want") and "Discrimination" (answered with "now him we don't want"). Allen has continued his progressive path over the years, branching out into hip-hop and electronic music, and he seems like a natural for both-- after all, his distinctive drums breaks could provide all the beatmaking material a hip-hop DJ would need, and his endless rhythm concept applies quite readily to electronic dance music.

>> 607. Johnson Mkhalali: "Joyce No. 2" (South Africa, 1985)Available on The Indestructible Beat of Soweto (Earthworks)

Robert Christgau called The Indestructible Beat of Soweto the most important record of the 80s, and while I don't agree, I can see his point. It's the first document of the mbaqanga music of South Africa's sprawling black townships to make it out of the country in large numbers. This bouncy number is a guitar-led instrumental stuffed with wheezing accordion and borne on a four-on-the-floor stomp that showcases everything charming about the style-- the ebullience, the fluidity, the indomitable spirit, the indestructible beat.

>> 608. King Sunny Ade & His African Beats: "Ja Funmi" (Nigeria, 1982)Available on Juju Music (Island Mango), Nigeria 70: the Definitive Story of 1970s Funky Lagos (Strut) (instrumental version), King of Juju: The Best of Sunny Ade (Wrasse), African Heartbeat: The Essential African Music Collection (Shanachie)

Sunny Ade is a huge star in Africa and his native Nigeria in particular, and he's the acknowledged master and modernizer of the country's traditional Juju music, a mantel he inherited from the late I.K. Dairo. This song is the lead track on Juju Music, his first record to feature synthesizers and a Western producer. Truthfully, his music was better off without those things, but this track is largely missing them anyway. It does have a very cool slide guitar solo in the middle of it and a hypnotic groove composed of several interlocking guitar parts, piano and lots of hand percussion. It's not much of a leap between here and Remain in Light.

>> 609. Amaswazi Emvelo: "Indoda Yejazi Elimnyama" (South Africa, 1985)Available on The Indestructible Beat of Soweto (Earthworks)

A vocal track from the same Soweto comp, this has the big backing harmonies the characterized mbaqanga vocal tracks but adds a bizarre twist: The song is about a guy who is harassed for his money every day while walking home (not an uncommon dilemma in the townships), and his harasser is voiced by someone speaking through some sort of vocal processor, lending it a freaky, almost sci-fi edge that sets it apart from all the other township music I've heard.

>> 610. Pacific Express: "the Way it Used to Be" (South Africa, 1978)Available on Afrika Underground: Jazz, Funk & Fusion Under Apartheid (Counterpoint)

A nice, rough drum part full of China crash cymbal provides the undercarriage for this unusually gritty

bit of South African fusion. The synthesizers and Rhodes piano flail about on top of the beat for most of the song, and that's basically it-- wild self-indulgence redeemed by a killer beat.

>> 611. Miriam Makeba: "Maria Fulo" (South Africa, 1967)Available on In Concert/Pata Pata/Makeba! (Collectables)

For some reason, the South African stuff wound up lumped together on this disc, but I swear it wasn't intentional. Miriam Makeba was a South African exile, prohibited from returning because of her stand against Apartheid. She settled at first in the U.S., ultimately leaving music for a stint as Guinean president Sekou Toure's United Nations representative. "Maria Fulo" is an incredible track, just a wall of percussion and some tastefully arranged horns and her voice. That voice owns the track, belting with an awe-inspiring controlled power-- it's something of a singular track in her discography, and it's definitely my favorite of hers.

>> 612. Youssou N'Dour & Etoile de Dakar: "Wadiour" (Senegal, 1982)Available on Volume 1 (Melodie), The Rough Guide to Youssou N'Dour (Rough Guides)

I'll be honest. I don't really like Youssou N'Dour except for this song. His mbalax stuff is interesting, but I don't enjoy listening to it much, and everything from his post-Peter Gabriel days (that incredible voice at the end of "In Your Eyes"? That's this guy) makes me rather ill, especially his duet with Neneh Cherry. However, "Wadiour" is a sweet track, charging up the mbalax sound with a dose of scratchy funk and coastal guitars. The recording has a lo-fi edge to it that actually aids the floating feel of the music, and the pitched drum interjections that define mbalax are nowhere to be heard-- those drums were actually one of the most interesting things about mbalax, but this is more of a funk track and they wouldn't fit here.

>> 613. Tunde Williams & Africa '70: "Mr. Big Mouth" (Nigeria, 1975)Available on the split release Lekan Animashaun: Low Profile/Mr. Big Mouth: Tunde Williams Plays with Africa '70 (Honest Jon's)

Any time you hear a trumpet solo on an Africa '70 record, it's Tunde Williams. The man was a monster player and he was one of a few Fela comrades-at-arms to record some of his own music on the side. Mr. Big Mouth is a two-track album just like much of Fela's stuff, and the title track features a sturdy horn arrangement over a mid-tempo funk vamp.

As with Tony Allen, Williams follows Fela's political path in his lyrics, offering "Him be contractor/ They give am big contract/ He blow money before he start contract," but it's the refrain of "He dey halla halla/ De boast boast" that reveals him as a master hook-crafter. In an unusual move for an Africa '70 track, there is no drum kit, only hand percussion, a foreshadowing of some of Fela's later Egypt 80 material, which is ironic considering Williams didn't remain with Fela long enough to play in that band.

>> 614. The Funkees: "Dancing Time" (Nigeria, early 70s)Available on Nigeria 70: the Definitive Story of 1970s Funky Lagos (Strut)

"It's dancin' time" calls the vocalist over the funky rhythms that open the song, and who am I to argue? The Funkees rose quickly from the ashes created by the Biafran War in the Eastern Nigerian town of Aba, and are emblematic of how quickly the area's Igbo population rebounded from what by all accounts was a truly horrible war. When they announce that "dancin' time is over" at the end of the song, it comes just a little too soon.

>> 615. Ladysmith Black Mambazo: "Lomhlaba Kawunoni (The Earth Never Gets Fat)" (South Africa, 1987)Available on Shaka Zulu (Warner)

Ladysmith Black Mambazo became international stars after their guest spots on Paul Simon's Graceland, still the best and most natural-sounding album by a Western musician to incorporate South African music. They're a Zulu a capella choir, and it wouldn't be an insult to say they sound like dirt. There's something about the mix of voices and the calm beauty of their music that makes it feel like the music is coming from the earth itself and it's been there all along. They still tour extensively and release albums at a phenomenal clip.

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>> 701. Girma Beyene: "Ene Negn Bay Manesh" (Ethiopia, 1969)Available on Ethiopiques Vol. 8: Swinging Addis (Buda Musique) and The Rough Guide to Ethiopia (Rough Guides)

This song is a masterpiece. It kicks in with a chunky vamp that blossoms into a majestic horn arrangement that sounds like a whole new world opening up, and its lead spot on Ethiopiques 8 is the only logical place for it to be sequenced. Beyene's vocals are the least Ethiopian of anyone in that scene, probably because he was a keyboardist and arranger first and foremost and a performer second. Both of his primary skills are on full display here, though, as his bluesy organ playing offers a sonic foil to the modal horn parts. If you only ever hear one track on this whole list, this one wouldn't be a bad choice.

>> 702. TP Orchestra Poly-Rhythmo de Cotonou Dahomey: "Minsato Le, Mi Dayihome" (Benin, early 70s)Available on World Psychedelic Classics 3: Love's a Real Thing, the Funky Fuzzy Sounds of West Africa (Luaka Bop)

Benin's greatest band are referred to by any number of variations on their lengthy name, but it's the "TP" that's most important. It stands for "tout pouissant," or "all-powerful." They began playing highlife, but in the 70s their sound got harder and soon they were playing a unique brand of funk stuffed with snaking guitar lines and punctuated with piercing James Brown screams. The way this song wraps the lead guitar part around the beat is astounding.

>> 703. Sweet Talks: "Eyi Su Ngaangaa" (Ghana, 1976)Available on Ghana Soundz: Afrobeat, Funk & Fusion in 70s Ghana (Sound Way)

This is another furiously funky blast from the Sweet Talks, who truly had a sound all their own in the mid-70s. The organ travels down, A.B. Crentsil's vocal travels up and somewhere in the space between them horns twitch and scorching rhythms throb away. If I'm ever in Accra, I have to pick up a few of their original albums.

>> 704. African Brothers Band: "Sakatumbe" (Ghana, 1970)Available on Ghana Soundz 2: Afrobeat, Funk & Fusion in 70s Ghana (Sound Way)

Oh, man, had these guys ever been listening to James Brown. Nana Ampadu's vocal performance on this song is full of Brownian squeals and screams, and the bit where he calls out to the band and asks, "Are you ready, fellas?" seals the deal. The music itself is fast, heavy funk, but approaches quite differently from the way the JB's might haveÐthe guitars are lighter for one thing, but the really big difference is in the drums. This break is disgusting-- a wacked-out, octopedal snare and cymbal festival-- and these guys weren't even a funk band! African Brothers were a guitar highlife band and one of the most prolific acts in Ghana, so it's only natural that they'd try out a little funk and fusion. The only shame is that they didn't try out more of it.

>> 705. Dan Boadi & His African Internationals: "Play that Funky Music" (Nigeria, 1978)Available on Money Is the Root of Evil (Hefty)

This song has no relation whatsoever to the massive Wild Cherry hit of the same name, though they're not very far removed in time from each other. This is from a 1978 Chicago recording session by Boadi and his band the African Internationals, and it's a pensive slow-burner full of long, searching sax lines. It never rises above a medium boil, but it doesn't need to-- a few minutes of spacey funk make for a great interlude in the middle of a disc like this.

>> 706. Manu Dibango: "Mwasa Makossa" (Cameroon, 1973)Available on Soul Makossa (Unidisc)

The funny thing about the success of "Soul Makossa" is that it's not even really an example of Manu Dibango's signature makossa groove. "Mwasa Makossa" captures that groove like lightning in a bottle-- it's basically a high-energy funk beat with a distinctive, ineffable rhythmic feel that no one else's music seems to have. Dibango is still doing it all these years later, and he has been since the 1950s-- looking at his recent album covers, I have to say I hope I look that good in my 60s.

>> 707. George Danquah: "Just a Moment" (country, year unknown)Available on The Danque!! (Afrodisiac)

"Just a Moment" is a well-titled piece of music, because that's all it asks for. It's almost a funk collage, with scratchy guitar, soulful female backing vocals buried in the mix, a flute, congas, and a few other things congealing into a slow-moving funk instrumental that gradually organizes itself enough to throw out a pretty sweet horn arrangement.

>> 708. Mulatu Astatque: "Netsanet" (Ethiopia, 1974)Available on Ethiopiques 4: Ethio Jazz & Musique Instrumentale (Buda Musique) and AfricaFunk: The Original Sound of 1970s Funky Africa (Harmless)

If I've got my Amharic right, "Netsanet" means liberty (it's also apparently used as a woman's first name), and I suppose you might say that that's what Swinging Addis was a celebration of-- the culture of Ethiopia was opening up, and so were nightclubs and bars where the music heard on the Ethiopiques series thrived. This instrumental drips with wah pedal and organ and features one of Astatque's stateliest horn charts.

>> 709. Gaspar Lawal: "Kita Kita" (Nigeria, 1980)Available on Nigeria 70: the Definitive Story of 1970s Funky Lagos (Strut)

At first blush, this almost sounds South African with its bright, shiny veneer and thumping beat, but as it progresses, it morphs into a weird dub track, with the originally straightforward piano part unfurling into a layered wash and finally giving way to echoing guitars, disembodied vocal intonations, and multiplying drums. No other African track I've heard sounds anything like it.

>> 710.Moussa Doumbia: "Keleya" (Mali, 1975)Available on World Psychedelic Classics 3: Love's a Real Thing, the Funky Fuzzy Sounds of West Africa (Luaka Bop)

If "unh!" was James Brown's motto for the better part of the 70s, then "Guhhhrrrrr!" must have been Moussa Doumbia's. His vocal on "Keleya" is the gruntingest, gruffest, gnarliest one of this whole set, like 70s Tom Waits with a nasty rhythm section. He wastes no time getting to the nastiness, either, announcing the song with a gurgly shriek and then riding the organ-dominated groove with all the "hey!"s and "hoo-ah!"s he can muster. My suspicion is that he's also the sax player, because he doesn't sound like the kind of guy who could stay quiet during the solo without something to do.

>> 711. Fred Fisher: "Asa-sa" (Nigeria, 1979)Available on Afro Baby: The Evolution of the Afro Sound in Nigeria, 1970-1979 (Sound Way)

Afro-disco explosion! Fred Fisher's "Asa-sa" should be in every DJ's crate, and in a perfect world it would be. But in our generally mediocre real world, it's relegated to the dustbins of history until some nice folks like Miles Cleret and his Sound Way cohorts dig it up. The groove is loose and crisp all the way, and the big horn hits at the 3:30 mark set up the charged last five minutes nicely. The sound doesn't have a conventional verse/chorus/verse structure, preferring to simply grow more infectious as it goes on, and that's exactly what it does.

>> 712. Konono No. 1: "Paradiso" (Democratic Republic of Congo, 2005)Available on Congotronics (Crammed Discs)

Konono have been the subject of quite a lot of press lately, following a sudden realization by the world that they exist and are making some pretty damn cool music. Most of their recordings are of the electrified brand of Bazombo trance music that got them noticed, but "Paradiso" feels like a real step forward, following a harder rhythm urged along by skittering hi-hat and rolling snares. The electrified likembe of course sits at the heart of the song, creating a mind-blowing whorl of sound that sound even more impressive with the band's newfound rhythmic discipline.

>> 713. Fela Ransome Kuti & Africa '70: "Water No Get Enemy" (Nigeria, 1975)Available on Expensive Shit/He Miss Road (MCA/Universal), The Best Best of Fela (MCA/Universal), Music Is the Weapon: The Best of Fela Kuti (MCA/Universal), Two Sides of Fela: Jazz & Dance (Barclay), Essential Afrobeat: The Very Best of Afrobeat 3CD Mix (Family Recordings), and Afrobeat Sessions (Sessions)

All discussions of Afrobeat begin and end with Fela, even when there's plenty of good stuff in between, and this one's no different. This is the flip of the Expensive Shit album, and it's one of Fela's heaviest tracks, opening with a loping horn-and-Rhodes groove. The main horn theme is doubled by Fela's choir

is the same way Sergio Mendes or Peter Thomas might have blended voices and instruments and it makes a thrilling texture, especially with Lekan Animashaun's baritone sax honking away down at the bottom.

Franco Aboddy's bass line weaves its way through it all deftly, tying together all the percussive threads and anchoring the groove. The song is the kind of thing you can imagine lasting a full hour at the Shrine in Lagos during an all-night concert and still not being long enough. That's ultimately the genius of Fela and much of Afrobeat in generalÑthe groove is endless and you're just tuning in to a part of it captured on tape. I'll be tuning in often.

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>> Segun Okeji & Afro Super-Feelings: "Afro Super-Feelings in Disco" (Nigeria, late 70s?)Available on Afro (Soul Patrol)

This is only available on French vinyl, but it's such a killer track I thought it rounded out this set nicely. It's a side-long, disco-infused Afrobeat odyssey that grunts into action with a burst of free-jazz sax and then it's off and running with a pummeling groove, ultra-tight horns and an exuberant chorusÐit's like Fela in the club, and when Okeji sings "you dance to the feeling of the sound" you do.