Fela Kuti

Originally published @ 
sabotagetimes.com, written by Len Brown

Despite his death over a decade ago, Fela Kuti is undergoing something of a resurgence with the re-release of his back catalogue and the award-winning musical, Fela. Here's part one of an archive interview with the great man...

Hot-foot from Broadway, the award-winning musical Fela! arrives at the National Theatre in London, while his complete recordings have just been re-released.  But who the hell was the real FELA KUTI?  Back in the autumn of 1986, I spent several heady, hedonistic days with the cocksure, copulating King of Afrobeat. Was Fela ever a serious contender for the Presidency of Nigeria? A truly revolutionary force in world music? Or was he simply a polygamist with dodgy politics and even dodgier underpants?

IT’S AS HOT as hell in here.  The heat is on, 12 floors up, mid-80s. A gaggle of colourfully clad-women stare at me, amused by my sweaty pinkness. It could be sun-stroked Lagos, anywhere typically tropical, but it’s Paris in October.

A big-eyed, very naughty, very small boy continually punches me in the leg; his sister giggles at my discomfort. As if this wasn’t enough, the man next to me is wearing only red and blue underpants. Apart from spiritual blasts on his saxophone and scratching his scrotal sac, he assures me he will soon be the President of Nigeria.

He is, how you say, a hero; a celebrated musician of some 50 albums; a world famous political dissident; a man who married 27 women in one day; the possessor of a legendary libido. In layman’s terms he’s a cross between Robin Hood and Bob Marley – a Nigerian James Last, a bandleader whose fame has risen above and beyond the category ‘superstar’. For nearly two years, until April 24 (1986), he languished in Kirkiri gaol; found guilty of a trumped-up charge of currency smuggling. No jury, no appeal. He was released when the judge, who sentenced him to over five years, admitted the trial was rigged.

His detention was politically motivated. He’s a rebel king, a pretender to the presidency, and for the past decade he has been a continuous thorn in the Nigerian authorities’ side. He refused to be silenced and used his music as a means of exposing the dishonesty and corruption of successive governments. At 48, and despite prison, his love of life and his life of love have preserved his physique. In Africa where the ample girth and wealth of leaders is often associated with power corruption and lies, this muscular torso could be interpreted as a sign of honesty.

I WANNA BE ELECTED

THE PRE-weed, pre-coital Feta Anikulapo Kuti is a rare find. He blinks, he stretches, he scratches. He stares out over Paris in the late-afternoon light. He’s worked his band, Egypt 80, through the night, procreating his familiar brass-and-keyboard dominated big sound, based on traditional African rhythms and featuring the call-and-response vocals of Fela and his queens. It will be his first album since prison, Just Like That, and it’s going to be more political, more direct in its attack on institutional injustice, declaring war on bureaucratic bullshit.

“No one wants the military, the country is telling them to quit,” he growls. “The military are saying they are laying the conditions for a civilian government, but how can you bring a tailor to lay the foundation for a building when he’s supposed to sew clothes. A tailor or a shoemaker cannot construct a building. Yet in Nigeria soldiers want to lay the foundation of government. It’s madness.”
Fela’s solution is to stand for the Presidency – in the 1990 elections if not before: “My popularity is so great now that I could even be made President by acclamation. I don’t think anyone will have the guts to stand against me”.

Undoubtedly he takes his political ambitions seriously. Why else would he have suffered so terribly for his belief? In ’77, during the reign of Obasanjo, Fela’s self-proclaimed independent state of Kalakuta was invaded by the military. Along with many of his followers he was brutally assaulted and gaoled; the Kuti women were raped (some with bottles and bayonets); his home was burnt down; and his 77-year-old mother died from her injuries. In ’81 he was detained again, charged with armed robbery and, he claims, the authorities tried to kill him.

And yet, while some take his Presidential candidature seriously and even fear his election, others regard his political dream as laughable. He’s been compared to Screaming Lord Sutch of the Monster Raving Loony Party or the late French comedian Coluche. John Howe of West Africa magazine wrote that Fela “wants to purify Nigerian society, not from the paternal posture of a real politician, but like a cheeky small boy jeering at the open fly of the passing banker”.

His elder brother Olikoye is a minister in the current government – “you can not make a wrong system work,” Fela argues, “he’s trying his best but they’re using him to give them credibility” – so he clearly has the contacts. And, in the face of the unpopular military, Fela’s vision of democracy combined with his rebel superstar status surely has all the romantic ingredients for mass appeal.
But what exactly would he do for Nigeria?  “I want to go everywhere and play my music. I want to make people happy. Imagine the President playing music to announce budgets and policies. I want to preach spiritual and political changes, that Pan-Africanism is the stepping-stone to human internationalism. That all human beings are one race; black, white, any coloured shit, it’s just a superficial cover of the inside of human life. Africa will teach that racism is negative, an institutional problem.

“I think artists will remove this negative stereotyped trend in peoples’ thoughts. Artists must be the future leaders of men: they will aim for more freedom of thought, more wanting to meet people, more participation in what will bring happiness. People will tend to remove themselves from what causes violence; the Reagan/Thatcher type leaders cannot do this. Their mind is too institutionally stereotyped.”
Radical idealism, you can’t beat it; fighting talk for cultural freedom, spiritual enlightenment, peace. But what’s this? He says that when he becomes President he will “create a law to make all citizens members of the police and military forces so as to legally annihilate violence”.
Sounds ominous; shades of Robespierre.  And what’s to stop the Babangida military government from gaoling Fela tomorrow?
“The people!  My popularity has gone beyond that now. My last experience has really broken the camel’s back as far as the people are concerned. You can’t keep harassing one man in Africa like that for a long time, people will go against the government. It was getting too much for them even before I went to prison, too attritious. But I’m not putting my guards down, I expect anything at any time.”

PROMISED LAND

EIGHTEEN MONTHS off the job may not have affected Fela Kuti physically, but he’s been altered spiritually by the experience and his music is now more “truthful” as a result. Before prison he was influenced by the teachings of Professor Hindi; often described, in derogatory fashion, as a “witchdoctor”, Hindi was last seen on these shores slitting throats, burying the victims and bringing them back to life days later. Now Fela’s developed his own brand of spiritualism, utilising his experiences in ’60s America with the Black Panther movement, and uniting traditional Yoruba mysticism with the ideals of leaders like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

But, I remind him, these spiritual heroes were assassinated, doesn’t he fear a similar fate?

“Nothing happens in this world that is not supposed to be. I know who Martin Luther King is, I know who Malcolm X is. I don’t want to say was because they still exist. They were special entities, not just politicians, who came to do their bit and die. They were supposed to die and they did. I have found that in my life it’s almost impossible for man to kill me. They’ve tried, I have physically experienced death and went through it and came back.

“When about 15-policemen turn their gun butts and hit you on the head and you don’t have a single scratch on your head and you don’t die, that is power. There is a spiritual life, a life that people don’t see, that people cannot explain. This life is there and you cannot kill anybody whose destiny is not to die. They try to form scientific philosophies on what this life is about but really the truth lies in the spiritual knowledge of the human race.”

The implication of Fela’s argument is that Europe is spiritually bankrupt. The colonial governments raped Africa and tried to impose institutionalised morality and religion on her peoples. But now, according to Fela, the boot’s on the other foot.

“I see Africa as the teacher of this new philosophy. I call it truth. The knowledge is not in Europe, it is in Africa, the formula of the spirit world is known in Africa. The secret is there. This information was placed in Africa at the beginning of civilization, in Egypt. Africa was supposed to pass this information to the Europeans and the Europeans were supposed to learn from this. But the powerful entities in European society did not want to wait for this systematic change and instead they came to Africa and took the powers, not wanting to learn how this power was developed. Because of this science was born. They disrupted the systematic plan for the universe, that was made for human beings to progress, so now the knowledge has gone back to Africa, to start to teach again.”
Well, I can swallow this. I’ve been spoon-fed centuries of institutionalised, proudly-revised English history. I usually welcome alternative interpretations. But what’s this…

“There was a witchpot,” Fela continues, “a witch-craft pot. Civilisation was placed in Egypt, all races were there to learn civilisation. But because of evil the maker dispersed all human beings away from Egypt. He gave the power pot to the Yorubas but instead of it remaining there, in 1470 Queen Elizabeth came to steal the pot. Mungo Park came with the story of exploration and brought the witchpot directly to Buckingham Palace. The pot gave the power of technology to Europe but technology was the wrong step to take at that time. And that’s why the whole thing has to go back again to Africa. Queen Elizabeth at that time was an entity, she knew about the pot, she had powers and that’s how she changed the whole plan.”

Mm, it’s an interesting theory.

“Okay people may call it theory, people always call things theories but I’m giving you fact whether people like to know it or not. When you give spiritual information it sounds like theory. Science uses words like theory to debase spiritual happenings. Science to me is doing a lot of harm to people by not allowing them to see the spiritual importance of their lives.”

HAIR OF THE GOD


IN STUDIO Davout near Montreuil, in the middle of the night, Fela pushes the 22-piece Egypt 80 through ‘O.A.U.’ in one take; threatening to sack the next “motherfucker” who falters; laying down his own sax solo sublimely, almost lazily. Then it’s his vocals: an attack on the red-taped incompetence of the Organisation for African Unity, answered by his queens with chants of “O.A.Eunuchs”, “O.A.Useless”.

In his blue-embroidered pink suit, he’s a benevolent dictator, hard but fair, a Brian Clough of a bandleader. Although Wally Badrou’s co-producing Just Like That, Fela’s in charge. He’s still bitter about ‘Army Arrangement’– an album released while he was in prison – being given the dance floor treatment by Bill Laswell, with Bernie Worrell on keyboards and Sly Dunbar on drums. “There was no permission, no asking. He didn’t see the beauty of what I’d done.”

Nevertheless he admits that, as the military’s aim in imprisoning him was to stop his music, the album’s release – with Egypt 80 led by Fela’s son Femi and held together by Fela’s younger brother Beko – was a triumph and drew attention to the injustice of his imprisonment.

And despite the polishing Laswell gave ‘Army Arrangement’ it marked a return to form, featuring the excellent title track and also ‘Cross Examination’, his strongest song since ‘Colonial Mentality’. It may lack the raw, energetic, freshly recorded quality of his past, but ‘Army’ still ranks alongside his best, his most politically outspoken work: ‘Why Black Men They Suffer’ (’71), ‘No Bread’ (’76), ‘Sorrow Tears And Blood’ (’78), ‘Vagabonds In Power’ and ‘International Thief Third’ (both ’79) and ‘Original Sufferhead’ (’81). Before he called his music Afrobeat; now it’s classical African.

"I want to play music that is meaningful, that stands the test of time,” he says with uncharacteristic modesty. “It’s no longer commercial; it’s deep African music, serious music, so I no longer want to give it that cheap name.”

The truths he sings about, the political and spiritual statements he’s making, are often hidden in analogies.

“The tune I’m thinking of now is about African women who palm oil their hair. It’s becoming so disgraceful that every African woman’s hair is shining like white man’s hair. It’s a chemical from America, big business. I will ask these women one question. Why the hair on the head is shining, but not the hair down there? What happens to the hair at the cunt? I want to discourage women from doing this thing because it destroys their hair.  African women have not learnt that having hard hair is a gift, that every time you comb your hair, it creates much electricity, so you can communicate much more with the spirit world. That is the only reason your hair is hard. This chemical makes their hair soft and it destroys it. It’s unnatural. In the same way that woman is treating her hair to make it look artificially nice, how many of our bureaucratic leaders are looking artificially nice?”

THEY’RE EVERYWHERE. Hanging around the studio, sleeping in the hallway, cluttering the room.  It’s like a medieval court; Fela’s subjects, his women, some of his 27 queens, mistresses, lovers. Of course, in the West he’s taken some stick over the years for his “traditional” views of women.
Let’s recall that he wrote ‘Lady’ (’72) and ‘Mattress‘ (’75) attacking women’s liberation, ridiculing demands for equality and, in the case of the latter, depicting women as mere procreation machines, vessels for man’s desire. But, since his release from Kirikiri prison, Fela’s technically divorced his 27 wives. Hasn’t he?

“I’ve not divorced them. I don’t believe in marriage so divorce does not arise. Marriage does not belong to my own environment, it’s evil, and it doesn’t go along with freedom. If I’m singing to marry then I’m telling a woman that she belongs to me, that her cunt belongs to me. But how can her cunt belong to me, it’s not possible to institutionalize her cunt? She moves about with it, she can travel to America with it. If they put you in prison you cannot take her cunt with you to prison.”

But what of his attitude towards women?  Has that changed? Cynics will say that Fela Kuti, while giving his wives freedom, has really just reduced his possessions and is back playing the field. Does he regret the sentiments of ‘Lady’ and ‘Mattress’?

“You see, what I said in ‘Mattress’ then, I did not know I was going to arrive at this conclusion of marriage today. It was a different period of my life and I did not know how to say it. Man must not take woman matters seriously, he must not put woman matters in his head. If you do you will get sick. I’ve seen myself having pain in my stomach, shitting, going through this syndrome people call jealousy. I’ve seen myself sick to the bones. That cannot be a good thing. So you must see woman as something you sleep with, not something that you let go to your head. Woman are mattress, but you must be nice to them, and make them happy. That is what they are and that is what life is about. Use your money to make women happy, make them dress well, make them fine.”

It’s pathetic coming from the son of Funmilayo Ransome Kuti, a pioneer of women’s rights, who met Mao and Nkrumah (Fela’s Pan-African hero), and set up the powerful Nigerian Women’s Union in the 1940s. He says she makes him see what life is all about, that he communicates with her spirit, and he sees no contradiction. But Fela no longer gets angry when judged by ‘Western standards’: “Before it annoyed me, before I went to prison, but now I find that to be annoyed is something negative. Happiness is the most important thing.”

Just as well. Maybe I envy Fela’s ease with women, but I don’t see woman as merely “something you sleep with”. Okay, so it’s a different world, a different culture, but if we resent the hot-crotched metal muthas and macho rappers for their negative views of women then surely we must resent Fela too. Cultural, social and economic excuses could no doubt be made for every category.

But what of Fela’s wives? Back in ’82, his wives expressed their contentment with life in the Kuti camp. They remain hooked on charisma, they want to be close to him. Let’s not forget that they’re mainly Nigerian women raised in the Yoruban climate of polygamy, and naturally there was a reluctance on their part to express any discontent with their lot.

The one exception is Kevwe – a Kuti queen for 20 years, who suffered terribly in the attack on Kalakuta and remains emotionally scarred by the experience. She feels rejected and is thinking of leaving Fela’s court. “Do you think he’s normal?” she later asked me. “Because I have no babies he doesn’t want me anymore.”

But back to Fela and the value of woman.

“Sex is life,” says Fela, profoundly. “That’s why I don’t understand those spiritualists, those monks who say they don’t fuck women. Women are the source of power in the kind of spiritualism I understand. You cannot have power without women’s participation. Sex is the main source of power. When people say that sex makes you weak, sex makes you older, that’s bullshit. Much more sex, much more energy, much more everything.”

Nice work if you can get it, and keep it up. Trouble is, particularly in the West, promiscuity is regarded as evil, and sexual power is seen as dangerous to the establishment.

“People who start all these moralistic trends and shit they could be impotent!” Fela laughs. “For me, I see with my eyes, I walk with my legs, I work with my hands, my stomach takes my food, and I need my prick. It’s just as important as any other part of my body. For me, sex is everything clean.”
Yeah, but what about sexually transmitted diseases?  How does AIDS fit into your spiritual scheme of things?

“It gets to the point now where they say that there’s AIDS all over the world, so because there’s AIDS I must not fuck? Okay, very soon people will not fuck. But I will fuck because I do not believe that I use my sex wrongfully, so I do not think I will be the victim of sexual disease.

“Sex disease is a spiritually influenced happening. When you die, everything that you do in this world, you are going to get your judgement for every evil. So when you are reincarnated and you have been using sex for evil purposes you’ll be reincarnated as a homosexual.”

Eh up, we’re back at the witchpot.

“That pot breeds societies, it breeds behaviour in societies, secret societies, cults. The pot breeds the misuse of sex in the spirit world, so the punishment for stealing the pot, is centuries of homosexuality in Europe.”

But not in Africa?

“Oh no, we don’t have homosexuals, at least in Nigeria it’s possibly only one per cent” (if true, one per cent of the current Nigerian population is approximately 767,000).

We’ve reached stalemate here. On women and homosexuality we’re worlds apart. But the light is failing, the night’s approaching, and it’s time for Fela to get some ‘rest’. He dismisses his entourage: only the chosen one remains. And me. “Make yourself comfortable,” he says kindly, taking her into the bedroom off the lounge in his suite.

So I’m sitting there, listening to the telly, French telly, to drown the cries of passion. Fela’s back on the job, and I feel a right gooseberry.

MORRISSEY FOR POPE

YOU MADE me judge him; I didn’t want to do it. No, I didn’t want to do it. He was kind to me; offered me his food, his grass, his hospitality in Nigeria. I could have chucked all this in, woken up in Lagos with a shaker and several wives. I was forced into making these value judgements about him, and I’ve no grounds to believe I’m right. Perhaps I haven’t seen further than my colonial nose and, as a result, trivialized his religion, trivialized his personal beliefs. He let me get close to him, one of my musical heroes, and I can’t be sure that I haven’t betrayed his confidence. I totally disagree with his views on women and homosexuals, but I guess that doesn’t mean I’m right and he’s wrong.
Where will his political philosophy take him next? I totally respect his courage, his commitment in the face of adversity…so who knows what the future will bring for Fela Anikulapo Kuti? With a geriatric cracked actor leading the “Free World”, surely you’re not going to tell me that the man with the two-tone underpants and the red-and-gold horn can’t be President of Nigeria?


 Originally published @ 
sabotagetimes.com, written by Len Brown

Sotuh African Jazz!

 

Colin and Valmont were pioneering Cape jazz music researchers from the turn of the Millennium. In an interview in Cape Town city, they said: 

VL: The regional styles of jazz: A lot of work needs to be done to firm up different definitions of jazz from different regions of South Africa. That is one of Colin's questions. How do you describe Cape Jazz in musicological terms? 

CM: It is a very difficult question to answer about Cape Jazz. One needs to go back in time because first of all from talking to musicians who are now in their late sixties, seventies is that they refer to Cape Jazz as goema music or some of them call it gummy. They have these names for it. And those names are names they would attach to music they heard for example in District Six. There seems to be a relationship between the music and the identity, the goema music and coloured identity. What I am finding is that when I talk to musicians about Cape Jazz, coloured musicians tend to claim it as their own. Musicians like Jimmy Adams or Basil Moses or Harold Japtha refers to that music as 'our music.' 

What musical elements are present in what we term Cape Jazz and what musical elements are present in what we term goema music. What is similar? If you look at Cape Jazz classic tunes. Donald Tshomela goes as far as to say that Dollar Brand was the person who started that sound. He says Dollar Brand is the initiator of that type of music, Cape Jazz. Jimmy Adams denies and says that Dollar does not play that music, Dollar plays African Jazz. What it brings out is that no-one has a clear meaning of what it is. If you take a CD like these collections that come out that are called Cape Jazz you find it is a mish mash of anything. What is defined in that industry as Cape Jazz is actually whoever is a Cape Town jazz musician features on there. Some of them sound like samba, some of them sound like Weather Report and anything else. 

VL: To look at the broad picture may be a useful place to start. The development of South African jazz as an idiom really took off from the 1940's onwards. On the one hand there was a big band sound and on the other hand you had these smaller combo sounds, four member and five member groups that started playing serious jazz with a well integrated African urban traditional sound. The Jazz Maniacs and later on the Jazz Epistles and others did it. The point that I am trying to make is that part of the myth about Cape Jazz and by myth I don't mean it is a lie. The myth about Cape Jazz derives from the fact that at some point in South Africa's history Cape Town became one of the last places especially at the end of the 1950's and early sixties Cape Town was one of the last places where this new kind of multi racial nation building jazz idiom could survive. In other words were musician intellectuals like Abdullah Ibrahim, Hugh Masekela and others could practice their music with a relative degree of freedom. Because of that Cape Town was named as a place as one of the birth places of jazz in South Africa which is both true and false because I think there were political reasons why Cape Town had this kind of liberal atmosphere right until the end. What many musicians did after that is they either left the country or they started playing dance music or they did something else. 

Abdullah Ibrahim is a very difficult guy to interview so it is very difficult to see how his thinking developed. It is clear that he had a sense of himself as a South African. He was taking elements of African music and taking elements of jazz and producing something different. Abdullah Ibrahim was also in tune with what was happening on the intellectual scene in Cape Town. That group of jazz musicians were also hanging out with writers and poets and journalists so there was a conscious sense that here they were producing something new. 

For someone like Jimmy Adams the term jazz is a much broader term and would probably include something he calls straight tempo ballroom dance music or langarm music when it wasn't so clear when he was playing jazz and when he was playing dance music. It was all mixed up. It was popular music. 

Whereas Abdullah did not care whether he was playing an obscure version of Thelonious Monk or Duke Ellington and in fact was more interested in that then playing dance music. That is a very important distinction to draw already when you are talking about styles. 

Would the coon carnival have an effect on jazz? 

CM: A picture that is commonly painted is these young ‘not yet musicians' in District Six over New Year, listening to this goema music and hearing these songs being played on banjo's and watching the troops rehearse and all of these things, for them that seems to be a fundamental part of their music experience which influences them in what they do later as jazz musicians. A factual example is someone like Cliffie Moses who plays with the Four Sounds and who did an LP called 'Jazz in District Six.' One of his songs was called the goema dance. He writes this in 1969, twenty years later from when he first used to hear this music. He remembers clearly this scene of him sitting under the tree watching these coon guys rehearse. When you listen to the music there is no doubt about it that it is a goema tune, but it allows the freedom of improvisation and jazz improvisation so they are using those characteristics that are typically American jazz improve over goema. 

Was there an American influence? 

VL: There was much more of an American influence particularly after WWII. Musicians like all people have their own fashion and after the Second World War, the banjo went out of fashion and the guitar became fashionable. Django Reinhardt may not have been as popular after the Second World War as Charlie Parker or Miles Davis. In District Six, American jazz and American crooning was very very big. You can see its influence in plays like ‘District Six the Musical'. The British influence also started declining from the end of the Second World War. Even Cliffie as a dance musician became a serious follow of jazz music and that LP has got very strong jazz. 

How much has Cape Jazz integrated for instance? How much cross fertilization has there been with Cape Jazz and marabi? There was a lot of integration especially in places like Kimberley on the mines and to some extent in Joburg and in Durban. There were a lot of people coming from Cape Town and bringing all those sounds with them to places like Kimberley, interacting with African musicians, forming new kinds of associations and new styles of music must have emerged and I think marabi is an example of that. 

CM: District Six was not about jazz. There were jazz musicians but jazz was a passing thing in District Six. There were very few venues in District Six and they would play jazz on a Sunday or one day during the week and there was an odd restaurant. There were a lot of restaurants patroned by a white Jewish audience where jazz was played and a lot of coloured guys would play. 

VL: When District Six was happening as a place it didn't have great symbolic value, it was after it was threatened by the group areas act that District Six becomes a metaphor so that it starts appearing in poetry in novels, and it is associated with the jazz musicians, Jonas Gwangwa and all those people who in exile also become mythologised. Along with District Six this image of a new South Africa renaissance developed. In literal terms District Six had little to do with jazz. There was very little jazz in District Six and very little interest in jazz except if it was in the form of popular music. It was Frank Sinatra or something like that. The mythology of it particularly from the middle sixties and onwards when it became politicised is very interesting. That is when District Six became associated with all the new icons of South Africa. 

Did politics affect the music? 

CM: It did affect the spaces that people were playing in. Some venues still exist. The Wiseman hall still exist and the one in Sea Point called the Waldorf. Those are two that might still exist. 

The audiences wanted something very different in the townships. They wanted the big band dance style or marabi music where they could jive. There was no bebop or anything. Sit down listen jazz was a very middle class thing to do. Working class get up and dance. Another space that was crucial was at people's homes. Guys would have their mega jam sessions in their homes. 

VL: The broader political environment would have affected what people listen to. When John Coltrane started going through his free period it got picked up on by quite a few musicians in Cape Town. People like Winston Mankunku became an imitator at first of John Coltrane's more adventurous work in the middle and towards the end of the sixties. That music had its own political symbolism. Max Roach, Archie Shepp and those guys were all doing wild things with free jazz and we know that was very popular among a younger generation of musicians. Chris Mcgregor and the Blue Notes is the most internationally famous example of that. They took African sounds and they blended it with the free movement that was happening in the UK. That became a big hit. 

CM: One of the very unique Cape Town sounds is when you listen to the saxophone players. Jimmy Adams who is a saxophone player explained to me that he used to sit with his dad who was a dance band player and used to play vastrap, squares and Jimmy was interested in jazz and would go and learn jazz in the township and at the end of the day his dad would sit him down and teach him to play his kind of music too. His dad would play the violin to him and he would sit with a saxophone. A violin has a very wide vibrato. And when you listen to the saxophone players there is that interpretation of it. 

VL : Basil Coetzee is an example of that. 

CM: Subconsciously the guys picked it up aurally. This tradition got passed on. It was first string instruments and then in the fifties the banjo's, guitars and violins fell away among the coons and these guys started learning saxophone and started playing the same sound on sax. 

VL : You must also hear the story about the fish-horn. There was a guy who used to walk around Cape Town with a horn to blow and make a vibrato sound and some of the saxophone sounds are like that as well. 

Was there a separate white scene? 

VL : There was even a white musicians union in Cape Town. In the major cities of South Africa, Durban and Joburg had it as well and it was very exclusive and tried very hard to the extent of lobbying parliament to protect white musicians interests. 

There was also an alternative scene which people like Chris Mcgregor, Morris Goldberg, Merton Barrow, Midge Pike and others. Merton Barrow was instrumental in creating spaces where musicians could be musicians and not worry about people's racial backgrounds and in fact tried to work with each other and learn from each other. There was a club in Green Point run by people like Midge Pike, Merton Barrow. That was one of the only places in Cape Town where people could mix. It survived for quite a long time but for the most part there was a separate scene for white and black musicians because white musicians had easy access to the establishments so they could get jobs with orchestras or in the nightclubs. 

I wonder if you can compare African jazz and European jazz to their philosophies. European being individualistic, African being uBuntu? 

VL : How would we differentiate between European jazz and North American jazz? If there is a coherent philosophy behind South African jazz it is African nationalism. After the second world war there was evidence of an African middle class becoming a lot more militant about its role in society. The development of the ANC will parallel all of that as well. This consciousness is also reflected in the way people viewed their musicality. There were African composers who became prominent in the 30's and 40's who for the first time started producing classical pieces, choral pieces and wrote it down with Western notation. There were important milestones and one of them was the development of jazz. 

What is interesting about Cape Town was in some parts with Abdullah Ibrahim and others there was success in that they managed to capture in imaginative terms this notion of South African jazz. Perhaps if musicians weren't forced into exile and people were allowed to grow and interact with each other it would be very different. 

CM: The type of evolution that jazz took here was very different to the type of evolution it had in the States. Jazz in the States was not about musical elements from Europe, foxtrots and waltz's and all that meeting a rhythmic section that came from Africa and fusing them. There was none of that coming together in New Orleans. I argue that jazz is a black African music because I firmly believe that people were denied freedom of speech and music became a form of expression. Music took on the form of expression of communication. The other things are co-incidental. That is the seed of it. The early New Orleans sound starts sounding like marching bands because that was the environment. You had the civil war going on and then this flood of instruments into New Orleans because the army band got disbanded there and there was a ton of instruments lying around and people started doing these marching band things to what became a New Orleans style and that kind of development is very different to what happened here. Here there was a little bit of the influence of church music. 

Was there a spiritual influence like a drummer beating the drum like the heartbeat, bringing rain, causing the crops to grow and for him to be cared for and well fed in society? 

VL : It also got undermined by urbanisation as societies that supported those belief systems were undermined badly over a long period of time. In a more contemporary sense I think a lot of jazz musicians grew up on a spiritual plane. Abdullah Ibrahim's mother for example was a church pianist and taught him to play piano, so a lot of what he plays is influenced by the spiritual music of the church. 

CM : Jazz is also a very class based music. There is this tendency to talk about jazz as classic music. 

VL : Or Jazz as art music. Like classical music, jazz provides a certain disciplinary environment for a musician that you won't get in neo-traditional and other kinds of music. What is powerful about jazz is it can absorb all these other influences as it is such a strong basis for any musician, so whatever other music you go onto play if you have a classical background or a jazz background you are probably going to do pretty well. It has become such a strong background for a musician to have that it is difficult to escape its influence. There are certain things you learn as a jazz musician technically that you wont learn in another environment.

The influence of the Union of South African artists on jazz? 

VL : Jimmy is a musician from the Western Cape and has been a pioneer in many ways. He went and played for one of the African Jazz and Variety shows and somebody pulled him a dirty and he got stranded in Joburg and Kippie Moeketsi was involved in the Union at that time and Kippie used to give him a pound everyday to go and buy something to eat. While he was stuck there the Union did play a major role in helping him to survive and find a job to get enough money to come back. It must have been providing quite a good support network for many musicians. 

CM: Dorkay house was a cultural meeting place. There would be dance and jazz. That was a place they would get together and jam, make music, play music and rehearse. MAPP music school in Cape Town played that role. It trained musicians and created space for rehearsals. It ran programmes. It was a performance venue too. And that is an important chapter in music training in Cape Town in the 1980's. A generation of musicians like Musa, Bennie and others beginning to make their names now came through that school. It also played a political role it was instrumental in the cultural boycott and in the late eighties in allowing exiles to come back and feed back into the community their musical knowledge. When Abdullah Ibrahim came back his first workshop he did at the music school. When Jonas Gwangwa came back the same thing. 

VL: The first international tours, Paul Simon, it was required that they do workshops at MAPP. MAPP used to be Musical Action for Peoples Power and got changed in more modern times to Musical Action to People's Progress. They moved with the times. 

In the 70's there was a disco movement that threatened jazz? 

VL: The musicians had to do what they had to do to survive. If you listen to Spirits Rejoice and the stuff from that period. All the musicians were jazz musicians. Robbie Jansen, Chris Schilder, Paul Abrahamse are all people that regard themselves as South African jazz musicians. They all made their contribution and they also all dabbled in what was popular in the 70's, soul, R n B and so on and fusion. Fusion was and still is a big influence on Cape Town. For me when I thought I was sophisticated as a teenager I started listening to Spyrogyro and Weather Report and all that stuff. It has been integrated into whatever we call jazz now. We can't escape the influence of that period. 

CM: Cliffie Moses and the 4 sounds were a typical jazz band and they backed Percy Sledge who is a soul singer who came to Cape Town in 1975. It was about money. Their Sunday gigs would be jazz gigs but all the other nights they played at the Beverley Lounge was dance. People wanted to dance. 

VL: Jazz has probably more institutional support today than it ever had. 

VL : For purposes of sanity you need to have some kind of definition for jazz. The question is how do you define it? 

Is smooth jazz a contradiction in terms? 

CM : It is the same with Cape Jazz. One of those Cd's calls it snoek flavoured jazz! 

Where is jazz evolving to? 

CM : When I listen to the recording industry I think that it is commercialised. It is about creating recording opportunities for musicians. It is opening a space to black musicians to showcase their music where that wasn't there before. I don't see a jazz movement happening! There are a lot of people trying to step out of that commercialisation. Zim is stepping out like Coltrane did in the 60's. He is going there. Maybe it is a Joburg thing? 

VL : There are two trends, one of which is happening and one of which I hope will happen. The one is I think people are much free-er to experiment now. People are looking at roots, at traditions and are quite unashamed about it. I hope that will grow and we get a better understanding of what traditions are evolving into. We are also exposed to the rest of the world in a way that we haven't been for many decades. That is also going to have an impact on what we do as far as jazz is concerned. Jazz has a dynamic relationship with other music, with traditional music or pop. Jazz is strong enough as a music to survive and absorb other influences. I am optimistic as there is enough support and institutional support to do this. If jazz managed to survive the 1960's, it can only flourish now. At the same time it is depressing that there has to be an overload of commercial smooth jazz. I like smooth jazz myself but would like a better balance between smooth jazz and other kinds of stuff. 

CM : There is an educational aspect that can play a vital role. There are institutions like Pretoria Technikon and UCT College of Music, Natal University, there is a music programme at Fort Hare where Hotep Galeta is teaching and Abdullah is initiating an academy here. And those are training grounds and you learn to play. You learn the discipline of jazz and that can only strive as far as the music is concerned. There will be a tendency for revivalism of African traditional jazz, Mike Campbell for example is re-arranging the music of King Kong written by Matshikiza. They intend having a national tour of King Kong. That is a huge play to put on and it is backed by government money. 

Originally published @  http://www.afribeat.com 

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Analog Africa , Soundway and Strut Records are lovers of African Soul , Funk, and often mentioned in the same breath . We chat with the operators of three houses and show that they are not so similar.

Text: Lukasz [email protected]




Analog Africa : archivist of African youth culture

Samy Ben Redscheb was ten years ago as a DJ engaged in a Senegalese hotel as he discovers in an old chest plate a particularly groovy radio disc of Zimbabwe. Intrigued by this sound completely foreign to him so far , he decides to unceremoniously to fly in the South American country and to go in search of clues . However, research is proving more difficult than expected : Where to get old soul, funk and rock on vinyl ? He always gets only shrug in response . But the German - Tunisian does not let up , traveling several times to Harare , rattles local radio stations from , asks somewhat dated musician and taxi driver until he finally , after three years in the remote gold mining village Shishavani will find them , "They have opened the doors and there was a camp of 50 by 30 meters and all full of records. We stayed there for two days and our car so packed that the central axis is broken on the way to Harare. « The charge of old records is shipped with a container to Germany. From the raw material picks Ben Redscheb the beads out, does she remaster and presses it to the market in the northern hemisphere . A new label is born : Analog Africa.
The Digger Ben Redscheb is so hooked that he umkrempelt his life and his passion for making vocation : He throws his job as an instructor , hires the time being at Lufthansa as flight attendant and fly every few weeks to Lagos , Accra or Khinshasa . Storage and basements or verrümpelte terraces and backyards are for him to workplaces; Bazaars of recorded music a forgotten heyday of African youth culture. According to the Zimbabwe compilations Nigeria , Ghana, Benin follow . The world music community is thrilled : Cosmic Afro Soul from Togo and Ghana or psychedelic Voodoo Funk from Benin. In the northern hemisphere has hitherto hardly known that it also has a beat and hippie era was in Africa, in the distorted guitars , Hammond organs , pants and Flowerpower - shirts were in vogue .
The stories of this era and the biographies and interviews with musicians such as Amadou Ballaké from Burkina Faso , Rob Raindorf from Ghana or the Orchestre Polyrythmo from Benin we learn not only on the blog of Analog Africa . Each vinyl is always accompanied by a lovingly designed booklet and rare pictures . Label owner Ben Redscheb it is important these " added value " mitzugeben to purchasers of its disks : " This gives the listener an idea of what is really happening in a country. If you listen to music without knowing where the people come from, who they are and what problems they had , then you can love music . But you'll love them until you get to know these people . "
Soundway Soundway fishes in Caribbean waters

Miles Cleret , operators of Soundway Records, which celebrates its tenth anniversary in April , has never intended to start their own label . 2002 he was on holiday in Ghana and heard a local DJ a track from Ebo Taylor hung up. Taylor Afrobeat combines traditional Ghanaian music with elements of American funk and rock giants like James Brown or Deep Purple. His songs are based on popular rhymes from the gold mine of traditional Ghanaian music. The instrumental tools : electric guitars , bass, drum set and brass section are imports from the Western Hemisphere. Like so many children of the hip-hop generation begins in the nineties, soul, funk and jazz records to discover Miles Cleret who have served as sample treasure trove of hip-hop producer. The intersection of their own taste in music and the newly discovered exotic let Cleret in Africa find the soundtrack of his life. Rough soul and funk beads that do not have the technical standard of U.S. productions , but autrumpften by a particular experiment . "There was a spirit of optimism , a sense of self-empowerment. Most countries had indeed just a decade behind independence , "he explained. Fascinated by this original sound hybrid he traveled to Ghana for three years then compile the compilation " Ghana Soundz " . When interested in a label on the compilation , based Cleret Soundway . After ten years, he can now look back with pride on 40 Releases of singles, EPs , compilations and albums published again .
Unlike Ben Redscheb the focus of the label has moved away over the years of Africa. As Cleret one day buys on Ebay Calypso plates , he befriends the seller Roberto Gyement . A Californian with Latino roots , which then puts together a series of Panamanian and Colombian compilations for Soundway . Gyement shares Clerets career : his childhood heroes were Black Sabbath and Run DMC . But in 2000 he moved to Costa Rica for six years and slowly developed a sense of calypso, salsa and cumbia . To extend his visa , he must make a trip to neighboring Panama every three months. "I was looking directly into the border town on a radio station where I bought thousands of old LPs and singles. They had tons of records. " Gyement takes over the department Panama and Colombia and, together five fabulous compilations, which could be considered as a genetic code Panamanian and Colombian musical culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike Cuba or Jamaica, the Caribbean Grooves of the neighbors were never in the global focus. In this case, both countries have very own Styles: Panama's music scene was enriched in the sixties and seventies by Calypso by immigrants from Trinidad and radio American GIs . On the Caribbean coast of Colombia cumbia was invented ; those shuffling Smoky offbeat groove, which found its imitators in Peru and Argentina and now mixed with club beats as " Electro- Cumbia " celebrates his victory in the clubs of Buenos Aires to Berlin.
By Will Holland (aka Quantic ) Cleret and Gyement finally found the third Anglo-Saxon Plattennerd , with a penchant for Latin grooves . The English producer , multi-instrumentalist and record lovers lived for some years in the Colombian Cali and returns this year with 59 tracks of the six- vinyl » The Original Sound of Cumbia " a true legacy of rare Cumbia tunes the years 1948-1979 . But Soundway is by no means a pure lovers label for obscure B-sides and long-lost sound jewels. Because the house always expanded its spectrum . In April , with " Batida " the first time a modern club music a solo artist appeared . Behind Batida plugged the Angolan- Portuguese DJ Mpula aka Pedro Coquenão , the 70 -year samples from Angola mixed with electronic club beats and Kuduro rape . To this end sought Batida samples of his favorite tunes, verwurschtelt them with synthetic bass lines and crunchy electro kicks and sent these riddims to MCs from Angola and Portugal. Thus, the first based on file sharing and sampling album has arisen for Soundway .
Strut Records Strut Records : You are still hungry

The heroes of the African Swinging Sixties and Seventies Roaring incorporated into modern studios new , however, is the recipe of the English label Strut Records. This happened in the case of Ethiopian jazz vibraphonist Mulatu Astatke , the Ghanaian Hiplife Lions Ebo Taylor or the Benin native voodoo - radio operators Orchestre Polyrhytmo . _ " Many of these old artists are still alive and we must use the time we have left to pick them up . Above all, they are still great musicians and they are still hungry for live gigs , "says label manager Quinton Scott. And exactly distinguish Strut in comparison to Analog Africa and Soundway . The label is flying the old gentlemen to Paris ( Orchestre Polyrhytmo ), London ( Mulatu Astatke ) or Berlin ( Ebo Taylor ) and gives a studio. But above all, organized Strut a band of young local enthusiasts , which not only provide the backing for an album production, but then also tour with the gray Afro - rockers through the world. There are, indeed always musicians who are on this very analog sound , but the biggest challenge is there , so not to deliver Scott a poor imitation of the legendary old recording .
It is precisely the " original " sound the fans expect . When Scott , the young British jazz radio operator Heliocentrics Mulatu Astatke brought together with , doubted some specialist Simpler to the analog studio recordings. _ "The Heliocentrics are purists , the sound is very clean but there was no sampling or other trickery , one hundred percent analog ," Scott assured . The choice Relatives of Ebo Taylor and the young stars of the Berlin Afrobeat Academy was a brilliant move . As the first collaboration, published in 2010 " Love And Death " , mainly new recordings of old Afrobeat numbers Taylors concentrated , breaks these days, appearing second disc »Appia Kwa Bridge " tracks. All six of the eight tracks are new compositions . And guest musician Taylor's age group , such as Tony Allen , Oghene Kologbo or Pax Nicholas afford him the Generational Clash Protect assistance. »Appia Kwa Bridge " is different from the compilations with no original recordings set to music time machine , but a living encounter several generations of musicians of different countries in the Ghanaian Hiplife - Darling . Recorded in the Berlin Love Lite studios in the Friedrichshain neighborhood.

Originally published by Lukasz [email protected]

How African Music is Winning the West

Joshua Bullock explores the immense impact newly digitised African music is having on the West.

As Western bands increasingly investigate the ever-expanding volume of releases and re-releases from the African continent, with the help of discerning European labels like Analog Africa, Soundway and Honest Jon’s, how long will it be before the way we are adapting these forms becomes parody?


Perhaps when we start getting it wrong. So many of these cross-cultural collaborations are just so damn right. From Damon Albarn’s African Express project that took dozens of British and African musicians by train on a UK-wide musical jamboree, via the Nairobi-London indie soundclash of Owiny Sigoma Band, to U.S hip-hop giant Nas sampling Ethiopian Jazz arranger Mulatu Astatke. BBC Radio 6 - Gilles Peterson’s weekly Saturday show in particular - continue the intrepid spirit of the late music journalist and DJ Charlie Gillett in bringing new sounds to new ears. The sleeve notes of Samy Redjeb’s Analog Africa compilations are a musicologist’s joy, full of archive photos and research into the life and times of the featured bands. 

Miles Cleret, founder of Soundway Records says, “Ultimately people love the music. They wouldn’t be interested in the cultural background if the tunes weren’t so good.” The more producers like Nicolas Jaar and Lefto loop and remix African jazz, soukous and highlife, the more hungry fans are to move upriver and discover more. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but watching a big ten-strong Afrobeat orchestra or an Ethiopian jazz quartet play live is the truest reflection of their spirit. This is music that comes from community and needs to be heard and understood as such, not just in the fragments Western artists are chopping and choosing to brilliant effect. Seeing Seun Kuti and his band, Egypt 80, at Lovebox festival in London was a mixed blessing: it was an intoxicating, total performance that in showmanship, energy, craft, volume and size blew away the mannered indie peacocks and electro acts that followed. As the wisest man in pop, Damon Albarn, has realised: if you can’t beat it, join it.

However, taking a large African band on tour is a visa-strewn minefield and significant financial risk, even for such stars of the festival circuit as Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou. Another concern is that African musicians receive proper royalties from their music. Samy Redjeb says that his label, Analog Africa, pays artists more than any European company ever offer him to license the songs from his label. He articulates a concern that African artists do not always receive the proper fruits from their labours: “At the end of the day there is almost nothing African bands can do to stop people using their tracks without paying their dues. Often there is no address for them to be contacted or there is confusion about who owns the copyright.”

The chaos of an industry that doesn’t act like one only serves to add to the romance of the music. Listening to the blind Malian guitar duo Amadou and Mariam, or the classical strains of kora player Toumani Diabaté conjures a world we know so little about. Our imagination is never fully checked by context, by celebrity or the intrusions of a tabloid press, or a snarky musical intelligentsia that wants the next thing before it’s even finished considering the current. These musicians are famous in their own right. They weren’t ‘found’ by us, they were always here, even if only now they’re being heralded by a global fanbase from Japan to Australia. The old Cuban musicians of the Buena Vista Social Club were once asked if they ever in their wildest dreams thought they’d become as famous as they had. They replied, yes of course, but they were only sorry it hadn’t happened sooner when they were young and could do something with the money.

This new music offers an alternative narrative to the hard reportage of civil war and famine that paints Africa as either teeming shantytown or antelope-flecked savannah. This is the music of the glorious in-between, with one foot in tradition and the other in the now. It evokes a subtler picture of African societies, where a youth in 70s Abidjan - capital of the Ivory Coast and the ‘Islamic Funk Belt’ of West Africa  - could be defined by wearing flares and stand-up collars as much as his tribe or religion. Watch the superb documentary Dolce Vita Africanato discover how the renowned Malian photographer Malick Sidibe documented a similar period of riotous expression in his country. See that nostalgia and suburban malaise are African experiences too.

Perhaps there will come a time when Africa’s musical styles become so influential that kids in Sheffield will be releasing Cameroonian Bikutsi mash-ups in the same way the rapper Baloji is channelling Tupac to describe the rape and suffering of the Congo.

Neal Cassady once said, “Life goes where the new forms are”. The incredible rise of African music in the digital age reflects a yearning for live performance and fresh sounds, as much as it marks a rejection of styles of mainstream pop and electronica that have become trapped in derivative retro cycles. As the software to produce music becomes simpler and anyone with a ripped copy of Logic and a half-decent microphone can program their own beats, the new arrivals on the web stream are invigorating. As the West delves deeper, more Afro-collaborations and fusion projects may go awry, their lustre tarnished by over-exposure, but this will be a triumph in itself. We’ll have articulated something musically we cannot politically, that true internationalism is not only inevitable, it is a joy.


fourthandmain.com 

Punk in Africa!

 

This immensly interesting documentary about the often overlooked punk scene in Southern Africa from the 1970s onward is now screening at various film festivals across the continent and in Europe.
Watch the trailer below and see the full list of screenings on the film website:

www.punkinafrica.co.za




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The striking story of a hidden, underground, even secret and banned movement. Bands with both black and white musicians broke the law. In the apartheid era, punk rock was comparable to worshipping the devil. Rediscover the real punk. Anarchy in SA.

While young people in the West started to free themselves from traditional authoritarian power relations in the early 1960s and to make the acquaintance of rock ‘n’ roll and later long hair and punk, in South Africa the institutionalised racism of Apartheid still existed. With the advent of punk music in the mid-1970s, for the first time there was a home-grown youth culture and an opportunity to resist oppressive regimes.

Punk in Africa tells the story of punk in South Africa and how it spread to Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Kenya and played a role there in the political struggle. We get to see the most important bands and the legendary venues where they played, but also the evolution of punk music and the influence it had on modern South African bands. In the wings of the many tumultuous concerts, the documentary tells an alternative history of South Africa in the last 40 years, a story unknown to many.

Programmer Note by Gertjan Zuilhof:

A special film that does not immediately look special. At first sight (but not at first hearing) you could think it is a skilled but ordinary music documentary. It provides a summary of a specific period (the 1970s in South Africa), lets people speak who played a role back then and shows clips of performances. A television documentary, you could say.

There are however several elements that make the film special. To start with - the music. If you are now fifty and were living in a town in South Africa thirty years ago, then you have never heard the music before and never seen the fragments before. The fragments of music are all unique and have been specially tracked down - not the stock material that so often represents this genre - and themselves provide enough reason to see the film.

You could conclude that the film is not primarily a music film. It is a committed political document. A belated pamphlet maybe. The anarchistic music in the film and the multiracial bands that play the music, were in fact banned under the apartheid regime. It was literally underground music.
Anyway, what really makes a film special is not how special the subject is (even though punk in apartheid South Africa was pretty special), but the passion of the filmmaker for his subject. And only then can you conclude: Punk in Africa rocks!

filmfestivalrotterdam.com

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“… bursting with the heyday of the multiracial punk scene … a loving emphasis on the surprising — and often overlooked — role that punk music played in Africa …” — NAT GEO MUSIC

“An interesting if accidental companion piece to recent docu hit ‘Searching for Sugar Man’ … ‘Punk in Africa’ chronicles the more overtly rebellious influence of punk music in that nation (and some neighboring ones) a few years later.” — Variety 

Lemi Ghariokwu - A Dynasty of Album Cover Art for Fela Kuti!

 written by  Lemi Ghariokwu, 
published on 4th October 2013 @ granta.com


As a youngster and aspiring artist in the early 1970s, I learnt a lot from attending art exhibitions and visiting private studios and galleries in Lagos. It was a ritual for me to flip through newspapers eagerly to check out the cartoon page where the artists reign supreme with their take on socio-political issues in the country. My other pastime was to check out the street sign-writers and their organic form of art. The minibuses in Lagos always had philosophical slogans written on them.


In Nigeria, everyday life is noted not so much for the abundance of technology as for the fact that so much of it does not function. The country’s political rulers are not satisfying the needs of the people and are interested primarily in enriching themselves. A new enemy has also arisen in Nigeria – insecurity has intensified due to kidnapping and terrorist extremism. Yet despite the despair, the underlying attitude has remained irrepressibly optimistic. In the last three decades or more, a couple of artists have started using the tools at their disposal to analyse political developments. Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was one major artist; with his Afrobeat music, he challenged the forces of repression and corruption in governance in the state of Nigeria. He suffered great consequences but never gave up the fight till his death.



In 1974, I earned Fela’s trust and friendship through my acquaintanceship with the journalist Babatunde Harrison. Fela had just experienced his first beating and incarceration by the police and this gruesome experience inspired the hit song ‘Alagbon Close’, which was the first cover I designed. Having listened ardently to recountings of the harrowing experience from the man himself and having been privy to the stages of the composition of the tune, the cover was a fait accompli. It actually started with a drawing of Fela I had in my portfolio prior to my chance meeting with ‘Tunde Harrison, which showed the musician dancing on a mishmash of mud and rubbish. The final design of ‘Alagbon Close’s’ cover showed Fela’s ‘Kalakuta Republic’ in the background standing solidly on the left and Alagbon Close jailhouse on the right, a broken chain leading from the walls of the jail, half of which is still attached to Fela’s left wrist as he dances triumphantly over a capsizing police patrol boat and is helped, in effect, by a prodigious whale.

 

The next two album covers for No Bread and Kalakuta Show followed the tow of Fela’s vitriolic statements on vinyl. No Bread was an elaborate oil painting; portraying a mélange of social ills plaguing a developing nation; the cover forespoke of the doom to come. This cover took the best of two weeks and a trip to ‘cloud nine’ to achieve. Fela had insisted I try out a concoction of igbo (marijuana) to ‘elevate’ my talent. Not wanting to let my great friend down, I tried the herb and the resultant effect was superb, but being a teetotaller and someone with a mind of his own, I learned to be myself and thereafter tune into the right frequency. Kalakuta Show is another oil painting, this time illustrating the arrogant sacking of the ‘Republic’ in another Fela-versus-Police drama, featuring a portrait of Fela with the smoking Kalakuta Republic in the background, while Fela, his aides and his radical lawyer are hotly pursued by a baton-wielding policeman!
My association and friendship with the maverick was very cordial. I was treated like a son, friend, adviser and comrade by the Afrobeat legend. I was a travelling companion, sharing the great ideology of Pan-Africanism on some of the trips across the West African coast. Between 1974 and 1993 I designed twenty-six album covers for his music career.

 

I designed the Yellow Fever cover in 1976. The song is an admonition to African women who are fond of using bleaching creams to lighten their dark skin tone, and I did use a model to express visually what Fela has orally illustrated in the song. Points of emphasis include the bad effect the bleach has on the face and bum. My life model was a girl named Kokor who was a member of the household at Kalakuta Republic. I decided it was going to be a straight-in-your-face image of misinformed African beauty. Fela had already expressed disgust at the belief that skin lightening enhances African beauty. I showcased a typical ‘offending’ cream in the top-left corner of my cover art. ‘Soyoyo Cream Skin Bleacher’ was actually my own creation. The word soyoyo is a Yoruba expression for ‘bright and glow’! I painted in the price tag of 40 naira which was high end for a cream, and yet so harmful to beauty and the psyche of African women. Fela reacted very positively when I submitted this cover for his approval and in his characteristic manner said glowingly ‘Goddamn!’, wittily adding ‘Lemi is a mutherfucker me-e-n!’ just to round up.

In 1976, the then-military government in Nigeria had instructed soldiers to horsewhip erring drivers on the highway. The soldiers carried out this order without impunity and with a fervour reminiscent of zombies. That was why, having been severally harassed by military personnel, Fela came up with the idea to compose ‘Zombie’. Everyone, including some military personnel from the nearby Albati Barracks, fell in love with the catchy rhythm and martial tempo, which galvanized the dancers, who wouldn’t let the song end. Fela’s saucy reprise of the Army Bugle call and horn riff got them jumping and whooping with the release of being able to mock oppressors they both feared and despised. The song became an anthem of protest for people, which was chanted under their breath anytime they felt oppressed by military personnel.

 

When the time came to do to create the cover art for this landmark song, I found myself unable to focus on the right idea initially. The breakthrough came right on time one Kalakuta morning just as Fela was asking how the sleeve was coming along. Tunde Kuboye, the photographer, film-maker, jazz musician husband of Fela’s niece, Frances, walked in with a bunch of his photographs taken at that year’s Independence Day military parade at Tafawa Balewa Square in central Lagos. With Tunde’s permission, I selected ten military images, and a few of Fela. I was set on making a graphic collage. Back in my studio I laid a cardboard mat on my drawing board and edited Tunde’s ten shots down to four. I was feeling like a shaman, and as I put them down, the pictures just dropped into a position reminiscent of an Ifa divination . . . subconsciously! Not wanting to take any chances, I fixed the pictures down with masking tape, then traced their position in pencil. I overlapped the photos and cut and pasted them down. Then, using a hard paintbrush and thick poster colour paint, I wrote, in freehand, the album title, Fela’s name and his band directly over the picture, outlining the result with a Rotring pen. Finally, I added the shadows.

The sleeve was an instant hit at Kalakuta, in Nigeria, Africa and around the world. It led new listeners to wonder what lay on the vinyl inside. For the initiated, it told the story of life under an oppressive military dictatorship – and what it takes to come through it feeling that you’re still somehow in command of your destiny.

 

Beasts Of No Nation (B.O.N.N.) was Fela’s attack on his jailers for an eighteen-month undeserved incarceration from a trumped-up currency trafficking charge. Smarting from his experience in jail, Fela throws his punches like an enraged prize-fighter. In typical Fela style, Beasts Of No Nation made the acronym BONN, which is a disguised reference to the once de facto capital city of West Germany and the days of Adolf Hitler’s Nazism.

The music is as powerful as it gets and beneath his knife-edge, cutting sarcasm, Fela’s voice rages. It would take a serious sleeve to convey that acid tone. I knew I had to depict the evils of South African apartheid, and the failures and hypocrisy of the United Nations. I made the delegates look like rats, and I portrayed the oppressors with animal’s horns and fangs; the slavering vampires of Margaret Thatcher, South Africa’s Prime Minister, P.W. Botha, Ronald Reagan and President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire cram the frame. The quote used on the top left of the cover art is from a speech by Botha, and among my beasts are Generals Mohammed Buhari and Babatunde Idiagbon, the men responsible for Fela’s 1984 jail stint. The images of Beasts of No Nation seethe with primal urges – greed, control, vengeance – and the spirit of defiance is embodied in the demonstrators waving a placard with a line from the song, ‘Human Rights Is Our Property’. The demonstrators wear Black Power sunglasses and their pink tracksuits pulsate with pastel against the sombre palette of their enemies. Fela’s costume is the same exuberant pink, and their gestures are echoed in his triumphant Black Power salute, as he faces them across the frame, while the offending judge cowers at his feet.

Fela decided to make an incursion into the various untouchable aspects of our society. He took advantage of the sweet and seductive power of those things that are looked upon as taboo and he invited Nigeria to the debate, and I stand with resoluteness behind him to this day.

 

Lemi Ghariokwu illustrated ‘Teju Cole’s Water has no Enemy’from Granta 124: Travel. See his illustration and read an excerpt from the piece here.

All images courtesy of Lemi Ghariokwu

From Ghana: The Jewels & Ghanaian highlife

 

Unfortunately, I cannot find any information about "The Jewels", 

but any interesting brief history of highlife music in Ghana ...

 

A little bit of blues, swing, rhythm and blues and African rhythms: So the style of music can sound Highlife from Ghana. Or even completely different: A pinch of samba, a touch of European church music, mixed with sea shanties - but also because the Ghanaian rhythms not missing. Because they are the common denominator of highlife music that is so diverse that it is difficult to characterize.
The roots of the high life in the bustling capital city of Accra in the late 19th Century, when Ghana is still a colony of Great Britain. Especially on the coast meet different cultures. This leads also to a musical melting pot of music from around the world mixed with indigenous sounds and rhythms.
Within the country develop at the beginning of the 20th Century, two different forms of this genre: the high life of the rich and the high life in the bush.
On the coast of Ghana is dancing the black and white elite to dance orchestra Highlife: Africanized foxtrot, waltz and ragtime, played by large string and brass bands. Dance to the rich in tails, top hat and much pomp.
Meanwhile produced within the country of the guitar band highlife. Especially in the simple style of this instrument differs from the elite: The harp lute Seprewa and later the guitar shape this music - and percussion instruments.
The signs of the beginnings: The band "Sam's Trio," which also "Kumasi Trio" was called. As early as 1928 they are in London in a studio and record the song "Yaa Amponsah" on. To date, this structure can be found in almost every highlife number.
Although so many Western influences collide in this music, highlife, after independence in 1957 Ghana's national music and also has political value: The president often takes a whole orchestra with him on his trip abroad.
As it rumbles in the 80s in Ghana - corruption and arbitrariness determine the policy, the economy is declining - breaks the music industry. More and more musicians wander off: Many to Germany, where highlife, funk and rock fused with the so-called Burger-highlife is. Or to Canada, there to wait an enthusiastic audience and a liberal working environment.

srf.ch 

moreover, ... I found an interesting brief history of highlife music in Ghana by John Collins

@bapmaf.com