Various Artists - Nigeria Special: Volume 2: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds & Nigerian Blues 1970-1976
SKU
05--SOUNDWAY020
Excellently packaged and annotated, this collects unbelievably rare material, none of which apparently has ever been reissued before!
" When I first started listening to African pop music, I tended to make a lot of assumptions. One of the most misguided was that I assumed the amount of stuff I'd like would be manageable. I now know how wrong that was-- and that's a positive. I also figured that highlife would be something really distinct, a highly specific sound that was easy to describe. It turns out it's more like rock-- rock music isn't any one thing. It's more of an umbrella term to blanket a group of related styles, and so it is with highlife as well. Highlife has its roots in the coastal towns of modern Ghana, where it developed in the early 20th century as a fusion of calypso, sailors' songs, palm-wine guitar music from Sierra Leone and Liberia, rhythms from both inland and across the ocean in the Caribbean, and European harmonic concepts. As it caught on, it became acquisitive, adding horn arrangements indebted to European dance bands and American jazz, rebuilding first around the electric guitar and then around synthesizers and drums machines a couple of decades later. It moved to the rest of English-speaking West Africa, absorbed the sensibilities of R&B and funk, fragmented into subgenres, and survives today as a powerful thread tying together generations of musicians. Soundway's second Nigeria Special volume homes in on the early 1970s and gives us a glimpse of what highlife sounded like in Africa's most populous nation during that period. It attempts to do it all in one disc stuffed with 20 tracks (or three LPs with 22). Like 2008's first volume, it digs deep, touching on artists familiar to those who have kept up with the wave of Afro sound compilations and reissues over the past few years, while locating a huge trove of obscurities. The vibe across most of the comp is laid-back and confident, with plenty of harmony vocals, horns, and buoyant rhythms. And then, of course, there are the guitars-- the cycling, fluid lines that underpin virtually every song. Highlife guitar styles vary considerably from player to player, but they all seem to have constant motion in common. The ragged, angular lines of Fidel Sax Bateke & the Voices of Darkness' "Motako" sound dissimilar to the mellow-toned, interlocking parts that snake around the cowbell and conga of Fubura Sekibo's "Psychedelic Baby", but they serve a similar function-- pushing the music forward and building a lush harmonic bed for the vocal harmonies and horns. For listeners looking for a bit more influence from funk and Afrobeat, they can get that from Tunji Oyelana & the Benders, whose "Iwo Ko la Dami" clearly bears the stamp of Fela Kuti's Afrobeat in its muted guitars, stabbing horn arrangement, and fluttering, jazzy drum part. "Shango Oba Onina" by Black's Zenith is short and punchy, with crashing horns, a taut vocal, and catchy rhythm section, and the Don Isaac Ezekiel Combination get funky with the Lord's Prayer, literally setting it to music. The strangest cuts that stretch furthest outside what I've come to think of as highlife's malleable boundaries are "Totobiroko (Ogbele)", by Twins Seven-Seven & His Golden Cabretas, which loads up a rampaging beat with talking drum and vibraphone to back a chanting vocal, and Joy Nwoso & Dan Satch's "Egwo Umu Agbogho", which wraps up the CD version of the compilation with a straight-enough highlife arrangement over which Nwoso wails operatically in an incredible display of vocal virtuosity. For listeners who haven't yet explored beyond some of the funkier, more overtly Western-influenced styles of African music, Nigeria Special, Vol. 2 offers a fine selection of 70s highlife that can help point toward new avenues of exploration, while offering a handful of selections that provide easy entry points. In fact, it somewhat mirrors the way I got into highlife myself, gradually letting go of the funk and soul elements that helped me get into vintage African pop to begin with. If you're already into highlife, this set provides a wealth of welcome surprises, with plenty of information to help you wrap your head around where all this stuff has been hiding."-Joe Tangari/Pitchfork - March 12, 2010