Sekouba “Bambino” Diabate got his name because he started singing with the famous Guinean group, Bembeya Jazz National, at the tender age of 17. This was a group of old guys by the mid-1970s and he was the nouveau talent, ie the little brat that the old-school members would make fun of. 30 years have passed and he’s still known as the baby/Bambino.

His last album, Sinikan, got a lot of attention, both in Africa and abroad. Well produced thanks to the studio work of some of Salif Keita’s team and well advertised/distributed, Sinikan was seen as an album that could finally get Guinean music on the map in Western markets. I’m not actually sure how well it sold abroad but regardless Sekouba is now well-known and seems set to rise in popularity.

He has that new-sound West Africa meets traditional and yet he stays true to his Mandingo/Guinean musical roots. While he’s a little heavy on the synth drums and casio sounds at times, his voice, the great chanting backup vocals and wonderful percussion more than save the music.

Here’s my favourite track off Sinikan (and no, it’s not “Fatou”) plus another tune from an earlier album that caught my ear on the Guinea Vibrations compilation.

And hey, since we now have some bandwidth to spare I’ll throw up another track off that compilation: some catchy Guinean dance music by another good traditional mandingo + pop fusion musician, Baba Djan. It’s Hallowe’en and I get the day-off tomorrow so may as well have something to move to tonight.

Sekouba Bambino – Gnangnini
Sekouba Bambino – Acanadia
Baba Djan – Kankan

After yesterday’s sweat-stained pop fest I think we should take a breath of fresh South African acoustic to change it up a bit.

A few posts ago I mentioned seeing Dave Matthews looking really timid beside the salsa kings, the Orchestra Baobab, at a concert in Dakar. Did you know he was South African? I didn’t until today to be honest. I also didn’t know that Vusi Mahlasela is signed to his label… and so it goes.

Despite this connection my educated guess is that Vusi and Dave didn’t really share the same childhood. Vusi Mahlasela grew up in a township outside Pretoria, the capital of apartheid South Africa. He started his musical career playing a home-made tin can and fishing wire guitar, eventually emerging as one of South Africa’s most famous musical artists and a major revolutionary voice against the white apartheid governement.

What’s interesting about Vusi and many, many other South African revolutionaries is that they didn’t hold a grudge. When apartheid finally fell during the 1990s he along with powerful voices like Nelson Mandela were preaching reconciliation and forgiveness instead of bitter revenge. Vusi was both a revolutionary and a post-apartheid pacifist. Without respected artists like Vusi Mahlasela South Africa could very well have decended into brutal civil war, not only between whites and blacks but also between rival southern African tribes vying for control of the new nation. For these reasons I really respect him.

I respect his music, too. No matter how popular he gets or how many of you already know him he deserves a post. Two songs today: one from his wonderful Live at the Bassline album and another track off Wisdom of Forgiveness. The first track is my favourite version of a song about Mandela’s return after years in prison. The latter track features some beautiful mbube singing found in a lot of Vusi’s music.

ps- unfortunately the Bassline is now closed. Or at least it was last time I was in Jo’burg. A great shame, that.

Vusi Mahlasela & Louis Mhlanga – When He Comes Back (Live)
Vusi Mahlasela – Emigodini

Today we’re going to have our first guest posting.

Ben Curtis: AP Photo Editor for West Africa, good friend and one-time roommate. He’s traveled all around Africa from the palms of Zanzibar to the mortars of Liberia. Good guy, funny accent.

See, the kids here are into their own modern pop. They laugh at the old school much like kids back in the States laugh at their dads for listening to Steely Dan. So without further ado, here’s Ben with a pop-filled contemporary night-club hit straight from the depths of small-town Sierra Leone…

In the lexicon of entertainment hotspots throughout the world, the remote diamond-mining town of Koidu in eastern Sierra Leone, near the Guinean border, is unlikely to feature all that highly.

But it was there in June that I found myself for a few days with a colleague and in the course of our work there, ended up at one of the hottest nightclubs I have ever been to. Hot in every way.

The place was small and dark with no air-conditioning, no ventilation, no windows, and was packed with about a hundred Sierra Leoneans flailing about on the packed dancefloor as their condensed sweat ran down the walls of the sauna-like room. Within five minutes in that heat and humidity every item of clothing we were wearing, including our shoes, was drenched in sweat.

But we stayed. As oppressive as the heat was, the place rocked. The dancefloor was pounding with a mixture of young guys and girls out to lift themselves up from the desperation of the town, diamond dealers, traders, and a few shady-looking white “businessmen” types standing in the corner looking very out of place indeed. The common bond between all was the desire to dance ourselves stupid.

During my stay in Sierra Leone, all the nightclubs and radio stations were playing this song, and when the DJ put it on, the whole place was completely jumping. Sadly I never found out the name of it, or who it was by, but when I got back to Freetown I managed to find a copy on a homemade, unmarked CD in the streetmarket. I decided to call it “Tell me if you want me to go” based on the chorus.

If you want a feel of the area, I have a photo gallery called “Sierra Leone Diamonds” on my website – www.bpcurtis.com

-Ben

Tell Me If You Want Me To Go

I managed to forget that it was one of my best friends’ 25th birthday on Monday. To make it up to her here’s a post that I’m sure she’ll love. Meg, sama xarit, je te dédie ce poste dans l’espoir que tu le liras…

I was driving home yesterday and saw a guy pushing a wheelbarrow filled with coconuts wearing a 50-cent t-shirt. Something was different. 50-cent was there looking at me all faux-ghetto but underneath his picture it said “50 CFA” – CFA is the local currency in Senegal and 50 CFA is worth about 8-cents US. I laughed so hard I almost fell off my scooter.

In honour of this wonderful t-shirt (and Meg) I thought I’d post one of the many cheesy Wolof covers of 50-cent’s repertoire. Here’s mbalax and Senegalese RnB star Viviane (the arguably sexy sister of Youssou N’Dour, no less) with PBS Radikal on a track called “Yaay Baign”, which doesn’t mean P.I.M.P. in Wolof.

We’ve also had requests for Daara J. Since I’m posting Senegalese rap anyway I’ll tack on my favourite track by this talented Dakar hiphop group off their 2003 album, Boomerang.

ps- that picture isn’t of the 50 CFA guy. I took it about 2 years ago when I first got to Dakar.

Viviane & PBS Radikal – Yaay Baign
Daara J – Boomerang

I promised some more grunting funk today, so here it is. Fresh-off the 8th volume of the popular Ethiopiques series, Swinging Addis, here’s Ethiopia’s Alemayehu Eshete sounding like he’s too-hot-can-you-handle-the-funk?

Volume 9 of the Ethiopiques series is devoted entirely to the man. He’s a big deal in Ethiopia or at least he was during 60s and 70s, otherwise known as the golden age of Ethiopian pop. People call him Ethiopia’s answer to James Brown and I wouldn’t disagree. Apparently he preferred Elvis over James Brown, but we’re lucky that the latter king influenced his music far more.

I’ve seen a few blogs post tracks off Ethiopiques albums lately but I thought I’d add a little context to the music. In the late 60s and early 70s the emperor of Ethiopia, Ras Tafari Makonnen aka Haile Sellassie, was at his peak. One of his many reforms was to relax state regulations that limited music sold and broadcast to “traditional” forms. This created a mini-boom in new Ethiopian pop music. The radios started putting black American music on heavy rotation and a whole generation of aspiring Western-style pop/soul/funk musicians was born.

I’ve also included another Ethiopian classic soul-funk tune by the Alemayno Eshirtay Group. I don’t know much about this tune other than it comes from the same era and I like it. Feel free to fill in the blanks with a comment.

Alemayno Eshirtay – Love is Love
Alemayehu Eschete – Tchero Adari Nègn (I Get By On My Own)

I started this site out with some old-school West African pop rock. We’re way overdue for some more.

The Super Eagles from The Gambia (yes, the “The” is officially part of the country’s name) aren’t really a rock band. They’re more accurately a pop, soul, afrocuban, rumba, highlife and rock group from the jubilant West African 60s. The song I’ll feature today, however, could be summed up like this:

“There’s an oddity called Love’s a real thing that attempts to blend Beatles and Cream guitar riffs and reminds me of garage bands I was in as a teenager.” (ref)

Perfect.

The second song is an obscure 11-minute bit off a 1976 Malian 45. (Anyone have the B-Side, “Wanri”?) It’s by Moussa Dombia and his sister? wife? Mimi, and I promise that this isn’t the same Moussa Dombia aka Tiken Jah Fakoly. I love the soul grunts in this tune; they remind me of an Ethiopian funk tune that I might have to post tomorrow. And what’s with the freak-out at the 8th minute? Anyone understand Bambara? Classic.

You can thank one of our readers, sufi, for kindly passing these tracks my way. Both can be found on a compilation called “World Psychedelic Classics Volume 3: Psychedelic Sounds from West Africa”. Who knows where you can buy that one, but The Super Eagles track can also be found on a compilation of their music on Retroafric called Senegambian Sensation.

Super Eagles – Love’s a Real Thing
Moussa Dombia – Keleya (Keleya is a small region in Mali)

Highlife is synonomous with Ghana’s first years of independence. Like many other Africans, Ghanaians rallied around a musical genre in an effort to establish a new and unique identity after the fall of colonialism. Though contemporary highlife sounds nothing like the original highlife from the 1920s through 50s, the music has remained the unofficial national sound for decades.

Highlife originally had more of a big band sound as developed by the “King of Highlife”, ET Mensah. It mixed popular styles from the 20s through 40s like European foxtrot and Carribean kaiso with local rhythms and instruments. As it evolved with the trends and times highlife took on a more afro-cuban, soukous and soul sound, with the guitar increasingly taking the spotlight off the horn sections.

By the 70s “guitar band highlife” was the dominant form of the music. In 1973 at Tema’s Talk of the Town Hotel in Accra the band Sweet Talks was formed. It would prove to be the starting point for a number of future guitar highlife stars, among them the fast guitar star, Eric Agyeman.

In 1978 Agyeman released his classic album Highlife Safari. It would go down as one of the classics of the guitar band highlife genre.

Highlife has evolved since Agyeman but the soulful, simple sound of 70s highlife remains my favourite form of the music. Here’s a sample off Agyeman’s classic.

ps- I’m on the lookout for some ET Mensah and the Tempos. If you have any or know where I could find a good recording please let me know.

Eric Agyeman – Nea abe beto

Big thanks to all of you who have donated so far. We’re almost there, having already collected over half of what we need to get enough bandwidth and space to last us through 2005.

Geoffrey Oryema is pretty famous now and, to be honest, this made me hesitate a bit when I picked him for today. A lot of you may already know him but his first album, Exile, is still one of my favourites and merits at least a post.

The guy’s life story merits at least a post, too. Born and raised in Uganda, he had to flee the country in the trunk of a friend’s car in 1977 when he was 24. Up until then he had lived a privileged life by Ugandan standards since his father was a respected and powerful police chief who later went on to become the Minister of Natural Resources for the national government. Oryema is also a member of Uganda’s “warrior king” tribe and/or ethnicity, the Acholi, who had traditionally ruled much of what is now modern day Uganda for centuries.

Unfortunately, like so many others, his father was murdered in a mysterious crash most likely caused by everyone’s favourite dead African dictator, Idi Amin. Uganda was a mess and anti-Acholi sentiment was rife. When his father was killed Oryema had no other choice but to send himself into exile.

He’s still living in “exile” today, having been in Normandy since 1989. The French apparently once called him “Africa’s answer to Leonard Cohen.” I’m not so sure about that one, but regardless his music is beautiful, intelligent and often unique. This isn’t so surprising since Oryema grew-up surrounded by a very artsy family who exposed to him the riches of Ugandan art, music and theatre.

Geoffrey Oryema – Piri wango iya

Well, it’s October 22nd and you jags have managed to whip through about 39GB of 40GB available transfer bandwidth in a touch over 3 weeks. Looks like we’re going to have to make some changes if we’re going keep things up and running.

I want to try and raise $150-200 so that we can upgrade this site to 80GB transfer per month with 1.5GB storage. That’ll let me post 2-3 songs daily instead of 1 song Monday to Friday, keep a larger archive with more active song links, encode at good bit rates instead of 128kbps and generally not stress about bandwidth.

You’ll notice there’s a new donate button on the site at the top-right of every page. By clicking on it you can make easy and secure payments via Paypal.

If you can afford any kind of donation – even $1 to $5 would do – I’d greatly appreciate it. All donations will go towards a web hosting account upgrade. Any donations that push us over the $150-200 target will go straight into new music purchases. That way everyone wins.

I have no plans to include any advertising on this site and would rather, if anything, make it a community effort to expand the site. I also have no plans to make this a pay site. I love doing this and want to keep it open for everyone to enjoy.

So here’s to hoping that a generous few with some spare change can help me out a bit. The site will keep running in some form regardless of donations but how much bigger and better we get is up to you, the readers.

-Matt

The acoustic guitar trend continues…

Thanks to all those who replied to my request for some S.E. Rogie. Special thanks to Olivier for sending me a full album and the Avocado Kid for passing me a great tune that I’ll post here today. I wanted some Rogie because I’ve been really into palmwine guitar lately. See my post a couple of days ago about Palmwine Highlife.

Sooliman Rogie may be the most well-known artist from Sierra Leone in the 80s. He’s the kind of guy who recorded a song called “Dead Men Don’t Smoke Marijuana” just months before his own death in ‘94. Already we like him. He plays a mellow, fine guitar that would go quite well with a calabash of palm wine and some of that famous Sierra Leonian greenery.

From his 1975 debut album titled “African Lady” here’s some S. E. Rogie to finish up that bandwidth.

ps – This song is especially appropriate today because my own lovely African Lady just got back into town. Missed you, K.

S. E. Rogie – African Lady