Afrobeat 121 Items

In 1971 two songs were released in Trinidad & Tobago that represented completely new directions in the musical and lyrical expression of Trinidad's place in the diaspora, Indian on one hand and African on the other. Nanny & Nana by Sundar Popo and “Blow 'Way” by Lancelot Layne were revolutionary and ground breaking and spawned two distinctly new genres in Trinidad & Tobago music – Chutney music in the case of Sundar Popo and Rapso, in Lance's case. Brother Resistance calls Lancelot Layne the father of Rapso music.
During the early 1970s Lance recorded at least a dozen startlingly original songs including “Blow 'Wa”y, “Afro'Dadian”, “Bringing' Off”, “Dat Is Horros” and “Kaiso For Mout' Band”. Each one expanding his talent for musical arrangements and dramatic counterpoint with chorus responses and vocal variation. He enlisted musicians, each exciting and pioneering in their own right, breaking ground in the post 1970 cultural revolution: calypso/jazz pianist, Clive Zanda; composer, guitarist, singer and flautist, Andre Tanker; Mau Mau Drummers including the young Jah Jah Onilu, Mansa Musa Drummers; vocalists, including Ann Marie Innis and Ella Andall.
The result is exciting, confident and musically ground-breaking. Until his death in 1990 he kept commenting and educating T&T'ssociety with songs like Get Off The Radio, Kamboulay, Jambalasie Dance and Strike Squad.
This release is pressed on 180-gram virgin vinyl and contains an additional 45RPM single. Everything is housed in a deluxe gatefold sleeve with 20-page booklet (8.2” x 8.2”) with extensive liner notes by Lancelot's daughter, Niasha Layne-Forde, and Christopher Laird. Cover and booklet artwork were created by famous Scottish painter, Peter Doig, one of the most renowned living figurative painters who settled in Trinidad since 2002.

The third international release by the legendary Malian singer and guitarist is many fan’s favourite. ‘The Source’ established Ali Farka Touré on the international stage and paved the way for his legendary collaboration with Ry Cooder on the GRAMMY award winning album ‘Talking Timbuktu’.
Available for the first time on vinyl, the album has been re-mixed from the original master tapes and includes a previously unreleased track from the same sessions. The album is presented in a gatefold sleeve containing double 180g vinyl and large format 28 page booklet with lyrics.
‘The Source’ features Farka Touré’s first recordings with his home town band Group Asco, with vocalist Afel Bocoum and percussionists Hamma Sankare (calabash)
and Oumar Touré (congas). Touré’s trademark acoustic and electric guitar (as well his njarka violin) playing are highlighted on some of his best loved and most sophisticated compositions.
The father of the desert blues unleashes a set of driving small group performances, intimate love songs, mesmerising guitar solos and two unique duets with the great American bluesman Taj Mahal.

Limited edition of 250 copies only!
Only one copy per customer!
Access to groovy, funkin', rockin', psychedelic, revolutionary (etc.) African music as we've grown to like it at Paris DJs was not for everyone before the internet age. For Paris DJs co-founder Loik, it began in the early 80s when he met with a former Fela Kuti horn player, who introduced him to Afrobeat. When Loik arrived at Radio Nova in 1986 (he was radio programmer there between 1987 and 1997), he then discovered marvels of African Music (other than Fela), through the radio's vast record collection, which soon led to the word-famous "La Sono Mondiale" concept.
At the same time, Grant Phabao, in his late teens, discovered Congolese music through friends from Zaire. He gets access to Afrobeat in the mid-90s with a Fela Kuti CD gathering the "Zombie" and "He Miss Road" albums, which long-time friend Djouls brought back from his diggin' sessions in Paris. Many friends ripped and burned that CD, for sure. Then the legendary Daktaris album happened on Desco Records in 1998, followed by the beginning of the Antibalas, the Comet Records & Strut Records compilations in 2000, and soon after Soundway Records… the rest is history but that's roughly how African Music started for us at Paris DJs.
At this point we met online with Calumbinho on the Soulseek P2P network. Such a mind-bending experience… The man was sharing hundreds of full albums, all sorted by country, and had music from every corner of 1960s/70s/80s Africa! We asked for advice, he listed 50 records to begin with! All those records, digital files, influences & experience gathered together gave birth in 2006 to a series of mixes on the Paris DJs podcast, "African Mashed Potato Popcorn", blending old and new African music from all over the world. It was an instant smash, DJs from all over the world reaching out asking us to keep on focusing on this amazing music coming from Africa (or inspired by music from Africa).
Around that time, the Paris DJs crew met with musicians from Antibalas (Martín Perna, Duke Amayo / USA), and from the Poets Of Rhythm/Karl Hector bands (Ben Abarbanel-Wolff, Jan Whitefield / Germany). They had all played with Fela Kuti's guitar player Oghene Kologbo by then. The German guys had even started a band with him, the Afrobeat Academy, releasing an album together in 2007. Little did we know that from this point on, Kologbo and African music would grow to become a very important part of our lives.
We started collaborating with Samy Ben Redjeb from Analog Africa, Miles Cleret from Soundway or Quantic from Tru Thoughts, among many others very influential record collectors, for some exclusive mixes of rare afro/latin music on the Paris DJs podcast. In 2009 we co-organized the first Ebo Taylor show in Europe, with German musicians from the Afrobeat Academy/Whitefield Brothers/Jimi Tenor crew backing him along with Kologbo. Soon we helped open the Superfly Record Store and got our hands (and ears) on many rare, original African Records. Loik started recording Kologbo's second solo album "Africa Is The Future" (featuring Tony Allen and Pat Thomas!), Grant Phabao was producing his first afrofunk tunes, and all this new music was damn funky…
Phabao went on a trip to Benin and Ghana, where he ended up hooking up with Ben Abarbanel-Wolff, who was recording with Ebo Taylor and Pat Thomas there. After a two-year period during which Grant Phabao and Djouls partnered with famous Irish-born, Paris-based producer Doctor L, and released with Cameroonian artist Franck Biyong no less than 16 digital albums and conceptual compilations, the Paris DJs label was born in 2012, with the addition of poster artist Ben Hito to the gang.
Five compilations in the "Tropical Grooves & Afrofunk International" series were released, with artists from all over the world, featuring the first tracks from the Grant Phabao Afrofunk Arkestra project, with Grant Phabao at the controls and many guests from the now global African music scene adding their own, original touch. Most of those were compiled in the "Massive Hits From the Grant Phabao Factory" LP in 2015.
It was a long read, many years of learning and sharing back, but we wanted to tell how African music slowly but surely infiltrated its way into Paris DJs' daily life, which led to the Kologbo LP being released at the end of 2017, and to this Grant Phabao Afrofunk LP to be released june 2018, featuring 20 guests among which Tony Allen, Oghene Kologbo, Sandra Nkaké, RacecaR, members of Antibalas, The Breakestra, Brownout, Fela Kuti's Egypt 80, Jungle Fire, Les Frères Smith, Ebo Taylor's Afrobeat Academy, Osemako… coming from Paris, Berlin, Lagos, Washington, Austin or Los Angeles!

Anthology of Zamrock musician Mike Nyoni’s funky, psych-rock and folkloric 1970s recordings Zambian guitarist and singer/songwriter Mike Nyoni’s music is Zamrock only because he came of age during the countryís rock revolution. He preferred wah-wah to fuzz guitar, James Brown to Jimi Hendrix. His 70s recordings - often politically charged, and ranging from despondent to exuberant - are amongst the funkiest on the African continent. He was also one of the only Zamrock musicians to see his music contemporaneously issued in Europe. This anthology collates works from his three 70s LPs - his first, with the Born Free band, and his two solo albums Kawalala and I Can’t Understand You - and presents a singular Zambian musician on par with celebrated artists Rikki Ililonga, Keith Mlevhu and Paul Ngozi.

No one had been through those doors in years. Unchanged, seemingly untouched, just a Guard watching over it, one wondered whether the place would ever see the light of day again. Built in the 70s by Scotch, there were only twenty such places in the entire world. Twenty studios, all identical. Most had undergone a digital makeover in the 80s, but not this one; situated in Lomé, this studio had stayed true to its original form. Silent and uninhabited but waiting for one thing, and one thing only: for the sacred fire to be lit once again. That of the Togolese Recording Office, is studio OTODI for those in the know. Through thick layers of dust, the console was vibrating still, impatient to be turned on and spurt out the sound so unique to analog. That sound is what Peter Solo and his band Vaudou Game came to seek out.
The original vibrations of Lomé’s sound, resonating within the studio space, an undercurrent pulsing within the walls, the floor, and the entire atmosphere. A presence at once electrical and mystical sourced through the amps that had never really gone cold, despite the deep sleep that they had been forced into. In taking over the studio’s 3000 square feet, enough to house a full orchestra, Vaudou Game had the space necessary to conjure the spirits of voodoo, those very spirits who watch over men and nature, and with whom Peter converses every day.
For the most authentic of frequencies to fully imbibe this third album, Peter Solo entrusted the rhythmic section to a Togolese bass and drum duo, putting the groove in the expert hands of those versed in feeling and a type of musicianship that you can’t learn in any school. This was also a way to put OTODI on the path of a more heavily hued funk sound, the backbone of which maintains flexibility and agility when moving over to highlife, straightens out when enhanced with frequent guest Roger Damawuzan’s James Brown type screams, and softens when making the way for strings. Snaking and undulating when a chorus of Togolese women takes over, guiding it towards a slow, hypnotic trance. Up until now, Vaudou Game had maintained their connection to Togo from their base in France. This time, recording the entire album in Lomé at OTODI with local musicians, Peter Solo drew the voodoo fluid directly from the source, once again using only Togolese scales to make his guitar sing, his strings acting as channels between listeners and deities…

In 1972, Orchestre Abass released two incredible singles on Polydor. These records - featuring Samarin Banza, Haka Dunia and other afrofunk masterpieces - were powerful enough to knock any music head out, but it wasn’t until the discovery of some unreleased material by the band that the seeds for this project were planted.

All the music was licensed directly from the various composers of these songs. The vinyl is pressed on 180 High Quality Virgin Vinyl and the gatefold contains previously unseen pictures and a detailed biography of the might band.

2023 Repress.
Hive Mind Records are proud to present the 2023 repress of Colours of the Night, the final studio recordings of deep, hypnotic Gnawa trance music from the late, great Maalem Mahmoud Gania.

The landmark recordings saw their first release outside of Morocco in September 2017 as a double LP through Hive Mind Records, however the album soon sold out and has since been commanding high prices on the collectors market. We are delighted to once again work with the Gania family to bring you this repress. Colours of the Night is his first solo recording to receive a vinyl release.

Maalem Mahmoud Gania was one of Morocco's most famous Gnawa musicians. Gnawa is a musical and spiritual tradition originating in sub-Saharan Africa that has survived as a subculture within Moroccan society for centuries. The roots of the blues can be heard in its hypnotic rhythms.

Born in 1951 and brought up in the coastal city of Essaouira, Mahmoud was raised in one of the country's great Gnawa families. A well-respected singer and master guimbri player renowned for his command of the Gnawa songbook, he became one of Morocco's most prolific recording musicians. From the 1970s until his death in 2015 he released numerous albums for a variety of local labels including Tichkaphone, La Voix El Maaraf and Sonya Disques, as well as recording with Western musicians such as Pharoah Sanders, Peter Brotzmann, and most recently James Holden and Floating Points. The original recordings have been remastered for vinyl by Julian Tardo at Church Road Studios, and the sleeve features the beautiful portrait photography of Nicolas Diop.'

Players:
Maalem Mahmoud Gania: guimbri & lead vocal
Chorus and qraqebs: Karima El Filali, Asmae Hamzaoui, Chaimae Lofti, Hamza Gania, Ahmed Elbnoua, Mehdi Mnouer, Abdellah Malibo and Soufiane Aghmam.

An explosive
compilation highlighting the era when funk and disco sounds
began to infiltrate Cameroon's Makossa style. The beat that
holds everything together originate's from the Sawa people's
rhythms. When these rhythms collided with merengue, high-life,
Congolese rumba, and, later, funk and disco, modern Makossa was
born. Makossa, the beat that long before football, managed to
unify the whole of Cameroon. Some of the greatest Makossa hits
incorporated the electrifying guitars and tight grooves of
funk, while others were laced with cosmic synth flourishes.
However, most of this music's vibe came down to the bass, and
'Pop Makossa' demonstrates why many Cameroonian bass players
are among the most revered in the world.

6 rare and almost forgotten benga tracks from Kenya including edits by Nik Weston, Jaakko Eino Kalevi and Africaine 808!

Inculding a 16 page printed silkscreen magazine!

FLEE is a collective of dedicated afro-diggers, driven by the enthusiasm to find and preserve semi-forgotten genres. For their first release they focused on an old Kenyan music genre called “Benga”. The record will be completed by a printed silkscreen magazine retracing the history of the genre, which will feature original archive pictures, great authors from the region, such as Emmanuel Mwenda, as well as the writer and singer of the eclectic Kenyan Band, Yellow Light Machine, Ondiso Madete. This vinyl compiles six rare and for some unreleased benga tracks, edited by contemporary artists (Nik Weston aka Mukat, Jaakko Eino Kalevi and Africaine 808), with the aim of approaching this genre with an innovative perspective, transcending simple nostalgia.

Only 200 copies of this first issue!

Vinyl close to NM. Cover with slightly bumped corner

By the mid-1970s, the Southern African nation known as the Republic of Zambia had fallen on hard times. Though the country’s first president Kenneth Kaunda had thrown off the yoke of British colonialism, the new federation found itself under his self-imposed, autocratic rule. Conflict loomed on all sides of this landlocked nation. Kaunda protected Zambia from war, but his country descended into isolation and poverty. This is the environment in which the ’70s rock revolution that has come to be known as Zamrock flourished. Fuzz guitars were commonplace, as were driving rhythms as influenced by James Brown’s funk as Jimi Hendrix’s rock predominated. Musical themes, mainly sung in the country’s constitutional language, English, were often bleak. In present day Zambia, Zamrock markers were few. Only a small number of the original Zamrock godfathers that remained in the country survived through the late ’90s. Aids decimated this country, and uncontrollable inflation forced the Zambian rockers that could afford to flee into something resembling exile. This was not a likely scene to survive - but it did. Welcome To Zamrock!, presented in two volumes, is an overview of its most beloved ensembles, and a trace of its arc from its ascension, to its fall, to its resurgence.

Analog Africa are proud to present the 27th release of their Analog Africa Series. A fantastic, hypnotic and funky compilation from the Dur-Dur Band of Somalia that comes out on a Triple LP.

When Analog Africa founder Samy Ben Redjeb arrived in Mogadishu in November of 2016, he was informed by his host that he would have to be accompanied at all times by an armed escort while in the country. The next morning, a neighbour and former security guard put on a military uniform, borrowed an AK-47 from somewhere and escorted him to Via Roma, an historical street in the heart of Hamar-Weyne, the city’s oldest district. Although previous Analog Africa releases have demonstrated a willingness to go more than the extra air-mile to track down the stories behind the music, the trip to Mogadishu was a musical journey of a different kind. It was the culmination of an odyssey that had started many years earlier.

In 2007 John Beadle, a Milwaukee-based musicologist and owner of the much loved Likembe blog, uploaded a cassette he had been handed twenty years earlier by a Somalian student. The post was titled ‘Mystery Somali Funk’ and it was, in Samy’s own words, “some of the deepest funk ever recorded.” The cassette seemed to credit these dense, sonorous tunes to the legendary Iftin Band. But initial contact with Iftin’s lead singer suggested that the ‘mystery funk’ may have actually been the work of their chief rival, Dur-Dur, a young band from the 80s.

Back then, Mogadishu had been a very different place. On the bustling Via Roma, people from all corners of society would gather at the Bar Novecento and Cafe Cappucino, watch movies at the famous Supercinema, and eat at the numerous pasta hang-outs or the traditional restaurants that served Bariis Maraq, a somali Beef Stew mixed with delicious spiced rice. The same street was also home to Iftinphone and Shankarphone, two of the city’s best known music shop. Located opposite each other, they were the centre of Somalia’s burgeoning cassette distribution network. Both shops, run by members of the legendary Iftin Band, would become first-hand witnesses to the meteoric rise of Dur- Dur, a rise that climaxed in April of 1987 with the release of Volume 2, their second album.

The first single ‘Diinleya’ had taken Somalian airwaves by storm in a way rarely seen before or since. The next single, ‘Dab,’ had an even greater impact, and the two hits had turned them into the hottest band in town. In addition to their main gig as house band at the legendary Jubba Hotel, Dur-Dur had also been asked to perform the music for the play “Jascyl Laba Ruux Mid Ha Too Rido” (May one of us fall in love) at Mogadishu’s national theatre. The play was so successful that the management had been forced to extend the run by a month, throwing the theatre’s already packed schedule into complete disarray, and each night, as soon as the play had finished, Dur-Dur had to pack their instruments into a Volkswagen T1 tour bus that would shuttle them across town in time for their hotel performance.

The secrets to Dur-Dur’s rapid success is inextricably linked to the vision of Isse Dahir, founder and keyboard player of the band. Isse´s plan was to locate some of the most forward-thinking musicians of Mogadishu´s buzzing scene and lure them into Dur-Dur. Ujeeri, the band’s mercurial bass player was recruited from Somali Jazz and drummer extraordinaire Handal previously played in Bakaka Band. These two formed the backbone of Dur-Dur and would become one of Somalia’s most extraordinary rhythm sections.

Isse also added his two younger brothers to the line-up: Abukar Dahir Qassin was brought in to play lead guitar, and Ahmed Dahir Qassin was hired as a permanent sound engineer, a first in Somalia and one of the reasons that Dur-Dur became known as the best-sounding band in the country.

On their first two albums, Volume 1 and Volume 2, three different singers traded lead-vocal duties back and forth. Shimaali, formerly of Bakaka Band, handled the Daantho songs, a Somalian rhythm from the northern part of the country that bears a striking resemblance to reggae, Sahra Dawo, a young female singer, had been recruited from Somalia’s national orchestra, the Waaberi Band. Their third singer, the legendary Baastow, whose nickname came from the italian word ‘pasta’ due to the spaghetti-like shape of his body, had also been a vocalist with the Waaberi Band, and had been brought into Dur-Dur due to his deep knowledge of traditional Somali music, particularly Saar, a type of music intended to summon the spirits during religious rituals. These traditional elements of Dur-Dur’s repertoire sometimes put them at odds with the manager of the Jubba Hotel who once told Baastow “I am not going to risk having Italian tourists possessed by Somali spirits. Stick to disco and reggae.”

Yet from the very beginning, Dur-Dur’s doctrine was the fusion of traditional Somali music with whatever rhythms would make people dance: Funk, Reggae, Soul, Disco and New Wave were mixed effortlessly with Banaadiri beats, Daantho and spiritual Saar music. The concoction was explosive and when they stormed the Mogadishu music scene in 1986 with their very first hit single, ‘Yabaal,’ featuring vocals from Sahra Dawo, it was clear that a new meteorite had crash-landed in Somalia. As Abdulahi Ahmed, author of Somali Folk Dances explains: “Yabaal is a traditional song, but the way it was played and recorded was like nothing else we had heard before, it was new to us.” ‘Yabaal’ was one of the songs that resurfaced on the Likembe blog, and it became the symbolic starting point of this project.

It initially seemed that Dur-Dur’s music had only been preserved as a series of murky tape dubs and YouTube videos, but after Samy arrived in Mogadishu he eventually got to the heart of Mogadishu’s tape-copying network – an analogue forerunner of the internet file-sharing that helped to keep the flame of this music alive through the darkest days of Somalia’s civil strife – and ended up finding some of the band’s fabled master tapes, long thought to have disappeared.

This triple LP / double CD reissue of the band’s first two albums – the first installment in a three-part series dedicated to Dur-Dur Band – represents the first fruit of Analog Africa’s long labours to bring this extraordinary music to the wider world. Remastered from the best available audio sources, these songs have never sounded better. Some thirty years after they first made such a splash in the Mogadishu scene, they have been freed from the wobble and tape-hiss of second and third generation cassette dubs, to reveal a glorious mix of polychromatic organs, nightclub-ready rhythms and hauntingly soulful vocals.

In addition to two previously unreleased tracks, the music is accompanied by extensive liner notes, featuring interviews with original band members, documenting a forgotten chapter of Somalia’s cultural history. Before the upheaval in the 1990s that turned Somalia into a war-zone, Mogadishu, the white pearl of the Indian Ocean, had been one of the jewels of eastern Africa, a modern paradise of culture and commerce. In the music of the Dur-Dur band – now widely available outside of Somalia – we can still catch a fleeting glimpse of that golden age.
Listen & Enjoy!

The latest release in Now-Again’s deluxe Reserve Edition series: the first ever anthology of Zamrock musician Mike Nyoni’s funky, psych-rock and folkloric 1970s recordings, plus bonus tracks on DL card for WAV files.
Zambian guitarist and singer/songwriter Mike Nyoni’s music is Zamrock only because he came of age during the country’s rock revolution. His preferred wah-wah to fuzz guitar, James Brown to Jimi Hendrix. His 70s recordings – often politically charged, and ranging from despondent to exuberant – are amongst the funkiest on the African continent. He was also one of the only Zamrock musicians to see his music contemporaneously issued in Europe. This anthology collates works from his three 70s LPs – his first, with the Born Free band, and his two solo albums Kawalala and I Can’t Understand You – and presents a singular Zambian musician on par with celebrated artists Rikki Ililonga, Keith Mlevhu and Paul Ngozi. The package also features an extensive, photo-filled booklet contains an overview of the Zamrock scene and Nyoni’s story. Includes a download card to WAV files, including bonus tracks.