Afrobeat 399 Items

Canopy & Opolopo collaborate on a new transmission, resulting in an alchemical amalgam to elevate dancefloors from Mos Eisley to Jades-GS-z13-O.

10" in top-on sleeve, limted to 300 copies. Yiri Yiri! Boom! A year and a half after their debut for Sdban Ultra, Brussels-based afrogroove formation M.CHUZI returns with a stunner of an EP.Yiri Boom! offers a variety summery sauces to assaison this spring with a refreshing sound, catchy songs and some catchy features.

Captivated by a musical residency in Benin, this time the band relocates to the Black Atlantic, with the agogo bell as their guide. Literally, because in "Mojo Picon", drum legend Stéphane Galland actually performs a solo on cowbell. A world's first. Together with singer Vanesa Diaz Gil, M.CHUZI travels from the Canarias to Cuba with an innovative cover of the Cuban mambo classic "Yiri Yiri Boum". Following in the footsteps of this iconic song, the Brussels gents finally cross back across the ocean in the danceable "Pepper Sauce", in which the heyday of Fela Kuti's afrobeat resonates with an irresistible guitar riff, a rippling bass, a rousing shuffle groove and punchy horns.

Ipek Yolu is the Turkish name for the Silk Road which connected the East and the West. This band does not deal in silk but they connect flavors, smells and sounds from different corners of the globe, connecting the world.
The band merges bass-heavy electro-tinged cumbia grooves, saz riffs and surf guitar into a multicultural melting pot of South American rhythms, Anatolian folk music and 60s psychedelic rock. A unique universe of sound that bridges the tropical jungles and the dusty deserts in a kaleidoscopic blend of music. Ipek Yolu has used 2020 to write their debut album Tropical Anatolia and are ready to hit the venues and festivals.
The members of Ipek Yolu first got together for an improvised jam session during the Aarhus Roots & Hybrid Festival in 2018. The show was set up as a special one-time-only show merging members from the bands Hudna & Junglelyd. The show ended up lasting for almost three hours. It didn’t take them long to discover they were onto something special. If you know any of these bands mentioned you know you’re in for a body-shaking party, characterised by musical curiosity and improvisation.
The three members of Ipek Yolu have all been part of the Danish music scene for several years. The band leader, Orhan Özgür Turan, is a well-known and respected saz player all over Denmark, and has made a name for himself through his efforts in the Anatolian Folk band Hudna. In 2018 he won an award as Global Roots Artist of the year at The Danish World Music Awards. Olaf Brinch and Lasse Aagaard have worked together for many years making high energy cumbia with their band Junglelyd and Afrobeat with their band African Connection. Olaf is also an integral part of the Danish band AddisAbabaBand. In addition, Olaf and Lasse have toured and recorded with great musicians such as CC Yoyo, former drummer of Fela Kuti, in both Ghana and Denmark. All of the past experiences collided to create Ipek Yolu.

Extremely rare, under the radar afro-psychedelic LP from South Africa. This mysterious band was produced by African funk master, composer, guitarist and producer Almon Sandisa Memela, who was active since the mid 1950s, first as a musician and guitar teacher and then also as a producer. He is famous for his 1970s Afro funk works Funky Africa and the very sought after Broken Shoes.

Action features a cool mixture of incipient afro-funk and garage pop/psych, with one of its songs having been compiled on the famous Next Stop... Soweto compilation series that helped ignite the current fever for African music.

Riyl: Ofege, Blo, Aktion, The Apostles, Sjob Movement, Soweto and the likes.

First ever vinyl reissue, reproducing the original sleeve artwork and with remastered sound. 500 copies only.

New, furiously exhilarating Tsapiky music from the south-west of Madagascar, beside the Mozambique Channel.
A rough, electric, rural take on the classic Congolese, Kenyan and Mozambican urban dancefloor styles of the 60s and 70s — hyper-fast interplay between pumping bass and clattering drums, overlaid with cranked-up high-life guitar — nourished with the musical traditions of local villages, especially in the singing and other passages of acoustic respite.
Ace.

In the early years of Fela Kuti's career, well before he would define the genre of afrobeat, and leave an indelible mark on the musical landscape, he was a struggling trumpet player, seeking to redefine the sound of his current group, the art-jazz ensemble Fela Ransome-Kuti Quintet. As he moved his group towards the then-popular genre of highlife in 1963, he lost his bassist in the move towards commercial success, but gained the company of Ojo Okeji, who had a sterling reputation both as a bassist and
percussionist in groups like Lagos Cool Cats, Rex Williams' Nigerian Artistes, and Western Toppers Highlife Band, a favorite of Kuti's. Okeji impressed Kuti with his deft jazziness on the bass, so he was in on the spot, and the Fela Ransome-Kuti Quintet became Koola Lobitos. It was Okeji that introduced Kuti to the famed percussionist Tony Allen, (Who would subsequently join Kuti into his greatest years as an artist) as well as conguero Abayomi "Easy" Adio. During his time in Koola Lobitos, Okeji not only contributed deeply melodic, and adeptly rhythmic baselines, but brought his own influence from emerging US soul artists like James Brown & The Famous Flames and Wilson Pickett, heavily pushing Koola Lobitos towards a more soulful direction. This push was often resisted by Kuti, who frequently clashed with Okeji. 1968 proved to be a turning point for the group, as the Nigerian Civil War broke out, and many starving musicians turned to the military for work. Okeji and Adio would leave for the army, while Kuti and Allen kept Koola Lobitos going, where it evolved through different names and iterations and grew into the worldwide afrobeat force that made Kuti an icon during the 70s and 80s. But as Kuti and Allen rose to global recognition, Okeji and Adio would form a new band within the ranks of the 6th Infantry Brigade of the Nigerian Army. Their emblazoned blue jackets earned them the nickname "The Blues”, but Okeji preferred the name “Shango” after the Yoruba thunder god. Shango took the fundamentals of Kuti's famous afrobeat and brought new layers of guitar and horn arrangements, while often invoking supernatural aesthetics, and maintaining a love for the US soul artists that influenced Okeji so much. Because Shango was an army band however, their records were not readily available to anyone outside of the military so their music, including their eponymous 1974 LP, remained relatively unknown even amongst the people of Nigeria. Decades later Comb & Razor is thrilled to present this long-lost Nigerian gem for the first time to a world-wide audience.

Maledetta Discoteca proudly announces the birth of their first daughter LA Sirenetta (*The mermaid) and the release of her first record!

An hommage to the Italian Afro scene of the late 80s, La Sirenetta is a sub-label born to take World Music to the next level for the contemporary Dancing Club Scene. We aim at digging, selecting and editing obscure bangers from our analogue record collections, travelling from Martinique to Ivory Coast, from Nigeria to Haiti, and giving them back to deejays and dancefloors in high-quality, highly collectable, 12” releases.

PS : This is the first release of a series that will delight collectors of Afro and World Music…we won’t stop, we just started!

Selection of all winners from the Music Team label - mid 80s to early 90s gems on here!

One of South Africa’s biggest independent labels for more than a decade, Music Team offered working musicians a shot at fame via access to top studios, producers, songwriters and session musicians, as well as distribution via a number of imprints: CTV, Red Label, Solid, Spinna, Mambo Music and others. Artists in the stable who tasted success would typically release a few albums over as many years before moving on to other labels or falling off the radar as times changed. At their peak, according to label boss Maurice Horwitz, Music Team was selling a million records a month, and was at the forefront of South African pop music as it evolved from soul to disco and beyond.

Afrosynth Records’ ‘Music Team Sampler’ dusts off six rare and long-forgotten gems from the Music Team catalogue, originally released between 1986 and 1992. Four are typical of the label’s take on the popular ‘bubblegum’ sound of the day — Isaac ‘Cool Cat’ Mofokeng’s ‘Candy’, ‘I Won’t Let You Go’ by Linda Oliphant, Jappie Lebona’s ‘My Love is Yours and ‘Instant Love (Eyami Lendoda)’ by Thandi Zulu (aka TZ Junior). Two instrumentals — Mr. Ace’s ‘Ace 1’ and ‘Axe Chop’ by The Hard Workers, a studio project by Music Team’s in-house producer Tom Mkhize — meanwhile hint at the imminent rise of kwaito and house.

Forged in the fire of a cruel and volatile political system that was gradually unraveling, instead of addressing political realities these indelible pop songs sought to provide an escape to a world where love and music were all that mattered.