Afrobeat 397 Items

Orchestrated by legendary producer Alan Lorber, this talented cast of musicians weave their way through Eastern-influenced and psychedelic interpretations of pop gems and some way-out-there originals, in an album touted as the first in the fusion of raga and jazz.\n \nBrimming with the sounds of sitar, tabla, and Gamelan percussion, this eccentric blend of Eastern and Western music includes four\noriginally unissued bonus tracks!\n \nPackaged in a gorgeous replica of the original gatefold jacket, featuring the original notes and a fresh set of notes from Alan Lorber himself! Exquisitely mastered from the original stereo masters, cut by Kevin Gray for a stunning and enveloping classic stereo sound with delightful stereo separation. Pressed on gold vinyl at Third Man in Detroit!

A download code is included. Berlin-based, Jerusalem-born artist Roi Assayag (a.k.a Tropikal Camel) is set to serve up his new album, Awakening Spirits, on Brussels' Rebel Up.

After much online hype shrouded in mystery, Soundway presents the first in a new series of 12” releases which will make available many hard-to-find and in-demand dancefloor tracks on loud, DJ-friendly pressings.
On this first 12” are two late 1980s Ghanaian highlife cuts taken from the catalogue of Nakasi Records. Nakasi was run by the late producer Nana Asiedu (Big Joe) - a well-known figure in the Ghanaian and African music community of 1980s London.
The A-side showcases a track from Jon K’s second solo album, which was a re-working of a traditional Fanti language Asafo company song Asafo Beesuon. Made famous by C.K.Mann on his seminal album ‘Funky Highlife’, this version very much reflects the more westernised late 1980s sound of highlife music recorded in the UK, Holland, Canada and Germany for both ex-pat Ghanaian audiences and those back home in West Africa.
The album features the stalwart session musician Alfred Bannerman, the go-to Ghanaian guitarist known for the classic cut of ‘Let Me Love You’ by Bunny Mack, among many other tracks over the last 40 years, including his work on contemporary releases for Soundway such as Konkoma and Ibibio Sound Machine.
On the B-side, Pat Thomas (the brother in-law of Big Joe) needs little introduction having been touring the world extensively in recent years with the Kwashibu Area Band. Somehow this dancefloor-heavy cut has eluded recent compilations and reissues. With horns arranged by long time friend and collaborator Ebo Taylor, it’s an instantly recognisable sound that also features Rex Gyamfi - himself a well-known purveyor of 1980s ‘burger-highlife’.

Hotly anticipated remixes for 'Ti Chuong' now finally available on wax!

Kalita are honoured to release the first ever compilation focusing on the musical career of Julie Coker, the queen of Nigerian television. Here we collate seven of Julie's most sought-after Afro disco and hauntingly-beautiful Itsekiri highlife recordings, accompanied by extensive interview-based liner notes and never-beforeseen photos.

Continuing his journey, the former member of Egypt 80 and last trumpeter of the Black President Fela Kuti releases his second album: APP (Accumulation of Profit & Power). Muyiwa Kunnuji and his band Osemako, which has been extensively recasted since Moju Ba O - which had already laid the foundations of his afroclassicbeat - have had quite an evolution, and are eager to share a recipe that has been patiently elaborated and stewed, both on stage and in the studio. A complex mix of deep musical and cultural heritages as well as a claimed and combative Pan-African culture, APP sets the bar still one step higher in the message, but also and especially in terms of composition and polyrhythms. Inspired by Western African highlife as well as the purest afrobeat of the Afrika 70 era, and even incorporating elements of South African marabi or Central African soukous, the whole does not sound less perfectly personal, tailored, with a natural and disconcerting ease. But this easiness is only an apparent as Muyiwa devoted himself body and soul to the composition and harmony during the gestation of these tunes so widely inspired and yet intensely personal. APP will thus delight fans of African music in the broad sense as well as connoisseurs, and just as much fans of funk grooves or jazzy solos; it is a deeply plural album. Multi-influenced, multicultural, multilingual, a slice of life as much as an initiatory journey, on which hovers the spectre of Covid, which has also largely inspired this second ‘effort’. Standing against absurd sanitary rules or the accumulation of profits by the powerful of this world and other pseudo-philanthropists, APP, again, reminds us of the great Fela, as much by the use of an acronym to entitle the album as by the themes addressed or the mixing of genres. A warrior album, filled and full of revendications, but also of calls for open-mindedness. An intensely human, sincere, combative album, and however radically enthusiastic and optimistic.

“June 2017, France. It’s 40° both inside and outside. At Studio Black Box, in the Haut Anjou, it is as if you were there, in Madagascar. And when the tape recorders start rotating, the musicians’ imagination feeds off the guts of their music : Malagasy bush, tropical heat, red dirt, sand, drought, corn, cassava, cockcrow, mooing zebus, lambahoany (fabric), leaf hut, fotaky house (mud), dust, portable generator, music, rhum, bodies frantically dancing wether in the dark or under the blazing sun…Tsapiky.

The album shall be named Valimbilo.
Bilo is a disease which strikes one’s mental health, depression is what western societies call it. When one is diagnosed with « voany bilo », a precise medical treatment is engaged and performed without doctors, nor medicine. To vanquish bilo, one has to use music.
The sorcerer solely decides upon the “good” day (the day which gathers the most positive aspects of the astrological conjuncture) to operate: the extended family hosts a ceremony ruled by many taboos, which can last up to a few days, and in which only one remedy is applied in high dosage : some Tsapiky.
They are “doctor” musicians whom talent is source of the cure.
They play for the patient, who has to be facing the orchestra : all of their attention is focused on the bilo, dancing in the sick person’s body : It has to be awaken, seduced, surprised and attacked from every angle before it is pressured, pressured until KO, until it can’t take the it anymore, stuffed with music. Then the patient is relieved, discharged, and the ceremony is over.

During the entirety of the ceremony, the patient picks a person who helps him/her get the bilo out of his/her system, this is what we call “valimbilo”, literally “husband/wife of the bilo.” "