no condition is permanent

Various, 50 Years Of Film Music

2011-02-09T18:39:00.000-08:00

Today's compilation, first issued in 1973, preserves many eras within its silver-papered slip cover. The three albums comprising this boxed set commemorate five decades' worth of scores and memorable songs written for Warner Bros. films. To that end, 50 Years Of Film Music is successful and then some. It's a true labor of love and a good example of the synergy that could exist - but rarely did - between the film and record divisions of an entertainment empire.

As mentioned, there were three albums housed in the 50 Years... box. (A companion 3-lp boxed set, 50 Years Of Film, arrived concurrently with this set. It contained mostly dialog clips from W.B. films, with additional songs.) For the purposes of today's entry, framed by my own prejudices, I'm focusing solely on the first album, a sampler of instrumental film scores from Warners Bros.' movies. These themes, many of which will prove familiar, have been dubbed from the original mag reels used to create the sound portion of each respective film. This accounts for the tremulous, slightly 'watery' aspect of some of the older recordings heard on the album. It is obvious that much care was taken in transferring this material to vinyl. It's a shame that this collection wasn't reincarnated for the digital era. No matter, as today it - or at least one-third of it - is available to the discerning listeners who have once more stumbled upon this too-long moribund blog.

The first side of the album collates memorable stretches from three film scores written by one of the 20th Century's best film composers, Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Exuberance, of the sort as can only be conjured by someone who genuinely loves their work, fairly drips from every note of the music written by Korngold for The Sea Hawk (1940), King's Row (1942) and The Adventures Of Robin Hood (1938). The last of these, for my money, represents his most inspired soundtrack and the sound of fun itself as enjoyed on a few levels: Errol Flynn playing Sherwood Forest's reigning badass; one gleeful rout after another, as Robin and his merry band continually tweak authority's nose in the person of Basil Rathbone's Sir Guy of Gisbourne; and mostly, Korngold's enthusiasm for the enterprise, which is contagious.

During the research phase for my little book (above right) about the triumphs and travails of composer Van Dyke Parks as a Warner Bros. employee, I watched one day as Parks obsessed over music playing on his kitchen radio. The dial was tuned to U.S.C.'s classical station, whose DJ didn't back-announce the piece. Parks was genuinely in the grip of the symphonic work he'd just experienced. This episode was of special interest, as Parks has exhibited a more than healthy curiosity about the work of other musicians throughout his career, often to the extent of sidelining his own output. Rarely, though, had I seen him as smitten as he was by the broadcast on that particular day. A session violinist who worked often with Parks and who heard the same program, later gave him a recording of the piece. Turned out it was written by Korngold.

The album's B-side leapfrogs through many styles and distinct eras of film scoring. On par with Erich Korngold's work are the many scores composed by Max Steiner. The latter's writing on behalf of All This And Heaven Too (1940), The Treasure Of Sierra Madre (1948), Now, Voyager (1942) and still another Errol Flynn swashbuckler, 1948's Adventures Of Don Juan, are testament to Steiner's impressive range. His music provided the shadings and subtlety (or not) required variously by opulent period pieces, action-packed epics, psychological dramas or soap operas. These tracks are vestiges of a time when directors and audiences alike demanded and, indeed, thrived on melody and on music that hit each mark in carefully blocked scenes with the same finely calibrated timing required of the actors. 'Ambient' film music lay in wait, several decades down the track.

Scores of a more contemporary stripe are represented by the work of Alex North (whose baroque charts played off the onscreen martial combat during 1966's Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?) and Dimitri Tiomkin, with his evocation of ancient Egypt conjured on behalf of Land Of The Pharaohs (1955). Two impressive Franz Waxman efforts here as well: The Nun's Story (1959) and his music for the 1957 Sayonara, the latter being a version of Madame Butterfly set against the backdrop of the Korean War.

The collection is a pip, overall, and a reminder of a time when a record company wasn't afraid to splash out on an archival project such as this. 50 Years... was overseen by Warner Bros. Records' head publicist Stan Cornyn, a Character of the old school who authored the witty ad copy that did much to identify W.B. as a home for artists of intelligence and complexity during that company's 'golden era' of the late '60s and early '70s. The Ivy League-educated Cornyn obviously cared a great deal about this music, as did Rudy Behlmer, who selected and thoughtfully annotated the tracks included here.

50 Years of Film Music - Pt. 1 @ 320

50 Years of Film Music - Pt. 2 @ 320

50 Years of Film Music - Pt. 3 @ 320

Rico, Jama Rico

2010-05-03T18:11:00.000-07:00

Though doubtless I already owned a great many records containing the trombone playing of Rico Rodriguez, his name was impressed upon me only after he joined The Specials partway through that group’s early ‘80s career trajectory. Rico — his first name alone has long been an imprimatur of quality in Jamaican music — was at least a generation older than anyone else signed to the 2-Tone label. Of his tenure with The Specials, group founder Jerry Dammers once remarked that there was a lot less fucking around at rehearsals, once Rico came on board.

Rico was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1934 and subsequently attended the Alpha Boys’ School. He was a pupil of Sister Mary Ignatius Davies, who taught at the school from 1939 until her death in 2003; several reggae luminaries, including the doomed genius Don Drummond, Roland Alphonso and Lester Sterling among many others, had their interest in music nurtured by Sister Ignatius. She gained cred with her rude boy students by dint of owning a record collection of impressive size; this was a nun who ran a disco at the school on Saturday nights.

Leaving school, Rico recorded for many of the soundsystem proprietors who would become record producers: Clement Dodd, Duke Reid, Prince Buster. He played in hotel orchestras, won competitions on Jamaican radio; then, turning his back on the hit-or-miss existence of a black musician in the late ‘50s, Rico followed Don Drummond, his horn tutor at the Alpha school, to live at Renock Lodge in the Wareika Hills, home to Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari. Rico’s description of this group as “more developed, mentally and musically, than the average musician” doesn’t quite do justice to a nearly cult-like ensemble, the Jamaican equivalent of Sun Ra’s Arkestra. Where Sun Ra and his fellow travelers of the spaceways used Fletcher Henderson’s charts as a jumping-off point to explore musical terra incognita, Count Ossie’s band was rooted in the hand drum-weighted liturgical rhythms of Rastafarian liturgical music. Of his time in the hills, playing with the group that recorded Tales Of Mozambique and the multi-lp boxed set Grounation, Rico said "When you play with them you can really explore. Most of what I know I learned from playing with them."

Rico left Jamaica in 1961, emigrating to the U.K. like so many citizens of the Commonwealth’s Caribbean outposts. He played in English jazz clubs and recorded two albums, neither of which he felt came close to representing his music. He worked on the line at the Ford plant, and played briefly in a group with the very young Ray Davies on guitar. Rico recalls the future Kink as an energetic sort, rolling on the floor while playing his guitar upside down; clearly, the well respected man about town was some years distant in the early ‘60s.

Come the 1970s, Rico signed with Chris Blackwell’s Island label, releasing Man From Wareika, an instrumental set focusing on the ska rhythms that had fallen out of fashion nearly a decade previous. The record was well received in the UK; though released in the US as well, it probably bypassed potential American customers owing to its appearance on a jazz label, Nemperor. (By the way, the dub version of this album is floating about cyberspace and is infinitely preferable to the released version.) After which, Rico joined the Specials, the most versatile of the ska revivalists associated with the 2-Tone label. The latter imprint would release two solo albums by Rico in the early ‘80s: That Man Is Forward followed by today’s offering, Jama Rico.

Both albums pair Rico’s trombone with the flugelhorn of Dick Cuthell, nearly all of the tracks from both records benefiting from the magical laminate created by the two musicians’ unison melodies. Recording for both albums was divided between English studios and producer/label owner Joe Gibbs’ facility in Jamaica. The Kingston sessions were engineered by the great Errol Thompson, who conjured inky ambiance throughout a series of fantastic dub albums in the ‘70s. Thompson wound up managing a supermarket owned by Joe Gibbs, a fact that I am at a loss to explain, though he managed to find time to return to the control room in the years before his passing in 2004.

Where That Man Is Forward toggled between the ska expected of a 2-Tone release and a survey of cultural reggae rhythms then in fashion (“Chiang Kai Shek”), Jama Rico followed with a more consolidated set owing much to the Nyabinghi drumming that underpinned Count Ossie’s music. The magic of multi-track recording allowed Rico himself to play the funde, repeater and thunder drums essential to the pulse of Rasta liturgy, a very dread thing indeed. As befits royalty, an array of stellar Jamaican players rammed the studio for these tracks: Santa Davis, Skully, Sly & Robbie, Winston Wright, all of their names familiar from even a parvenu reggae enthusiast's collection. In their company Jerry Dammers acquits himself in good form, adding keyboard parts sufficient for snake charming and atmospheric production touches into the bargain.

Jama Rico compares favorably with the late-in-life renaissance of other island-bred talents, most notably the 70’s output of Hawaii’s Gabby Pahinui on Steve Siegfried’s Panini label. Rico is still with us, last I checked, and continues to perform and record, but none of his subsequent discs match the delectable malevolence and worthiness of this album, its imagery rendered in the inky strokes and dark washes characteristic of Charles Addams’ best paintings.

The record is nearly too cool to bear. Some listeners may require medication for this one – possibly a feisty little indica, or at very least an icy glass of Stone's – but as I tend to suggest something along this line for the majority of my postings, one could be forgiven for assuming a particular mindset at work here. Seen?

JAMA RICO (@ 256)

Lord Buckley, The Demon Verbals LP's

2010-01-01T19:47:00.000-08:00

Some men are born to their titles. Others win theirs. But Richard Buckley came into his title because a friend, with the unlikely name of Midas, went to a bankrupt circus to buy his kids a pony. With a fine nose for bargains, Midas bought the circus. And phoned Buckley for help. (What do I do now, daddy?)... The watchman led them through the warehouse, marched them past the line of mighty elephant rumps, past the dark roaring cages with thick aromatic clouds hanging overhead. They halted before the wardrobe trunks. From the first trunk Buckley pulls out a vast purple robe studded with emeralds, rubies, sapphires, all of fine solid glass. The robe is strangely shaped but he wraps it carefully around him, head to ankles. It leaves a broad trail in the dust as he steps over to the mirror. "Is he crazy?," the watchman asks. "That there's an elephant hanging. Belongs to the elephant!" But Buckley stares at his reflection. He bows. "Your excellency," he whispers. Richard, now Lord Buckley, swept berobed from the warehouse and on through the streets of Chicago with people pretending not to stare, with the wind off the lake whipping his train sky-high, making a great clatter with the glass jewels. Arrived at his apartment, he set about celebrating his title, as nobility obliges. They came from everywhere, politicians, pimps and bankers, Negro musicians and Italian gangsters, chorus girls, policemen, pitchmen and hookers. And together they worked out the etiquette of the royal court. For Lord Buckley was not the man to keep all that nobility to himself. He knew that Lord-ship is no good unshared. So it was "Your Ladyship, this...Your Grace that...Will your highness please let go of my goddam leg?..." They papered the kitchen with eviction notices. Everybody had a fine time...and the party lasted three years.

– excerpted from Dan James' liner notes, Way Out Humor (World Pacific, 1959)

Today's post was inspired in part by a recent radio special that, to the credit of those who assembled it, managed to cram many salient points as regards the fluid talents and deeply, albeit cheerfully messy life of Lord Buckley into a half-hour of audio.

Of course, this sent me back to the shelves, pulling out old lp's and Oliver Trager's indispensable biography, Dig Infinity! The Life and Art of Lord Buckley. I listened to many of His Lordship's routines and read anecdote after anecdote culled from his pell-mell transit though this veil of tears.

Lord Buckley was 'the hipster's hipster,' a comedian who often neglected punch lines, so enthralled was he with the nuances of speech and the capacity of his own storytelling to cast spells upon nightclub audiences. His delivery was based in a sincere appreciation of the patois of the black jazz musicians with whom he consorted in 1930's Chicago. He loved the rhythm and the inventiveness of their argot, and from this Buckley formulated his cabaret persona, one charged with street energy and wholly in love with what he termed 'this sweet swingin' sphere' and all those who rode upon it.

I first visited San Francisco in the early '80s. My trip was well timed: City Lights Books had just issued a slim volume entitled Hiparama of the Classics, wherein several of Buckley's best routines were transcribed. It was, and remains a worthy addition to the shelf of little books that should change the world (The Elements Of Style by Strunk & White; Chairman Mao's little red book; Tanizaki's In Praise Of Shadows). Hiparama... collects seven transcriptions of Buckley's best-loved monologues, these prefaced by Joseph Jablonsky's encomium which goes some ways toward establishing Buckley's rightful place in the pantheon of 20th Century comedians, orators and overall singular characters.

Having said this, I found the book frustrating, as might anyone who derived pleasure from the sound of Lord Buckley's untrammeled musings. It was an incomplete experience, ultimately doomed to disappoint for the same reasons as do the various attempts to create films (or even reasonably spiffy radio plays) from P.G. Wodehouse's evergreen Bertie & Jeeves books. The authors, in each case, have been placed at a remove from the words that they imbued with verve and incandescence.

Reinterpreting literary classics and bible stories and historical accounts in the florid lingo he deemed 'the hip semantic' was the work of a man who thought as no other, but the lion's share of Lord Buckley's art was bound up in his performance. Unfortunately he died in 1960, when I was a mere sproglet, so my only experience of Lord Buckley in motion - perhaps the best way to phrase this - was viewing a surprise appearance he made as a contestant (!) on Groucho Marx's TV game show, You Bet Your Life. One suspects that Groucho knew full well to whom he was speaking; Buckley's notoriety had spread to both coasts, and this most righteously hip comedian numbered Frank Sinatra and the television variety impresario Ed Sullivan among his fans. (Buckley's alliance with the Chairman of the Board was somewhat strained when the former led a conga line of naked women to a ringside table during a Sinatra club engagement.) Still, if the verbal Marx brother was aware of His Lordship's reputation, he did a great job of playing the straight man to Buckley, the latter's speech taking flight merely upon being asked about his home town. Beyond that, I have only seen this frustratingly truncated film of Buckley in action on a nightclub stage.

All of which could prove, as Ian Frazier pointed out about the Sioux leader Crazy Horse, that Lord Buckley simply existed beyond the abilities of his day's technology to capture him. It is easy enough to conflate a Buckley performance in one's imagination, enabled by the scant evidence that exists: His regal posture that seemed to extend even the height of a man who stood six foot, six inches to begin with; the impeccable tailoring, tending toward formal wear; his signature mustache, its components springing from the lip like an especially vibrant pair of curb feelers; a wide-eyed countenance that suggested awe inspired either by the simple act of existence or a bottomless appetite for elixirs and chemicals (probably both, as Buckley was a standard-setting transcendental hedonist); and his ability to carry off an outsized boutonniere, a tuxedo and a pith helmet within the same ensemble. Add to that his voice, its hill-and-dale range belonging in the good company of Yma Sumac and Don Van Vliet, informed by an accent that suggested fox hunts and stockyards in the same phrase. From such a cornucopia of irradiated ingredients, each with a half-life Edward Teller might envy, one may summon this extraordinary figure just as surely as if you'd rubbed a lamp found on the set of a Maria Montez film – such was His Lordship's potency.

(Inner sleeve layouts from the Demon Verbals reissue packaging.)

Still, though his art was very much about performing, there were key moments within each of his monologues that would not be denied, momentary insights into the character behind The Character that was His Lordship. Skidding into an aside, Buckley's voice would drop his stentorian affect, his mock English-ness would ebb briefly, and he would allow that he "was a people worshiper...that every man and every woman had within them a god and goddess." There was no doubting the sincerity of his words. Of course, in the next moment, his mind skyrocketing once more as he essayed the lives of those he admired and, to an extent, resembled: The Mighty Hip Eine (Albert Einstein), The Naz (Jesus of Nazareth), or The Gasser (Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, the Spanish conquistador who explored the Americas).

Buckley sold many comedy records during his career peak in the 1950's, for labels such as Vaya and RCA. The live recordings preserved on three albums released initially by the World Pacific label were subsequently reissued in the early '80s on Demon Verbals, a spoken word imprint of the UK label group Edsel/Demon. Though I was introduced to today's subject via A Most Immaculately Hip Aristocrat, the studio recording (actually, a living room performance complete with peripheral noises from passing aircraft and the recordist's hectoring wife) released posthumously on Frank Zappa's Straight label, the full luminosity of Lord Buckley was revealed through these three lp's. Some were re-released briefly on CD, all are furiously rare and expensive in the present day.

Each of these recordings, it must be said, is essential to a complete education. For this reason, I'll dedicate today's post to Spaced Saviour, a fellow blogger with immaculately considered priorities, whose entries compile all that is lacking in contemporary culture. His is the work of a True Believer, one whose memory has not been voided by the Great Con of the past quarter century and more. Having just matriculated to the third iteration of his blog, I'll offer hope that his run extends well toward the next millennium.

Now, humbled by thoughts of a wordbender non pareil, I will quit forthwith and let one of Lord Buckley's numerous friends in high places – one Henry Miller, he of Nexus, Plexus and Sexus reknown – take us to the bridge:

"To Lord Buckley, his most euphoric Lordship, greetings! What a treat to hear your new shatterbusting recording delivered with variations à la Paganini, Gilles de Rais and the Marquis of Queensbury! It seems to me that your Lordship opened a new vein, leading from the medulla oblongata (hold on to this one!) and the Cloaca Maxima. It's all so very alive and jumpin' and in the pauses one can hear the atoms exploding out there in the Milky Way where the grass comes up every once in ten billion years and there are no moth balls or frigidaires, no box office receipts, no railroads, no crucifixions rosy or otherwise... It is very far out, your Lordship..."

BAD-RAPPING OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE

BLOWING HIS MIND (AND YOURS TOO)

LORD BUCKLEY IN CONCERT

Pamelo Mounk'a, Samantha

2009-04-05T21:44:00.000-07:00

As a youngster, Yves Andre M’Bemba spent more time than was probably good for him hanging around Léopoldville’s Kongo Bar. Like a lot of kids gripped by music’s unholy thrall, he wrote songs instead of doing homework. And he could sing.

The saxophonist Jean Serge Essous, co-founder of both OK Jazz and Les Bantous de la Capitale first hired Yves, a mere teenager, in 1963; the youngest singer in what was then known as Orchestre Bantou (or Bantous Jazz) was re-christened Pablito. He would leave and rejoin Les Bantous throughout his adult career. By then he was known by an altogether more familiar name, Pamelo Mounk’a.

Having left the fold, then returning, Pablito enjoyed a three year reunion with Les Bantous. His relations with the group soured once more, at which point Pamelo followed Sam Mangwana – the latter having accrued considerable success in the ‘70s - to the Third World’s Nashville, that being Paris. There, in 1981, Pamelo reunited with Eddy Gustave, a saxophonist from Guadeloupe. Gustave had become a record producer of significance; Pamelo had first met Gustave a few years before during one of the latter’s scouting trips to Paris. Gustave’s label, Eddy’son, subsequently had packaged a compilation of Les Bantous’ most popular tunes.

(Incidentally, Pamelo added the stage surname Mounk’a, a Bateke name meaning ‘glory,’ at some point prior to prior to his debut as solo artist. He had previously used the word in a song – ‘Alléluia Mounk’a’ – with Trio Cepakos.)

Having decided to break Pamelo as a solo act, producer Gustave convened the cream of expatriate Congolese musicians then living in Paris. The guitarist Master Mwana Congo (originally known to his mom as Ignace Nkounkou) was the lynchpin element of Gustave’s studio players. Pablo Lubadika Porthos provided the mi-solo guitar, being the muted, continuous arpeggio parts that are the spine of any soukous arrangement. Lea Lignazi from Cameroons sang backing vocals, keening and silvery, colored perfectly to complement M. Mounka’s own honeyed voice. Also color-coordinated to the lead singer’s timbre was the horn section, feigning and darting like the fists of Ali the Greatest, with Jimmy N’vondo playing sax in unison with trumpeter Fredo ‘Tete Fredo’ Ngando. Together, they generated in short order the eponymous Eddy’son debut of Pamelo Mounk’a, followed by today’s featured album, Samantha.

On the strength of these two releases, Pamelo Mounk’a and Eddy Gustave became leading figures of the rapidly developing African music scene in Paris during the first half of the '80s. Jane Kramer, cousin to art photographer Stephen Shore, wrote a detailed account of that scene (“Letter From Europe”) in the May 19, 1986 issue of The New Yorker.

I'd love to tell you that I was on the scene as all of the above took place, were it either in Kinshasa or in Paris. Truth be told, I gleaned this breadbasket of fun facts by the same means available to any sensible person: I bought a copy of Gary Stewart's defining monograph on Congolese music, Rumba On The River. Soon as Bezos's elves figure how to squeeze this most valuable tome into my iPhone's Kindle app, I'll probably buy it again. (Stewart's book contains an anecdote, related by Pamelo himself, about the car pictured above. The story will make most people laugh. Those among our number who have been signed to a record company may respond differently.)

I have spent enough column inches in earlier posts exalting the glories of Pamelo’s voice and the wonderful songs that he wrote, each and every one an evergreen item in my library. Gamble & Huff put it best: "If you don't know me by now..." I’d hazard that there's never been a time like the present for this album, a balm for dispirited ears amidst our ongoing gloomy Sunday. The four songs contained here play as extended vamps, rolling toward the horizon with no apparent need to conclude; any one of them easily trumps potassium or pig candy for beating depression. Liquid, sexy, congenial in the extreme, tapered at the cuffs and perpetually arriving, Samantha is the genuine article.

SAMANTHA

Various Artists, Waikiki Surf Battle

2008-06-14T12:34:00.000-07:00

An extraordinary document culled from an era when humans of an early and impressionable age really, really, really cared about music. This lp contains key performances from two years' worth ('63 & '64) of competitions held in a Hawai'ian bandshell. All the bands in question are practitioners of instrumental surf music, a genre that just might be the straight line connecting classical music theory and the endless ostinati of Tangerine Dream, as first drawn by iconoclast guitarists Dick Dale and Hank B. Marvin. (I interviewed the English guitarist Fred Frith in the pages of The Wire a few years back. Listening to The Shadows playing "Wonderful Land," Frith became very quiet. The record finished and he noted that "Without Hank B. Marvin, there would be no Syd Barrett." His voice, as he said this, took on a markedly reverential tone. I didn't have reason to doubt him; still, I thought about that for some time afterwards.)

18 bands comprised the 1963 show and 20 competed in the following year. An representative selection from each battle-of-the-bands made it onto this album; however, not all of the prize-winners are present. The Kona Casuals took 3rd place in 1964. Aren't you curious to hear what a group named The Kona Casuals sounded like, much less learn what they were wearing? Unfortunately we will never know, though this disappointment is occluded by the superabundance of primal guitar beating in evidence throughout the program.

Which brings us to the varying levels of musicianship on display during Waikiki Surf Battle. You could see where The Spiedels (like the wristwatch, I'm guessing) would win, place or at least show in any year. Angie & the Originals, an all-girl group, actually err on the side of tidiness at intervals, their phrasing so mannered and crisp. Other bands take liberties with tempo; rubato might be the kinder designation in this context. Each of the groups is worthy of the high decibel appreciation they receive, though it's not an altogether bad thing to keep Robert Wyatt's words in mind: "You may notice some technical inadequacies in some of my performances - a hesitant beat here, a dodgy note there - these are of course entirely deliberate and reproduced as evidence of my almost painful sincerity..." Rest assured: The Infasions (sic) are no less sincere.

In some instances, most notably the Royal Victors' rendition of "High Surf" that begins the 1963 Battle, the original vinyl sports egregious surface noise galore, some of which I've taken pains to expunge. An ineluctable quality, possibly the organic miasma spoken of by Frank Zappa, remains intact on these cuts, all the better to enhance the Lowell-Thomas-"You are there!" aspect essential to one's enjoyment of this summery ritual. The late Mr. Zappa was referring to the panties frequently tossed onstage by women during sets by his band, the Mothers of Invention; collected by the band's roadies, the undergarments in question - unwashed, of course, all the better to preserve said miasma - ultimately became constituent elements of a very large quilt.

The reference isn't so terribly off-base as all that. A great many Hawai'ian girls make a hell of a lot of noise in the course of Waikiki Surf Battle. Another concert released on lp a year or so later, The Kinks Live At Kelvin Hall, contained audience response approaching the status of musique concrete; considered in this light, the white noise generated by The Statics' appearance at the bandshell might have raised a smile on Pierre Schaeffer's weathered mug. There's probably as much screaming done in the course of these sets as during contemporary appearances by the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. I'd venture that The Pill had as yet to appear in Hawai'i when these recordings were made.

WAIKIKI SURF BATTLE Side 1
WAIKIKI SURF BATTLE Side 2

Pete 'Mad Daddy' Myers, The Final WHK Broadcast

2007-10-24T14:07:00.004-07:00

From our secret laboratory
You know the MAD DADDY story
In the Sponge Rubber Tower!
Rockin' and reelin' and havin' a ball!
Swingin' and singin'
Straight-jacket and all!

A few years ago, knowing that we both treasured respective pantheons of radio gods, I sent a copy of this vintage radio aircheck to Reverend Dan, the DJ whose Music for Nimrods show on Los Angeles' KXLU I've enjoyed for a decade's time and more. I hadn't considered sending the CD-R as a seasonal gesture, but that's how it was framed when Dan played it on the last Saturday of that particular October, some hours after the bars and liquor stores closed. "If anyone owns Halloween," Dan wailed, "It has to be Mad Daddy!"

Born in San Francisco, Pete Myers made his on-air debut with Armed Forces Radio during World War II. He studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and worked briefly as an actor. Myers returned to radio initially at a San Diego station, then moved to WJW in Cleveland, Ohio, on Lake Erie's south shore, in 1958. There, he was the host of that station's late night Shock Theatre; though Myers' tenure as horror movie host lasted only a short time, he would influence the subsequent emergence of Ernie Anderson's legendary Ghoulardi character at the same station.

It was at this point that Myers began perfecting his Mad Daddy persona, a frantic, neo-Beat disc jockey predisposed to speed-rapping in rhyme. In short order, Mad Daddy became the baddest and most popular DJ on Cleveland's WHK. Mad Daddy was a mutation, a beautiful one, as could only have been cultured in the Ohio city often derided as The Mistake By The Lake.

Boppin' and crashin' and ATOM SMASHIN'...

Myers' on-air presence was a high-water mark of feral energy on American AM radio prior to the British Invasion of the early '60s. He stormed thousands of then-new portable transistor radios, babbling a private language rife with signs and signifiers seemingly drawn in equal portions from surrealism, the monster/motorhead imagery of car customizers like Ed "Big Daddy" Roth and gimmicky William Castle movies. The Mad Daddy Show was awash in continuous sound effects, maniacal laughter, tons of runaway repeat-echo, all to the accompaniment of many, many greasy rock'n'roll and rhythm'n'blues 45's. Myers didn't work with prescribed playlists, nor was he encumbered by some draconian station format. The high energy music of his day, made by blacks, whites and Hispanics, the stuff universally reviled by older folks, was manna for Mad Daddy and his following, all of those impressionable, horned-out, delinquent ears waiting in the darkness of a Cleveland night.

During the changeover between stations, he found himself banned from the airwaves temporarily, owing to fine print within his former employer's contract. The solution to a possible lowering of Mad Daddy's local profile was to jump out of a Piper Cub flying over Lake Erie. When Myers hosted area record hops and midnight live shows at the peak of his popularity, he often dressed in a Dracula costume. He opted for a Zorro outfit on the day of his big leap, the better to promote the tie-in song from a Disney TV show of the day. A bed of Jello in the waters of Lake Erie was promised as his landing pad, but Myers was unable to secure enough gelatin powder prior to take-off. He did jump, though, and survived both parachuting for the first time from 2,000 feet up and landing in what was already becoming a notoriously polluted, oxygen-deprived lake. Mad Daddy's sustaining notoriety was assured.

Foolhardy but cool. Myers' stunt was immortalized in song many years later, via The Cramps' tribute, "Mad Daddy." Herewith, an inspirational couplet:

Gotta pair of shades and purple shoes,
Gotta parachute to land on you.

At the behest of U.K. music periodical The Wire, I interviewed Lux Interior and Poison Ivy Rorschach of the Cramps, at their pad in Glendale; though four years of magazine work have passed since that evening and several more preceded it, my visit with Lux and Ivy stands as the most fun I've ever had pointing a microphone at someone else. Well into the conversation, maybe four glasses of Vampire wine into the conversation, the subject of Cleveland radio surfaced. Lux jumped from his rattan chair, hollering, "You're gonna be jealous!" He darted into another room, to return with a framed and autographed ("To Eric...") version of this photo, obtained during his childhood:

The regard Lux held for the picture was palpable; it was as though he'd managed to chip off a shard of Lascaux cave painting, perhaps from that portion of the cave commemorating Cro-Magnon horror hosts and DJ's, and smuggled it back home. This was no mere fan club 8x10, but clearly a document possessed of life-altering power. And he was right; I was jealous.

They got the pop and the bop and the rhythm and the blue...

In 1959, WNEW hired Myers, the wildest DJ anywhere at that moment in history, to bring his transgressive style to New York radio. WNEW's The Mad Daddy Show first aired on July 4th, 1959. The new show elicited immediate disapproval from the station's audience, at the time very much reflecting an upper middle-class demographic. They weren't about to sit tight for his bizarre turns of phrase or the antic tenor of a show that defied squares to make sense of it all. (Though enquiring minds would doubtless love to know, the reaction of WNEW listeners to the phrase mello jello has gone unrecorded by history.) The station's management eliminated The Mad Daddy after a single broadcast. Myers stayed at WNEW as just another announcer, but in 1963 he moved to New York's 1010 WINS. Here his new boss, by splendid chance, turned out to have been Myers' intern during the latter's Cleveland stay. The Mad Daddy Show returned to Sponge Rubber Tower. All was right, for a while.

...the winky, blinky light in my groovy SKULL!!!

Mad Daddy's renaissance lasted for two years, until WINS changed to an all news, all the time format. Pete Myers then returned, sotto voce, to WNEW. The Manhattan station, still regarding him as something of a necessary evil, changed his shift from afternoons to evenings in October, 1968. On the first night of the new time shot, the 40-year-old Myers committed suicide with a shotgun in the bathroom of his apartment on East 76th Street.

TECHNICAL NOTE:

This aircheck is swathed in what might best be described as galactic fog, the product of many generations of tape duplication. As one would suspect, Mad Daddy was capable of generating distortion galore by his own means, aside from the artifacts of home taping-as-samizdat. Myers obviously enjoyed an adversarial relationship with the audio chain of commercial radio. He can be heard on this broadcast subjecting WHK's signal to the usual amounts of punishment, causing the microphone to oscillate and produce waveforms of its own under the pressure of Myers' untrammeled alter ego.

MAD DADDY: HIS FINAL WHK SHOW

Ustad Bismillah Khan, The Magnificence Of Stereo

2007-09-18T00:41:00.000-07:00

In previous NCIP posts, something like evangelism carried the day. I was a man with a mission, hell-bent to rope you on my obsessions of the week/month/season, a mission that I plan to continue. Today's entry, however, requires disclosure; either it will hold appeal...or it won't. The sound of the Indian double reed instrument known as the shehnai is not for everyone. Its timbre a hybrid of oboe and soprano saxophone, the shehnai nestles comfortably alongside such particular tastes as uni, the films of Yasujiro Ozu, the chile that they used to serve at Motor City Dragway, the best episodes of Captain Beefheart's career, Krazy Kat cartoons, Lord Buckley's monologues...you probably see what I'm getting at here. There's really no fence-sitting to be done. First, listeners should be willing to give over to the spare, ascetic form of North Indian classical music. Then, assuming an affection for the sculpture made from cigarette smoke that is a raga, we can begin to consider the version according to Ustad Bismillah Khan. At which point it gets serious.

My introduction to the piercing and plaintive tone of Bismillah Khan's shehnai happened in one of my favorite settings, a bootleg restaurant. Perhaps you've enjoyed something similar: There's no certificate of inspection on the wall, because the city isn't aware of the existence of the eatery in question. I had attended a concert at Toronto's Music Gallery ("No tunes allowed" read the sign over the entrance) in the company of a Toronto native whom, a few years before, I had bullied into becoming my friend. After the concert, the promise of an amazing meal lured us upstairs. We entered a loft of defining bohemian mien above the gallery. I recall the ambience as being the brighter side of stygian. We stumbled over other diners in the gloom. Throw pillows sufficed for seating. Discussion and smoke wafted about the space at knee-cap height. Indian food was being prepared and the air itself was nearly saffron-colored as a result. And, as is often the case with off-the-books dining (for whatever reason), lots of lp sleeves were scattered about. Nearly all of these held Indian albums. I picked up a record jacket that felt light to the touch and, of course, its mesmerizing contents issued from the house system in that moment. I was hearing Bismillah Khan for the first time and, yes, I wound up in love with the sound of shehnai. Not immediately, as I'll admit to being enveloped and audibly tasered by what my fellow Detroiters might recognize as the weirdness of it all. After ten or so minutes the shehnai player had moved out of the drifting, free-meter portion of the raga known as alap and into the rhythmic movements that followed. I was pole-axed with happiness by this point in the proceedings.

The Magnificence Of Stereo was the album that I heard during that unforgettable meal (involving as it did celestial channa masala, served by local free spirit Gordon W). The sleeve that I tried to read in the dimly-lit loft condensed, within a 12" square, everything that I've come to love about Indian music: Hyper-effusive praise for the author of the recording, the liner notes wrought in fantastically purple prose; kooky graphics, in this instance explaining the multi-dimensionality of the recording you are about to hear; and, of course, a title that may have little or nothing at all to do with the centuries-old stories embedded wordlessly within the ragas comprising The Magnificence Of Stereo. A very good film writer from New York, the Voice's J. Hoberman, once described the beyond-Busby Berkeley song-and-dance routines of Bollywood cinema as "MTV for the very, very stoned." Would that I could summarize the otherworldly character of Bismillah Khan's music, especially today's slice of same, so neatly.

I only heard Bismillah Khan in concert once. He appeared at Manhattan's Town Hall during the '80s. He was already very old, that much was evident. I knew within moments of sighting him that this would be his final American tour. He played beautifully, though his jaw muscles and embouchure weren't quite up to the hailstorm of pointillist phrasing that had once been his signature in sound. It didn't matter. I had paid an unholy sum to sit in the back row of the balcony. Around me was India in microcosm: Everyone talked throughout the performance; everyone spoke a different dialect; nearly all of the balcony was involved in varying degrees of dispute, with hissing and scolding galore; babies cried; dinner was being eaten from a multitude of plastic containers (the curries smelled fantastic and drove me to distraction). The presenters of this event took every opportunity to interrupt the set, laying a funeral home's allotment of flowers on the stage and seizing the mic whenever Bismillah Khan took a break, the better to sing the praises of their organization.

None of this, unbelievably, affected my enjoyment of the snowy-haired fellow seated cross-legged at stage center. I was sharing a (huge) room with Bismillah Khan & party and I was so happy. I could have heard more of his shehnai, and far less of my neighbors and less of the endlessly tiresome minions of the concern that staged the show and less even of the racktastic hostess from the Namaste America TV show, who introduced Bismillah Khan (yes, even she wore out her welcome in short order). The concert was still the stuff of transport, even with annoyances factored in. Stanley Booth said it best, describing his own, nearly fatal proximity to the Rolling Stones on their 1969 tour: At least I got to hear the band play.

Ustad Bismillah Khan died in 2006. He was extremely old when he died, older than Judy Garland looked when she bought the farm; in his deathbed photographs, he resembled nothing so much as a twig of cardamom nestled within white sheets. His was an enviable lot in many respects. His forebearers played shehnai, and he, in turn, did so too. As the person responsible for elevating his instrument into the classical canon — previously, it had only been deemed appropriate for wedding music and for greeting pilgrims approaching a temple — Bismillah Khan was considered the ne plus ultra of shehnai players throughout his life, never less than innovative and deeply soulful into the bargain. His shadow arched over so many musicians following in his wake. John Coltrane was smitten with his sound, as later were the minimalist composers La Monte Young and Terry Riley, during their respective spells as saxophonists. Bismillah Khan died where he'd lived his entire life, in Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges.

Nearly every obituary that I read last year mentioned Bismillah Khan's favorite mode of transportation: a bicycle rickshaw. None of the obituaries that I read last year mentioned the quality that seemed literally as plain as Bismillah Khan's face: the expression that he wore in so many of the photographs taken of him, an expression that telegraphed a degree of wry amusement and perhaps even watchfulness of a worldly sort (those acquainted with the arcana of the Stooges' legend will recognize this as TV Eye). He was a musician, after all, and had a small army of grandchildren at the time of his passing, so maybe I'm not simply reading too much into this faintly picaresque aspect of his visage. It wears well on a musician steeped in liturgical repertoire.

Incidentally, the accomplice guiding me towards the Indian meal in Toronto was Michael Brook, the guitarist and producer who, not so much later, was to garner well-deserved renown of his own. (Most recently, Michael scored Sean Penn's newest film Into The Wild, due in theaters immediately.) Two decades and some down the line from that meal, Michael and his missus Julie recently produced a son, Felix, who thoughtfully turned up on my own birthday (Aug. 27th). This post's for you, Felix.

THE MAGNIFICENCE OF STEREO

Gasper Lawal, Ajomasé & Abio'sunni

2007-01-26T15:20:00.000-08:00

I’ve been absent from the blogosphere for something like the duration of a comet’s orbit, so today’s post is an effort to make up for lost time. Thus, a pair of records are featured, being the first two solo efforts by expatriate Nigerian drummer Gasper Lawal. Both embody every motive behind my (admittedly sporadic) commitment to this journal:

• Neither album has appeared on CD in the quarter-century since their release. “Kita-Kita,” from Ajomasé, turned up on the epoch-marking Nigeria 70 compilation assembled and released by Afro-Strut, a label whose demise I still lament. The combined running times of Ajomasé and Abio’sunni outdistanced the storage capabilities of the compact disc; it’s doubtful that either title was sufficiently popular to justify re-release in its own right. Fortunately, downloading now renders the timing problem moot.

• Both albums are filled to the brim with great playing and terrifically modern ideas (Lawal, with his 1980 debut Ajomasé, might have formulated the Nigerian response to Bowie’s & Eno’s Low), none of which have dated in the least. Curiously, neither record is mentioned on Gasper Lawal’s page in the All Music Guide.

What I know about Gasper Lawal is summarized in this pocket bio, as type-written by Black Music magazine’s Chris May on the reverse side of the Ajomasé lp sleeve:

Gasper-Lawal, African percussionist extraordinary (sic), is the son of Herbalist Asorono-Akejiwori Lawal. Born in Ijebu-Ode, Nigeria, Gasper came to England in the sixties and gigged with numerous African bands before deciding to involve himself with session work, as a means of expanding his musical horizons. He worked with Ginger Baker’s Airforce, Steve Stills, the Rolling Stones, Funkadelic, Joni Haastrup, Sonny Okosun, Barbra Streisand and many other names before joining Clancy in 1975. In 1977 Gasper returned to Nigeria for a while, returning to England to record ‘AJOMASE’ – which means “we all have to do it together”

Obviously, Gasper’s curriculum vita is — as AbFab's Patsy once memorably noted of high colonics – nothing to sniff at. In regard to his work with the Stones, I’ve often wondered if Gasper was among the African drummers at their Hyde Park memorial concert for Brian Jones. One thing I’m certain of is that, in addition to his formidable drumming skills and immaculate taste in accompanists and production technique, Mr. Lawal must possess a sense of humor. I'll offer the Barbra Streisand credit as proof, but will also cite a couple of items not mentioned above. He was part of Graham Bond’s Magick, a band assembled for the making of an album in tribute to occultist and pain enthusiast Aleister Crowley. (For the record, keyboardist Bond – an impulsive sort, best known for his leadership of the Graham Bond Organization — later tossed himself under a train. The thought lingers that he and producer Joe Meek might have made for an interesting twosome at teatime.) Also, Lawal was featured on Men Opening Umbrellas Ahead, the first solo lp from Bonzo Dog Band founder Vivian Stanshall; regrettably the latter’s credentials as a forward-looking Africanist have been obscured, for the most part, by his eccentricity. Which Viv worked overtime.

The cast assembled by Lawal for both albums is reason enough to investigate. Colin Bass, programmatically named, both creates and steals thunder from multiple layers of Gasper the friendly drummer; like the Velvet Underground’s John Cale before him, one feels compelled to review not just Colin’s bass playing but his very nervous system, so intuitive, inventive and altogether on-the-money are his performances here. Then there is the seven-stringed mi-solo guitar of Abdul ‘Tee-Jay’ Salongo, heard throughout Abio’sunni; the releases from his own group, Rokoto, are enjoyable but don’t approach the galvanizing impact of his playing as you’ll hear today.

And so it goes, every track a perfect mesh of English and Nigerian players, the balance between tension and release, synthesizers and tortoise-shell guitars, background and foreground, each so carefully calibrated. Great splashes of echo and reverb, out of Ennio Morricone by way of dub reggae, are integrated with Nigerian rhythms to good effect here. Lawal & co. were exploring this terrain some months in advance of Paul ‘Groucho’ Smykle’s engineering for King Sunny Adé’s Juju Music.

Gasper Lawal did release a third album in 1995: Kadar, on the Globestyle imprint, whose A&R director, 3 Mustaphas 3 guitarist Ben Mendelson, played violin on Abio’sunni’s “Kai Anibaba.” Kadar featured the same cast of musicians, yet left me entirely unmoved. Still haven’t figured that one out.

It’s worth noting that I bought both Ajomasé and Abio'sunni in what, for all intents and purposes, was a punk record store, 99 Records in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood. Its proprietor, Ed Bahlman, followed his instincts to good effect. His store’s eponymous label released downtown art bands (Y Pants), post-punk (Bush Tetras), the minimalist funk of ESG, reggae (The Congos, as produced by Boris Gardiner of The Upsetters, Lee Perry’s house band), and amazing one-offs on the order of journalist Vivian Goldman’s Dirty Washing EP. It seemed then, and still seems appropriate all these many years later, to have acquired Gasper’s DIY albums at 99, a haven for adventuresome weirdos.

Next up, sooner than later, some unfinished business from 2006: a memento mori for one of my favorite Indian musicians, Ustad Bismillah Khan, who died last year. Please stay tuned.

AJOMASÉ (@ 320)
ABIO'SUNNI (@ 320)

P.S. This particular resurrection of NCIP was motivated in no small measure by the appearance of a like-minded journal, Magic of Juju. Well-chosen, impossibly rare records of diverse temperament presented with care, every one a joy to hear. Good shit, Maynard…indeed.

As was obvious to frustrated visitors over the past few months, most of NCIP's Rapidshare links had long ago gone the way of the dodo, owing to inactivity. I’ve re-upped the albums for the entries immediately visible on the right, as well as the King Sunny Adé lp’s (and that of his pedal steel player, Demola Adepoju), and random others. Please notify me, via the comments page, should you desire a particular album link restored, and I’ll respond in kind. Thank you for your patience. I want to buy you all a cup of coffee and some pie, give you all a ride home. For the nonce, however, this will have to suffice.

In acknowledgment of the year that stretches before us, I’ll offer a benediction for all NCIP readers and listeners. Here it is, straight from the mouth of the late James Brown, who shook the knuckles from my right hand back in '76 as he barked in my face:

“SON! BE COOL! STAY IN SCHOOL!”

(23 years of age at the time, I was reading for a Master’s degree; my parents were prodding me to enter the job market. Couldn’t wait to tell them the news…)

Pamelo Mounk'a, No.1 Africain (a repost)

2007-01-09T18:40:00.000-08:00

I began buying Congolese records during 1980. The punk music that had drawn me to New York a few years earlier had succumbed to terminal ennervation, with Kingstonian 'cultural' reggae not far behind it. At the time, an African student dj named Lawrence Nii Nartey was broadcasting on WKCR, Columbia University's radio station in uptown Manhattan; his program, emerging from my bedside radio in Tribeca, had a galvanizing effect on this little honkie. He played all the greats: Franco & OK Jazz, Tabu Ley Rochereau, Kabassele, Dr. Nico et al. The songs were so good, each one fully as sensuous - to invoke again a metaphor that has resurfaced more than once in my writing - as the flick of a sperm cell's tail. I didn't want them to stop. They didn't. The novelty of these extended dance tunes was such that if I found an album from Zaire containing four songs, it would be deemed good enough and I would buy it without question. Of course, nothing was or is that simple. This practice had me buying a lot of mediocre music in the course of pilgrimages to Brooklyn's African Record Centre. I did manage, however, to divine a simple, immutable truth while early in the thrall of listening to Pamelo Mounk'a: If a woman's name ended in "a," chances were Pamelo could spin a deathless tune in homage to her.

No.1 Africain, Pamelo's third solo album helmed by producer Eddy Gustave, is offered herewith as proof. "Tamara, Ndjeu Nkasi A Me" and "Nourama" comprise the B side of this disc, both tunes sporting the earmarks of great soukous music: the horn section jabbing and feigning like a prize fighter; multiple guitar interplay that obliterates the line between rhythm and lead roles, as with the Rolling Stones' best London singles from the mid-'60s; and that genuinely pregnant pause when, after a couple of verses sung to a languid 3+2 Afro-Cuban tattoo, the band shifts into high gear for the extended vamps known as the seben, which form the lion's share of a given song. I live for the seben, when drummer Domingo Salsero plays four-to-the-floor, driving the band towards the horizon without obstacles in sight, red-lining in fifth gear all the while. Master Mwana Congo gets off some rude asides on his guitar, the backing vocalist offers props off-mic to the gentlemen of the orchestra. From this, something like genuine trance music materializes.

What's more, Pamelo's root inspiration holds water when soaked overnight. Every woman I've ever met (well, there's a lone exception, whom I'll gladly ignore for the nonce) whose given name ended in the letter "a" has become a luminous, valued presence in my life. Pamelo Mounk'a offers a gallery of these alluring creatures throughout his discography: Selimandja, Nora, Camitina and the penultimate, his 'tresor Hindou,' Samantha, whom we'll meet in a later post. What a guy! What a life! What a cream-colored suit! More's the pity, then, that Pamelo and the late Robert Palmer never met, as both were boulevardiers setting an admirably louche example for the rest of us.

One more of Monsieur Mounk'a's solo efforts will appear next, being the first chapter of his solo career prior to working avec Eddy. Beyond that, other soukous discs will be offered as iterations of my soundtrack for warm weather, Arette Gran Clase tequila, buttery women and hedonism in all desirous forms. Then, in a while, the twin peaks of Pamelo's canon, Pamelo Mounk'a and Samantha. Please stay tuned.

NO. 1 AFRICAIN (@ 160)

Pamelo Mounk'a, Pamelo Mounk'a

2006-07-31T23:46:00.000-07:00

It is possible to get lucky in this life. There are no guarantees, of course, but every now and then one is afforded a first great experience, to which one's imagination will return time and again. If you're sufficiently awake at the time, you'll notice these moments. Noticing, that's the lucky bit.

Let's imagine that you grew up in a bell jar, or under a rock, or in Houston. You walk into a cinema for the first time in your life and by weird chance your first experience of film is Carol Reed's 1947 feature, The Third Man. Or imagine a friend describing the thicket of non sequiturs that is dub reggae, and then being smart enough to put Augustus Pablo's King Tubby Meets The Rockers Uptown on the turntable. (We're assuming that your friend is a really good friend, and as such has already made a successful sales pitch for herb.) Or imagine yourself bored and sleepy in a campus library, unfamiliar with the quicksilver magic possible within a short story, as you happen upon Haruki Murakami's "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo." In these moments, as Poly Styrene sang thousands of years ago, the world turns day-glo.

Or, so long as we're conjuring, imagine that you are young and green and so chronically distracted as to have your friends suspecting Asperger's Syndrome at work and you are stuck in a cab buried in the morass of lower Manhattan traffic during, for the needs of this hypothesis, 1982. Your driver, a Nigerian, has his radio tuned to WKCR, Columbia University's radio station beaming across 110th Street. He listens to WKCR because it is there that an African dj, Lawrence Nii Nartey, holds court on Thursday evenings (and, thankfully, still does in the present day). Lawrence plays all stripes of African pop music, but on this evening he dotes upon the Latinate hybrid that in time you will come to know as soukous. Lawrence's show makes driving a non-medallion cab bearable for a fellow West African expat, especially on hot days. This particular day is, of course, very hot.

It is then that you, the pale neurasthenic slumped in the back seat, suddenly sit up and take notice. The cab's interior and, for that matter, the adjacent lanes of 7th Avenue seem at once filled with electric guitars, so very many of them, slyly grinding against one another. When you first took notice of the song, it struck you as old-timey, pinned to a mid-tempo rhythm of curiously Hispanic tint (rumba? mambo?). Then, after a pause that could have delivered twins, the band switched up to something like mid-'70s disco. The thump of four-on-the floor kick drum now seems unstoppable. The hi-hat cymbal races ahead of the beat, then pulls back. This dynamic will repeat again and again and then some more. Yes, this feels like disco, but it's so much sexier, and you don't need 714's to appreciate it!

You can't understand the singer, but you are pulled in immediately, as he seems charming and possessed of good humor. His voice is double-tracked, so the recording feels modern; there's something you hadn't expected, modernity, from an African record. The singer parses each line of his lyrics as though savoring tobiko, egg by egg, his diction on par with Blossom Dearie. His is the song of a happy man, yet in the same breath he sounds tethered to a melancholy past. You begin to think that maybe this is the equivalent in song to Proust sampling a fresh madeleine.

In the space of not so many moments, you feel you've made a very real connection with someone you haven't met. When you get home, you waste money that you don't have sitting at curbside in this cab until Lawrence Nii Nartey back-announces his set. (Years later, NPR will label this a driveway moment, but as it is still 1982, you're parked on the cobblestones of Chambers Street. The twin towers of the World Trade Center loom nearby. At the end of your block is a sand dune that soon will sprout the apartment buildings of Battery Park City.) The cab's meter ticks onward. The cabbie laughs like a drain. The little honkie in his back seat learned something this evening, something the cabbie has known for some time now. On the radio, finally, Lawrence Nii Nartey tells you that you have fallen hard for a guy from Brazzaville named Pamelo Mounk'a. His song has been a huge hit both in Francophone Africa and in France itself. It is titled "L'Argent Appelle L'Argent."

As this journal began, so now shall it continue, inspired once more by the deathless voice of Pamelo Mounk'a. A quarter-century's reflection hasn't altered my opinion a whit: Pamelo remains as good as they come in Congolese music, probably better. His singing never felt less than entirely natural and alive. Though Pamelo Mounk'a could nuance a given phrase — or, indeed, a syllable within that phrase — with surgical precision, on the whole his delivery was modest and sincere, as simple as saying hello. As much could be said for each of his band members, their every move redolent with grace, sensuality and cunning. The lead guitar — though the distinction between lead and rhythm guitar in Congolese pop may not mean much beyond treble content — was the signature work of Ignace Inkounkou, a guy who merited his own fan club when billed as Master Mwana Congo. He played impudent and sly like Teeny Hodges, the guitarist from Memphis producer Willie Mitchell's house band, though it is doubtful that Hodges spent much time doting on the memory of Trio Matamoros while backing Al Green. On mi-solo guitar, Pablo Lubadika Porthos showed promise that would reap dividends mere months later with his own solo album. Domingo Salsero ranks alongside Janne Haavisto (Laika & the Cosmonauts) and the soul of motorik rhythm, Germany's Jaki Leibzeit, in the pantheon of tireless minimalist drummers. Domingo had the smarts to strain the hysteria from uptown Manhattan salsa, while always keeping in mind the rudiments of post-war Cuban music.

Pamelo Mounk'a was the first of the singer's winning streak of albums overseen by Eddy Gustave. The producer had left his native Guadeloupe, in the French West Indies, moving to Paris in 1960. A jazz enthusiast, he took up saxophone; Gustave's solos are heard throughout the mature work of Pamelo Mounk'a. It is a curious thing, the modernist Caribbean edge imparted by Gustave's studio technique and arrangements; clearly, these elements gave Pamelo Mounk'a a leg up on his fellow Congolese singers, yet the same elements foreshadowed the absorption and dismantling of soukous later in the '80s by the Antillean form known as zouk.

Just when most had judged it down for the count (I'll offer gratitude to the encouragement of hopeful correspondents), No Condition Is Permanent lives up to the pataphysical promise implicit in its title. My little journal has been revived by this torpid, vaporous summer, returning to provide virtual refreshment, reminding you that very, very warm weather requires a new pair of tatami-mat sandals and a kitchen cupboard stocked with appropriate snacks and fluids. To the latter, I will recommend Pimm's No. 1 in the proscribed admixture; as with the works of Wodehouse, the Pimm's Cup must be experienced above 72º and will only lull you to sleep in cooler temperatures. Closer to the crux of the seasonal biscuit is Arette Blanco Suave, being both necessary and nothing less than the apogee of Vitamin T when monsoon-quality humidity prevails.

As hedonist chums are prone to turning up unexpectedly in the sticky season, the sounds of equatorial musicians remain a must when the mercury climbs. While you can: rethink your morality (or at very least discard the troubling bits), open the windows, annoy the neighbors, plug in The Volcano, [cue: voice of Vivian Stanshall] think on't and begin again…

PAMELO MOUNK'A

Lijadu Sisters, Double Trouble

2006-02-07T23:34:00.000-08:00

There is much to love about the Lijadu Sisters, identical twins of entirely self-determined nature who sing like birds, albeit carnivorous birds with roomy lungs. The sisters raised a brood of four kids, none of whom allegedly knew which Lijadu sister, either Kehinde or Taiwo, was their respective mom. The Lijadu Sisters seemed to be well in control of their professional destiny and critical of the colonial mentality that pervaded Nigerian record companies. They also had little patience for the male chauvinism that was seemingly part of the furniture in their native Nigeria.

The Lijadu Sisters also featured in one of my favorite music documentaries, Konkombé. The work of English director Jeremy Marre, Konkombé was the Nigerian installment in his 14-episode world music series, Beats of the Heart, which ran often on PBS during the late '80s. The three chapters concerning the black diaspora (Jamaica, South Africa and Nigeria) held the best blend of musical, political and cultural content, and of this trio Konkombé was beyond fabulous. It was loaded stem to stern with great performances, fascinating archival footage, revealing interviews and near-palpable neighborhood funk. (With much of the last; speaking at New York's Museum of Natural History, Marre described the horrors — corpses left in front yards —routinely encountered during his Nigerian shoot.)

The Lijadus are seen taking care of their kids and rehearsing in the side yard of their house. Without much accompaniment beyond a couple of talking drums and acoustic guitar, the sisters sing in unison, laid-back and vibrantly erotic in the same breath: "If you want to…you can touch me." Then the camera invades a session with the Lijadu Sisters at the cramped, over-heated Lagos recording studio run by their record company, Decca West Africa. The same song is being recorded, but feels rushed, not nearly the wonderfully loose-limbed affair heard a few minutes previous. Aside from coping with their crumby work environment, the sisters do battle with their overbearing producer (a Nigerian version of the evil producer portrayed so well by Lou Reed in Paul Simon's otherwise regrettable film, One Trick Pony). It's a wonder Kehinde and Taiwo got anything done at all, much less music of the quality heard on today's download.

Double Trouble, released in the U.S. by the Shanachie label in 1984, compiled tracks from then-recent albums (Danger, Horizon Unlimited) by the sisters. Though obviously working in the same climate that gave rise to Afrobeat, being the great invention of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and drummer Tony Allen, the Lijadu twins drew additional rhythmic inspiration from reggae and West African high life.

The last I had heard of the Lijadus, both sisters had moved to Brooklyn, possibly in the late '80s. They played some dates at Wetlands, the lower Manhattan club-as-Petri-dish partially responsible for culturing the jam band plague. They also did a gig in Harlem, with King Sunny Adé's African Beats as their backing band; first on the bill was Robert Farris Thompson, noted Africanist and author of a genuinely deathless work, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy.

Unfortunately, that's the last I'd heard of them. It would be a dreadful shame if their fate mirrored that of another great African singer, Bebe Manga. The latter's epic "Amie-o" has been revived of late on the Golden Afrique Vol. 1 compilation, yet Bebe Manga's career seemed to end with her own move to Brooklyn. Much as I loathe Bob Dylan, I am reminded of his line about pitying immigrants who wished that they'd stayed home. Hopefully, the Lijadu Sisters are still up to something good.

DOUBLE TROUBLE

It never fails to amaze me, but there are humans — sentient types with driver's licenses and all, individuals presumably capable of dressing up and going places — who still have not twigged to the fact that there is music to be had from this site. So, with the consummate subtlety of a flying anvil, I will list the following and remind all concerned to check out the final link always, as encoded in the album title at the end of each entry. And there are new entries planned for the near future, "If we are spared," as my Scottish grandmother used to say. Oh, my grandmother, fun at parties…

Orchestra Super Mazembe, Kaivaska

2005-12-12T12:05:00.001-08:00

Joe Boyd, the American expatriate record producer, was once asked why contemporary English folk music — many of the best examples of which were produced by Joe Boyd — didn't resonate with most American record buyers. In response, he cited the African origins of most American pop music, and described music based in African idioms as 'a passport to fun.' By that consideration, your average Fairport Convention album might as well exist on a different planet than the one hosting either Africa or today's subject, Kaivaska.

Orchestra Super Mazembe reissue the passport to fun with each spin of Kaivaska, their 1982 album released in the U.K. by Virgin Records. The nine songs comprising Kaivaska are of consistent quality, energizing and vibrant. Collectively, they commemorate an African dance band at the top of its form connecting with the recording studio. Which hardly ever happens.

A friend (of Danish decent, so she really meant it) once described Orchestra Super Mazembe as "the happiest band in the word." Its membership might argue otherwise, as they weathered much of the grief routinely visited upon working musicians in Africa. Orchestra Super Mazembe — the latter portion of its name an homage to earth-moving equipment — relocated to Eastern Africa, specifically Nairobi, to establish itself at a remove from the highly competitive scene in its native Zaîre. Earlier on, the band had its instruments repossessed by its first patron immediately prior to crossing the Zambian border; fortunately, the club owner in Zambia owned gear they could use. Subsequent morbidity and mortality influenced Super Mazembe's shifting membership. By the mid-'80s, the group was effectively out of the running.

Factoring in these career speedbumps, my friend's words hold true. There probably isn't music much happier sounding than that played by Orchestra Super Mazembe. As one might expect of Congolese natives, Super Mazembe dealt in Congolese rumba (or soukous), the Latinate sound that still remains the Congo Republic's great contribution to music, one that could be described as salsa with the hysteria filtered out. Super Mazembe augmented their rumba template with elements of the local music in their adopted home, Kenyan benga. They weren't the first or the last band to do so, but may have been the best at it. Ultimately, theirs was indisputably an African music, with contours somewhat more linear than its Afro-Cuban antecedents, yet every bit as sensual.

Those readers interested in the greater history of Orchestra Super Mazembe should investigate Giants Of East Africa, a career-spanning overview of the band's music from the mid-'70s through the subsequent decade, as issued on a compact disc a few years ago by the Earthworks label. Trevor Herman's liner notes for this collection are the defining historical account this splendid band deserves. Even as he recounts their success on the hotel and agricultural fair circuit — really — Herman observes that Super Mazembe's timing for success outside of East Africa could have been better. The band peaked in the era of Kaivaska's release, then disintegrated shortly thereafter, a few years in advance of the coming world music boomlet.

Herman also makes note of one of the band's best performances, "Maloba D'Amour," being their cover of Buddy Holly's "Words of Love." The song is not included on Giants Of East Africa, which I find curious as it clearly was the centerpiece of Kaivaska, despite its being tucked away on the second side of the original vinyl disc. Anyone within my acquaintance who has heard Kaivaska remembers "Maloba D'Amour" with much fondness. The song is a holographic shard with hooks, one that enables both a view of the band's history and the extraordinary potential of its membership. More importantly, the song embodies — and then some — the fun alluded to by Joe Boyd. A solo guitar rephrases Holly's trademark hook with a borrowed Spanish accent. Drums and grouped voices slam in to a groove that, as was said of early singles by the Kinks, could be the sound of musicians running the four minute mile. Or jogging the four minute mile with spliff in hand, as I'd prefer to imagine Super Mazembe. The horn section blazes with authority, and the rolling groove seems altogether unstoppable. "Maloba…" ends with an out-chorus repeatedly hummed by the singers. I can think of only one other example of humming used to such great effect, by another group named after a bulldozer(!), Buffalo Springfield. (The latter's song, "Merry-Go-Round," was included on their third and final full-length, Last Time Around; Richie Furay sings lead, but Stephen Stills' timbre is unmistakable even when humming.)

Next on deck, the hottest identical twins ever to cut an album in Nigeria. Please stay tuned.

KAIVASKA

'Reebop' Kwaku Baah & Ganoua, Trance

2005-11-08T20:54:00.000-08:00

Here is an album that bridges English avant-pop music and something approaching ethnomusicology. It is also an artifact of a now-distant time, when hippies with an intellectual bent could pilot Land Rovers around Africa looking for both new sounds and a proprietary buzz to go with the music they'd discovered.

Steve Winwood plugged an important component into the second iteration of his group Traffic as the '70s began: a Ghanaian percussionist he found in Sweden, Anthony 'Reebop' Kwaku Baah. A merciless conga player, a good cook by all reports, most certainly an all-stops-out hedonist, Reebop made the front line of Traffic much fun to experience in the glam '70s, an era captioned by Traffic's Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys. He countered the band's innate tendency to experiment in concert and so meander; I will borrow Brian Eno's phrase and describe Reebop as Traffic's direct-inject anti-jazz ray gun. Reebop was also, to reiterate, a hedonist. By the time Traffic wound to a halt in mid-decade, as Winwood recalled, "[Reebop] was so out of it, he insisted on singing during every song." The band gave Reebop an unplugged microphone.

After Traffic, Reebop joined the German avant-garde group Can for the one album (without Can founder Holger Czukay) that Can enthusiasts still avoid discussing. However, "Masimbabele," a fantastic single recorded with two Cologne musicians calling themselves The Unknown Cases, turned up on the Rough Trade label in the early '80s. Reebop takes the lead vocal on this record and his singing comes off, surprisingly, as likeable. "Masimbabele" was later issued as part of WOMAD Talking Book Vol. Two: An Introduction To Africa. Reebop died in 1983, probably from the condition author Eve Babitz identified as over-boogie. Reebop had also worked on a solo project, unfinished at the time of his death.

In between his stints with Traffic and Can, Reebop Kwaku Baah entered into collaboration with musicians from the Ganoua (or G'noua), a mystical sect resident in North Africa whose roots may be traced across the Muslim diaspora to the Sudan. The album resulting from that collaboration, Trance, bookmarks the waning moments of an era when a pop record label of significance (in this case, Island Records) could issue foreign language songs played jointly by an African drummer and some hill people from Morocco.

The project was conceived and brought to fruition by Mim Scala, one of the 1200 or so humans who actually got to live the 'Swinging London' lifestyle during the mid-'60s. Scala had been a manager and agent and record company A&R, had socialized with artists and pop stars and gangsters (as one does); a high diver of the low life, Scala specialized in being wherever one was supposed to be in the halcyon days of rock stardom. Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones was a friend (comparisons between Scala and Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham are inevitable). Having returned from Morocco with tapes of the Master Musicians of Jajouka, Jones confided to Scala that music from other mystical sects lurked elsewhere in the Atlas Mountains. Subsequently, Jones died in 1969. His much-remixed tapes would eventually surface as the first release on Rolling Stones Records some three years on. In '69, Mim Scala ducked out of a London coming down from its high and hit the pot trail. What followed remains the stuff of hoary cliché: the Land Rover, the spiritual quest, the exotic girlfriend, the antipodal terrain, the fabulous dope, the amazing connections...

The notion of recording ritual music in Morocco stayed with Mim Scala. In 1975 Scala, then a shaggy itinerant but ever the scenemaker, coordinated a recording date in Tangiers involving both Reebop and a select group of Ganoua musicians. Several photos documenting the occasion may be found on Scala's cob-website, including one framing a topless blonde lady of fairly happening mien traversing the sand dunes next to Mim. He seems oblivious to her presence. Priorities being what they were back in the day, Mim is carefully toting his hookah to the next tent.

The sessions comprising Trance, like Brian Jones' recordings from Jajouka, were initially made on a four-track tape machine (Jones used a Uher; Scala, six years later, employed a Teac) then mixed to stereo in a London studio. The results were not overtly psychedelic, as with the phase-shifting and non-linear audio content of the album produced by Jones and engineer George Chkiantz. Still, Trance exudes its own druggy miasma. Those listeners with a past, as I'll euphemize, will probably experience sympathetic cottonmouth by the end of the title track, which spanned one side of the original vinyl pressing. The album whose sound best compares with today's offering — a signature laminate of moist reverb, off-mic incantations and other artifacts of reoriented consciousness —is probably Gris-Gris, the 1968 debut Atco label lp by Dr. John the Night Tripper. Though Dr. John had been a session player for Phil Spector, the New Orleans pianist's entrée into making records for hippies sounded like an arcane rite conducted in a graveyard…after a flood. He, too, knew the meaning of value added entertainment.

Trance, like Gris-Gris, is equal parts smoke and rising damp, music as chimera. The congas telegraph their presence seemingly several feet down a tiled hallway. Chants kick-start, then fade into rhythmic mumbling. Most of the album's five songs peg their mysteries to the buzzing gimbri, an acoustic bass guitar made from wood and leather, with metal resonators, that forms the melodic spine of Trance. Every one of these tracks is charged with subdued intensity, which in turn gives way to naked intensity.

In his notes, Mim Scala offers "The album Trance is the music of a separate reality. I hope to see you there." There may be no 'there' there anymore, not as Mim might have experienced it then, not in today's world. There is, however, a near-tangible reminder of Mim's 'there' in each fuzzy note and conga pop of Trance. He did get that much right and as such is owed a debt of gratitude by the proprietor of NCIP and its readership. Messages and potent imagery are embedded in this music. The Ganoua believe that music can have external meaning. This notion embarasses ethnomusicologists, but doesn't trouble the musicians. They believe that the gimbri speaks to them, and to the spirits surrounding them. Appropriately, Trance can trigger synesthesia, even at a remove in time. Listen closely and you may smell hash oil, kif smoke, roasting goat meat, estrogen, sweat and the vapors of petrol leaking from a crashed Land Rover.

Trance mesmerizes as great liturgical music should, even as it stains the air with a palpable sense of loss and evanesence. Writing in his best collection of short stories, Jesus' Son, author and fifth-gear hedonist Denis Johnson nailed the feeling with a scant few words:

That world! These days it's all been erased and they've rolled it up like a scroll and put it away somewhere. Yes, I can touch it with my fingers. But where is it?

TRANCE

Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey & His Inter-Reformers Band, Joy Of Salvation

2005-10-17T01:07:00.000-07:00

The late George Plimpton, consummate boulevardier and enthusiast-without-boundary, enjoyed fireworks as have few others. His 1984 book, Fireworks, A History and Celebration, is still considered the defining tome on the subject. Late in his career, Plimpton was appointed Commissioner of Fireworks for New York City, a position created especially for the 6' 4", plummy-voiced polymath. "They're wonderful, fireworks," Plimpton once told Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times, "You set fire to a fuse and there, suddenly, is everything a writer or artist wants to do. The crowd cheers and the sky lights up — you've elicited an immediate reaction."

Much as I doubt that Plimpton, editor of The Paris Review, occasional advertising pitchman and one-time Detroit Lion, had any significant encounters with African pop music, I wouldn't put money against it. George Plimpton could be counted upon to turn up wherever it was assumed that he wouldn't. Had the man whom John Wayne insisted on calling "Plankton" actually heard Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey and His Inter-Reformers Band, he might have recognized the incendiary energy common to both roman candles and the Nigerian approach to pedal steel guitar.

Whether Ebenezer Obey or King Sunny Adé was the great innovator of juju is possibly still open to debate. Obey certainly was in the game a few years earlier than Adé, and was a guiding force behind the minting of a genuinely Nigerian pop music; in the early '60s, highlife rhythms imported from neighboring Ghana still ruled local dance floors. Obey formed his first group, the International Brothers, in 1964. That group became the Inter-Reformers Band by 1970. By that point Obey & Co. were in the habit of completing four or more albums per annum.

Ebenezer Obey never found the connection to Western audiences enjoyed briefly by his rival, King Sunny Adé. In the first throes of enthusiasm for all things African as the '70s ended, Obey was signed by Virgin Records (as always, the Avis to Island Records' Hertz, Sunny Adé already having been signed to Island) but little came of it. Still, Obey enjoyed huge sales in Nigeria and has maintained a consistently prolfic output down the years. Having recounted as much, I'll admit that Joy of Salvation is the only one of his albums to have engaged me on par with my affection for any number of Sunny Adé's long-players.

[An editorial aside: The notion of spiritual absolutism in any form is anathema to this sensible hedonist, yet I am willing to allow for Chief Commander Obey's lyrical obsession with morality, honesty and the principal characters of the Bible because (1) his music brims with pagan vitality seemingly at odds with its ecclesiastical text and (2) he's singing in Yoruba, which makes it that much easier for me to ignore whatever deity-dedicated message he's putting across.]

About ten years ago, Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey and his 18-strong Inter-Reformers Band arrived in Los Angeles for a rare concert appearance. This event was marred from the get-go by the worst concert sound I'd encountered up to that point in time, or since for that matter. Horrendously loud and distorted in equal measure, Obey's P.A. drove the entire audience — even the African expat crowd — outdoors to the theater's patio. The Inter-Reformers almost sounded good when heard outside the building. I'd sneak back into the hall at intervals, where I'd spy a well-known DJ, a local eminence gris of world music, gamely grooving by himself in the near-empty hall. Even as I marveled at his perseverance, it seemed all too likely that the upper range of his hearing could vanish then and there. For my part, to paraphrase Don Marquis' Archy the cockroach, I'll take half the volume and twice the longevity as regards my own perception of treble frequencies. And so I retreated once more to the patio, there to ogle the solidly constructed Nigerian beauties in their Sunday best, complete with elaborately folded headpieces made from Japanese washi paper. Fantastic!

I'll let you set the volume for Joy of Salvation, all the while advising (slightly) louder is better as befits cheap electric guitars drenched in signal processing. And be sure to check Ebenezer's pedal steel player, his left wrist flexing like the tail of a moray eel. Our next installment, hopefully turning up sooner than did this one, lures NCIP and its constituency to Morocco. Please stay tuned.

JOY OF SALVATION (@ 160)
(vinyl courtesy of Dan Meinwald, E.A.R. USA)

Pablo Lubadika 'Porthos,' En Action

2005-09-18T12:21:00.000-07:00

No sooner was The Wire kind enough to spotlight this page as a good source both for African music and the Trivial Pursuits data accruing thereto, than NCIP took off for the Caribbean. This should not be taken as a measure of contrariness. Then again, were this so, I probably wouldn't admit it. In essence, my site follows the weather, with drinks, snacks and shoes to match in the best-case scenario.

This week's entry marks a return to soukous, the up-and-at-'em dance music of Zaïre and the Congo covered in our initial posts. Latinate by inspiration, purely African in its inventiveness and zest, Congolese 'rumba rock' still sounds new with each play. Musician and arch horn-dog Pablo Lubadika Porthos was featured in an earlier entry on the subject; today's offering, En Action, is his magnum opus, the album for which he should best be remembered.

Gary Stewart's history of Congolese music, the indispensable Rumba On The River, follows the peregrinations of Pablo's career, tracing steps from his mid-'70s tenure as guitarist in Vicky Longomba's Lovy du Zaïre and that group's next iteration, Orchestre Kara; Syran M'Benza, future member of Les Quatre Étoiles, was Pablo's bandmate during this era. Following his next bandleader, vocalist Sam Mangwana, young Pablo left a hardscrabble existence in Kinshasa behind for Lomé, Togo. Membership in the African All-Stars was a significant entry in Pablo's curriculum vita; the band was together less than a year, but as Stewart describes its legacy, the All-Stars recorded eight albums' worth of music and determined the future course of soukous itself in the process.

After recording the album Matilda in Lagos, Nigeria with the African All-Stars, Pablo moved west to Abidjan in Côte d'Ivoire, in the company of Mangwana and a core group of former All-Stars. He then would migrate to Paris; there, while still playing with Mangwana's group, Pablo became part of a stable of Congolese expatriate musicians haunting local studios. His guitar was a key component on the best recordings by Pamelo Mounk'a, as produced by Eddy Gustave. Pablo began devoting increasing amounts of time to his solo career. With producer Richard Dick at the helm, Pablo completed several extended dance tracks at Studio Laguna, some of which found their way onto Island Records' two-volume soukous anthology, Sound d'Afrique.

Pablo sussed out the advantages that Parisian studios offered circa 1980 and soon was overdubbing multiple guitar and bass parts himself. He was helped in no small measure during the solo sessions by Ignace Nkounkou, better known as Master Mwana Congo, a wizardly guitarist, maybe the Congolese conterpart to Teeny Hodges from Al Green's band. Master's sparkling ostinati (as I've long ago concluded, the sound of a guitar telling itself a dirty joke) embellished recordings by Pamelo Mounk'a, Lea Lignazi and many others among the Kinshasa-in-Paris ex-pat set. Also on board were drummer Domingo Salsero and Priso 'en sax.' The four tracks recorded for En Action were issued as two 12" singles by Island, but were never released as a consolidated album in the West. Gary Stewart offers the best description of that album:

"Pablo's new work delivered the latest increment in the music's evolution, a ménage à trois of of old-school musicianship, the African All-Stars' faster paced new beat and the repetitive guitar phrasing of Kinshasa's youth bands. The music aimed below the waist, and it succeeded famously."

Should anyone have had possible cause to doubt the latter ambition, Pablo's best solo album was adorned with what amounts to photography-as-mission statement. The women pictured in Pablo's company, incidentally, were styled by skilled hands from Parisian salon Coiffure Marceline, “Chic African Hair Dress,” at 56 rue des Poissoniers. Labor-intensive hair is much appreciated here at NCIP. Not to put too fine a spin on the issue, I'll exert my flair for the obvious by pointing out the visual evidence of Pablo's credentials as a hedonist non pareil; his unassuming expression on the cover of En Action more and less says it all. Monsieur Pablo, wherever you may be in the present moment — whether on earth or in the aether — rest assured that you've earned our respect.

[Today's vinyl courtesy of the Tony Conrad collection.]

EN ACTION

Pier' Rosier & Gazolinn', Gazolinn'

2005-09-05T20:42:00.000-07:00

Here's another gem first heard during one of the late '80s table tennis matches described in my last post. Gazolinn' represents the high-water mark of my fondness for zouk, the Antillean dance music blending influences from Haiti (compas), Europe and the folk traditions (biguine and cadence) of Guadeloupe and Martinique, both islands in the Caribbean's Lesser Antilles archipelago. Indeed, today's entry, Gazolinn', is best described as the spawn of an assignation between Kraftwerk and Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band near a beach-side disco in Martinique.

Zouk was another exotic music genre seemingly destined to take over the world in the '80s. Within the Francophone diaspora, you could say that it did just that for a time. Soukous, the brilliant dance music featured in NCIP's introductory posts, was nearly flattened outright by the one-two punch of MIDI sequencing and zouk. Though garnering huge audiences in Europe and Africa, zouk made next to no impact in the West, if possible even less than its immediate predecessors, Nigerian juju and soukous from the Congo (via Paris). As the decade closed, zouk's non-impact became an inadvertent barometer of America's xenophobia, mounting then and intensifying through the present day.

Pier' Rosier came to zouk from a grounding in chouval bwa, the rhythm-weighted traditional form of Martinique, a music associated with carnival. In the early '80s, Rosier formed the band Gasoline and when that dissolved, owing to those oft-cited creative differences, he assembled Gazolinn'. This new iteration of his band turned then-new MIDI and sampling technologies to its own great advantage, with Rosier handling the lion's share of programming and arranging. As with Les Quatre Étoiles' recordings from the same period, Gazolinn' struck a workable alliance between horn charts that jabbed and feigned, creole lyrics delivered by full ensemble chant or sultry cabaret purr atop computer-driven rhythms moving at full clip, augmented with busy hand percussion. I found myself enjoying instruments I usually loathed (electric piano at its lounge-iest, or the deadly squealing faux-roadhouse sax that must be Lorne Michaels' favorite instrument), further testament to the enduring greatness of Gazolinn'.

While not steeped in all things folkloric to the same extent as Jocelyne Beroard, zouk's greatest voice fronting the group Kassav', Gilda Ray's singing here is supple and versatile, the sound of l'amour fou in any language. Her vocals provide an immediate prompt for comparison with Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band, circa 1976 ("Cherchez La Femme"), as her timbre reminded me then and now of the latter band's Cory Daye. Gilda Ray was easily the more musically sure-footed of the two; Cory Daye relied on acting ability and volume to disguise her somewhat impressionistic relationship with intonation. To be altogether blunt, Ms. Daye often sounded as though she was most of the way in the bag. Anyone capable of sitting through a single play of Dr. Buzzard's regrettable late period effort, Calling All Beatniks (its possible subtitle: All of the reverb, None of the band), will know whereof I speak.

The Shanachie label released Zouk Obsession in 1990, a Pier' Rosier compilation including material from both periods of his career. How an anthology devoted to Gazolinn' could avoid interesting music is anyone's guess, but somehow Shanachie managed exactly that. After my first encounter with the Rosier sound in Original Music's barn, I scooped up as much of the band's original vinyl as I could grab at the time — including another self-titled release whose cover features a merde-encrusted human peering from beneath a manhole cover and pointing a can of air freshener at the photographer. I soon learned that every Gazolinn' album contained at least a few songs, though often more, of comparable worth with the music you will hear today. None of these albums, to my ear, is quite on par with Gazolinn', saturated as it is with the good stuff stem to stern. Still, there's much to recommend in the group's discography, so it's all the more curious that neither Rosier nor Gazolinn' merit so much as a mention in the usually well-researched volumes comprising World Music: The Rough Guide. It seems that a remedial Gazolinn' comp is in order, and so I will attempt same at some point in the foreseeable future.

GAZOLINN' (@ 320)

Coupé Cloué et L'Ensemble Select, Sôciss

2005-08-21T02:20:00.000-07:00

It seems that most new planets, especially those recent add-ons within our ever-expanding solar system, are discovered by more and less the same process. As I've been told, astronomers figure out where a planet ought to be and proceed to case the neighborhood with enhanced scrutiny. Often as not, these guys get lucky by informed means and something turns up.

By rights, then, it should have made sense that I'd gravitate to Haitian music. The western side of the island known as Hispaniola still holds the greatest concentration of African émigrés (that is a euphemism, folks) in the Caribbean. Also, Haiti occupies midddle ground, er, sea between Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Cuba; records from each of the latter three convinced me that equatorial musicians are second to none, all the better if they've honed their craft in comparative isolation on some island. Then there are the fabulous corollary attractions of Haiti to consider: native brews, exotic combustibles, populous bat and insect colonies, bizarre syncretic religions (and the oppressive dictatorships that exploit same), zombies and so much more.

I'm opting not to snow all of you with an account of musical detective work in exotic climes that led me to Coupé Cloué. Instead, I will own up and reveal that I first heard Gesner Henry and his impossibly cool compas band L'Ensemble Select in a barn in upstate New York, more than likely during a late '80s game of table tennis. The barn in question belonged to an English expatriate, John Storm Roberts. Though Roberts delighted in raising ducks and chickens on a Dutchess County farm, his principal concern was Original Music, the first niche record company devoted to nurturing a then-nascent world music audience. A convincing case could be made for the fact that Roberts' first release on the label, the continent-spanning compilation Africa Dances, kick-started the whole worldbeat issue. (Though as good a case could be made for Robert Christgau's favorable review that appeared in The Village Voice a year or two after the album's release; to that point, circa '82, a great many copies of the record had been languishing in Roberts' closet).

Original Music grew through the '80s, both as a record label and a mail-order source of lp's and cassettes and, later, compact discs from faraway places with popular music of their own. That other countries made their own popular music, being music about cars and girls and fast money, music to do the horizontal mambo to — rather than the tuned rock- and log-beating that preoccupied most ethnomusical types to that point — wasn't news to Roberts. He'd been stationed throughout Africa as a UNESCO employee and had assiduously purchased the local top ten wherever he'd lived. Interest in indigenous pop was the focus of Roberts' writing (Black Music of Two Worlds, The Latin Tinge), his own field recordings (as issued by Nonesuch Explorer and Folkways labels) and definitely his Original Music imprint.

I moved upstate from Manhattan in 1985. Once settled, I made a point of seeking out Roberts' farm and soon enough found myself editing and remastering Original Music compilations in my studio. Many happy days were spent in the barn housing Original, a drafty, miserably cold affair in winter, so much more fun in the warmer seasons. Roberts set up a ping-pong table in the main room, the scene of endless matches between Original employees and visitors as the stereo blasted Congolese soukous, beguine from Martinique, than ko from Southeast Asia or old jazz sides by King Oliver. On a given summer day, the ping-pong ball's report bounced off the roof beams, pets of various species wandered through 'the office' and a record I'd only just heard would set a hook in my consciousness, usually in the same moment that a winning serve had cost me a point; happily, I recall Najma's Anglo-Indo hybrid Qareeb as one of those mid-game revelations. Sôccis, by Coupé Cloué et L'Ensemble Select, was another.

Here's what I actually know about Coupé Cloué, a.k.a. Gesner Henry: He was born in 1925 in Leogane, Haiti. He won renown first as a professional football star. Gesner's nickname, typical of his sly nature, was a multifold pun on both soccer skills and sexual prowess. His musical career lasted some forty years, beginning with Trio Crystal, later renamed Trio Select which then morphed into L'Ensemble Select by the early '70s. In that time, Coupé Cloué managed a brainy and sensuous meld of old-school twobadou style (its guitar technique imported from Cuba by cane-cutters), island folk rhythms, Haitian méringue and jazz. He popularized electric guitar in Haiti's pop music. Singing in Francophone patois, from the beginning Henry evinced a knack for double entendre. (Though the cover photo and the title of today's album, Sôciss, nearly qualifies as a single entendre, one about as subtle as a flying anvil.) And so, another reason to enjoy Coupé Cloué: Gesner Henry was wonderfully rude, as remains obvious to Haitians and honkies alike. Most of his songs featured extended monologues set to music, commentaries on life and love and sex, the human condition at a humid latitude; imagine Balzac telling dirty jokes while leading an irresistable dance band. Gesner's own delivery alternated between song and speech much like that of his American counterpart, Andre Williams, another transcendental hedonist.

The guitar interplay within L'Ensemble Select much resembles that heard in Congolese rumba-rock or soukous, the stuff of my initial (and future) NCIP posts. Gesner Henry always claimed that he had not heard soukous prior to visiting the Congo in 1975. Not surprisingly, Henry & Co. were très populaire in Africa and remained so at home. Indeed, Coupé Cloué may have been too popular for their own good in Haiti, as they were often asked to perform at parties held by the Tonton Macoutes, the dreaded secret police force maintained by dictator Jean-Claude 'Baby Doc' Duvalier. Gesner Henry was sensitive to criticism of these gigs, deflecting charges that he supported a corrupt regime by pointing out that an invitation from the Tonton Macoutes was one that you couldn't refuse.

Gesner Henry died at age seventy-three in 1998, about four weeks after his final performance. Like Pamelo Mounk'a, Henry was a victim of diabetes. It saddens me, that there won't be any more records by Coupé Cloué; I wish there were more like him. Other Haitian bands like Boukman Eksperyans and Tabou Combo and RAM more recently have made inroads with international audiences; while they're each one fine in their own right, they all seem more than a bit polite. None possess the rootsy, lo-fi raunch of Gesner and his ensemble of horn-dogs. Someone once described Neil Young's Crazy Horse as being the antithesis of slick, looking like a band made up of car thieves. To judge by the picaresque verve evident in every note of their music, Coupé Cloué et L'Ensemble Select played like a band of car thieves.

SOCISS

Prince Jazzbo, Natty Passing Thru' / Ital Corner

2005-08-12T18:50:00.000-07:00

Each iteration of this journal has found me striving to preach both to the choir and beyond, by hopefully inviting means. Some years ago, Paul Buckmaster (composer of the 12 Monkeys film score and string arranger for the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers lp…and for Elton John, too, but we'll forgive him) chastised me gently, as he is a good egg, for assuming too much of my readership's knowledge. He felt that my writing should be more instructive for those new to the subject at hand. I agreed with Mr. Buckmaster, then and now.

Of course, that doesn't make introducing this week's entry any easier, as our featured album represents a number of entwined threads:

• Jamaica's DJ culture of the '70s, which in turn spawned hip-hop and rap and the debatable 'science' of remixing
• that most prolific record producer, Lee "Scratch" Perry, an inventive runt whose mixes are recognizable from note one and whose significance in the history of popular music is unimpeachable
• the embrace of weirdness for its own sake as an esthetic strategy, utilized — perhaps unconsciously — by artist and producer alike, often to self-immolating extremes (literally, in Perry's case, as he ended the chapter of his greatest creativity by torching his own studio)
• the admixture of music, humor, millennial cult religion, paranoia and drugs

What say, we just take the last three for granted? It would make my life so much easier. OK, anyone unfamiliar with Lee Perry and the musical output of his backyard studio, a blaze of hard work and bizarre inspiration lasting three or maybe four years (depending on the strength of your affection), is directed to David Katz's biography and the Scratch-themed back number of the Beastie Boys' magazine Grand Royal. Those acquainted with the quixotic, ultra-distinctive and probably pathological career paths of record producers Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, Joe Meek and Todd Rundgren should have no trouble mapping Thread #3 onto today's topic. And as I'm certain you've all taken drugs and laughed achingly at nothing in particular while music was playing and then wondered why, perhaps hoping that membership in the Church of the Subgenius might solve your existential dilemma...well, I think that takes care of Thread #4. Are we happy thus far, Mr. Buckmaster?

It would be easy to dismiss Prince Jazzbo as an also-ran in reggae, a DJ who validated trends rather than instigating them. Consider the pantheon* of Jamaican DJ's:

• U-Roy, the first true star of 'talkover,' shrieking and cackling nursery rhymes and ass-backward limericks over instrumental mixes of hit songs;
• I-Roy, his toasting glacially cool, wicked and literate, fast as lightning, a consummate wise-ass with a gift for extemporaneous lyrics comparable only to Lou Reed;
• Big Youth, spearheading the second wave of DJ's during the 'cultural' era, the perfect blend of good humor, Rasta dread, fascinating orthodonture and the manic presence of a late night horror movie host, crazy about motorcycles, Marcus Garvey, John Coltrane and herb;
• Prince Far-I, the sub-glottal rumble of his voice probably registering on the Richter scale above that of Barry White, filled with righteous indignation (Inspirational quote: "I grieve for this generation"), the lone source of information whom I'd believe, were the world about to end.

Jazzbo shared qualities with each of these characters, though to my ear he never came across as an originator. For many reggae fans, he was the guy who lost a cutting contest with I-Roy. As documented in David Katz's indispensable oral history of reggae, Solid Foundation (Bloomsbury, 2003), the war of words between Prince Jazzbo and I-Roy was a marketing gimmick instigated by the manager of Monica's, the Toronto hairdressing shop that became a serious reggae emporium in the '70s, as mentioned in my Medley Dub entry.

It all began cute, but sure as my mom or Michael Madsen's Mr. Blonde will tell you, the kids play rough and somebody — in this case, Prince Jazzbo — gonna end up crying. His "Straight to I-Roy's Head" single charged that I-Roy was a mere U-Roy imitator, a barb too polite by half. Jazzbo was a ghetto kid, unschooled and fundamentally kind. I-Roy was anything but, as he proceeded to rip several new orifices in the carcass of Jazzbo's career with the demented relish of a Sergio Leone villain. I-Roy's intimation that Prince J was gay was but one among many of the former's rapid-fire ripostes, each more lethal than the last. This was about as bad as it could get in Jamaica, an island whose males suffer a paralyzing fear of homosexuals and the menstrual cycle (to the latter, blood clot, bumba clot, etc. as the last words in deprecation, not to mention grounds for justifiable homicide). Jazzbo couldn't compete, ultimately, and threw in the towel. Incidentally, the 45's documenting Jazzbo's and I-Roy's feud were collated on an lp, Step Forward Youth, which I have yet to find, this collection distinct from the entirely weak conciliatory duet CD they released over a decade later.

We will never know Prince Jazzbo's true place in the greater scheme, had his recorded debut (Choice of Version) appeared as scheduled in the early '70s; producer Coxsone Dodd delayed its release by a couple of decades and more. As such, the album known variously as Natty Passing Thru' (for its initial release on the Black Wax label in Jamaica) or Ital Corner (when later issued in the U.S. by Brad Osbourne's Clocktower imprint) represents Prince Jazzbo's moment in the sun. It was tracked in its entirety early in 1974 at producer Lee "Scratch" Perry's newly opened four-track studio, the Black Ark, a garage-sized structure in Perry's backyard, with Perry's house band as rhythm section.

The Upsetters were Scratch's answer to the Meters, whose New Orleans funk was plagiarized often and effectively on early Upsetters instrumentals. Most of Ital Corner's tracks were cut for Jazzbo's use, according to David Katz's exhaustively researched People Funny Boy: the Genius of Lee "Scratch" Perry (Payback Press, 2000). Some rhythms, though, will prove immediately familiar, the accompaniment of Max Romeo's "One Step Forward" recycled as the basis of Jazzbo's "Ital Corner." The sound is pure Scratch, reggae-as-moiré-pattern, the entire band and vocalist pushed through phase shifters and excessive spring reverb. The other Black Ark productions released on Island Records had the benefit of English mastering engineers. Ital Corner is rougher around the edges, dark as India ink and enhanced with portents of doom. We hear the DJ at the bottom of a very deep pit, en route to Hell; the horn section squalls like insects over a distant hill at dusk.

Throughout, Prince Jazzbo plays the sufferer, enumerating the difficulties of a Rastafarian marooned several area codes distant from his true Ethiopian home. Jazzbo's raps document his struggles through the veil of tears known as Babylon or Jamaica, as Noel Coward and Ian Fleming might have recognized it. Our Prince bad-raps the Pope and rails against the breadheads with vehemence that would do Neil of The Young Ones proud. All told, Jazzbo summons feelings of wrath and paranoia and vengeance that, combined with the fog of herb, create an ambience that is very dread indeed. And, from time to time, a tad dyslexic, as typified by Scratch's decision to let an episode of the Rhoda TV sitcom play into the mix of "Blood Dunza." (Myself, I'll take the Pope over Valerie Harper, but to each man his own image of iniquity.) An outtake from the Ital Corner sessions, "Croaking Lizard," appeared a few months later as part of the Upsetters' Super Ape, a rococo masterpiece still available on aluminum, the Sgt. Pepper's… of reggae, deconstructed and over-embroidered all at once. Differing from other NCIP entries to date, Ital Corner has been issued on CD, though obviously ripped from a vinyl pressing and not so well at that. I hope today's entry is an improvement.

It has been mooted that the more tightly wound rhythms of rock steady unspooled into the slower tempo of reggae in response to very loaded types dancing outdoors in the depths of an especially muggy Jamaican summer. I'd venture that now's the perfect time to reenact history. It's Friday, for Jah's sake. Torch one, people! Check it! Seen? As I would really, really tell ya!

ITAL CORNER

* Well, my pantheon, anyway. Make your own if you don't like it.

Prince Jammy, Jammy's In Lion Dub Style

2005-08-05T01:32:00.000-07:00

Dub, in all its shadowy refulgence, offers pleasure on par with few other items in my life. Its pleasures are rivalled only by the sight of pale, overly-mascara’ed, zaftig girls spilling out of black corsetry at Goth clubs or, more likely, the cloudy afternoon that finds me curled up with a favorite anthology of Charles Addams cartoons. There is more than faint redolence of the macabre, enjoyably so, in the murky dream logic of reggae deconstructed in dub. Fitting, then, that the caption of a particular Addams cartoon sums for me the joy of immersion in a great dub album: Addams's drawing shows the couple whom we now know as Gomez and Morticia (thanks to the ABC sitcom, as they were never named in the pages of The New Yorker) standing in the doorway of their decayed Victorian pile, waving good night to a pair of mutants shambling down the front walk. Gomez remarks, “I like them. They wear well.”

As much can be said, and more (as you knew I would) of Jammy’s In Lion Dub Style. Though it appeared circa ’77, in the fading years of dub’s halcyon era, this set is a standard bearer for the form, with its many strengths linked to the first great collections of ‘version’ sides appearing earlier in the decade. Jammy's... was mixed at the studio of dub potentate King Tubby, by his then-assistant Prince Jammy (neé Lloyd James). Most of the tracks versioned herein were drawn from Black Uhuru’s debut album for Jammy’s label, reissued by Greensleeves in the U.K., the set known variously as Black Sounds of Freedom or Love Crisis. That group’s vocal talent was mostly absent from Jammy’s In Lion Dub Style, as the mixer of the title was concerned with hammering out his own signature mixes and escaping the shadow, still lengthening through the present day, of his employer. The space-delineating reverb, a Fisher unit rewired by King Tubby, added a dimension perhaps best appreciated by spelunkers. Though there was more than enough bass, the first priority of any self-respecting dub organizer, Jammy used filter sweeping to create slow-motion melodies, anticipating Kraftwerk’s activities in this area by a full decade or more. The album that emerged was dark, very dark, deceptively plain-spun as a Double Dutch rhyme and every bit as insidious.

Prince Jammy issued this lp in close proximity to two other essential dub albums he created, Horace Andy’s In The Light Dub (reissued on CD in combination with its parent album of songs, on the Blood & Fire imprint) and Gregory Isaacs’ Slum In Dub. Jammy’s In Lion Dub Style has never seen release on aluminum, possibly owing to what Steve Barrow (A&R director for archival imprint Blood & Fire, he's also the music’s greatest historian, the A.J.P. Taylor of reggae) described as ‘ineradicable groove swish.’ This artifact is occasionally audible and may speak to an attribute of the studio then frequented by Prince Jamm y. To describe many of the dubs being cut in King Tubby’s studio is to speak literally; often as not, the mixes went straight to a disc-cutting lathe, bypassing the usual intermediary master tape. This technique is still employed by audiophile labels; it certainly abetted the cavernous sound stage and stygian bass unique to Tubby’s mixing room.

Of course, an enduring tenet of dub is that the weirdest, most inventive mix can’t save a duff performance. Jammy’s In Lion Dub Style drew upon sessions featuring a stellar array of Jamaican studio talent: Robbie Shakespear on bass, drumming by Sly Dunbar or Carlton ‘Santa’ Davis, keyboards by Keith Sterling and Winston Wright (both from the later edition of Lee Perry’s studio band, the Upsetters) and the largely unsung MVP of reggae, guitarist Earl ‘Chinna’ Smith.

I was saddened, as many others were, to see 'cultural' rhythms of the '70s segue into ‘80s dancehall. The ostensible symptoms of change seem linked. The figurative death of songwriting in reggae. The too-literal death of many legendary talents (Marley, Tosh, Prince Far I, Hugh Mundell, Michael Smith — the latter stoned to death by a mob in the 20th Century — and King Tubby himself), others emigrating from the world's loudest island. Dancehall’s serving as soundtrack for the test-marketing of crack in Jamaica, before that substance became the mid-'80s agent of cultural corrosion elsewhere. Prince Jammy matriculated to King Jammy as this new era dawned and made his greatest mark as a dancehall producer. I will always favor the earlier years, though, when he helmed fabulous dubs such as those heard today.

As Jammy’s In Lion Dub Style is a comparatively brief collection, I have added a rarity found only on a 12” vinyl single, to the best of my knowledge. The A-side is a song by the Congos, “Jah Is The Sweetest.” (By the way, since I've mentioned Black Uhuru already in this post, don’t you think it’s interesting how reggae artists obsess about Haile Selassie-as-godhead, until their royalty cheques improve? Excepting Burning Spear, of course.) The B-side, included in today’s listening, is “Reggae Strings,” credited to Derrik (sic) Holtsma and Sly & Robbie. The intro of this instrumental finds the treble muted, under heavy manners. Another wild filter sweep, the high end opens up and lead violins (!) appear in duet; a bit Alice In Wonderland, this. I don’t know of any other reggae tracks that employ strings so effectively, save for those comprising the four volumes of Harry Mudie Meets King Tubby In Dub Conference. (Jamaicans were way in front — by years — of author Alexander McCall Smith in the baroque titling sweepstakes.) “Reggae Strings” resembles a soundtrack cue from two decades later, composer Angelo Badalamenti’s “Alvin’s Theme,” the splendid musical centerpiece of The Straight Story. That film was directed by David Lynch, something of an Addams character in his own right.

Next up, our trio of Jamaican posts concludes with the one mid-‘70s album from Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Black Ark studio that still is not properly represented on CD. Please stay tuned...Querida.

JAMMY'S IN LION DUB STYLE

REGGAE STRINGS

Errol Brown & the Sky Nations Band, Medley Dub

2005-07-29T15:08:00.000-07:00

Not so long ago, an acquaintance was curious as to my stance regarding drugs. The response was immediate and truthful: I own many dub albums. Several posts within No Condition Is Permanent come with recommendations for cocktails appropriate to the sounds at hand; with today’s post, I can only hone my flair for the obvious: Herbalizers, start your vaporizers!

Yes, herb and herb alone will provide the change of mind best matched to today’s offering, Medley Dub. The album embodies the allure of dub, Jamaica’s contribution to electronic music. As is common knowledge by now, dub was born in Kingston's studios. There, recording engineers deconstructed the multi-track tapes of songs, playing mixing board faders as one might play a piano's keys. The singer's track would be dialed out, so that DJ's could 'toast' atop rhythms embellished with splashes of reverb and runaway tape echo, effects borrowed from Ennio Morricone's scores for spaghetti westerns, these films being fantastically popular in Jamaica. (The English music historian and theorist David Toop, ever wise, once described Morricone as 'a straight line drawn between Puccini and dub reggae.')

Medley Dub exemplifies this form early in its evolution. In these re-imagined 'versions,' non-sequiturs gallop out of the shadows, only to fade seconds later; imagine a reggae band performing on the far bank of the river Styx, its vocalist occasionally struck by lightning. George Melly’s description of '60s psychedelic music (from his essential Revolt Into Style) serves dub equally well: "Objects appear and disappear, metamorphosis becomes a commonplace." The songs have been stolen out from under their singers. Only apparitions remain, shadowy voices drifting through the studio reverb unit, the sound of fata morgana. Bass and drums rule the dance to seismic effect. Logic becomes immaterial, just so much smoke in the grooves of hastily pressed vinyl.

I was one lucky college student. My initial exposure to dub, and to Jamaican music in general, occurred in the living room of Martin Walsh, film professor, armchair Marxist, hedonist without constraint and an unapologetic skirt-chaser. (My first experience of psychedelics took place in Walsh’s front room, too, recalled in my “Epiphany” essay for the U.K. periodical, The Wire.) Walsh, an Englishman, had recently moved to Canada. Jamaican sounds were already well established in his menu of rococo appetites. The Walsh collection was well-stocked with lp sleeves whose crude two-color printing exuded rude magnetism: the Twinkle Brothers Rasta Pon Top, Culture’s Two Sevens Clash, Prince Far I’s Psalms For I. Best of all, he thought Bob Marley was dull. (Curiously, Martin adored Springsteen and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Go figure.)

Prof. Walsh was my ticket in. Early on in our acquaintance, he put Augustus Pablo’s King Tubbys Meets The Rockers Uptown on the turntable. Immediately, I witnessed a mere 12" vinyl disc threaten the structural integrity of his Victorian house. I sat very still, impressed into silence. It was as though I had discovered moving pictures by bumbling into a screening of Citizen Kane in time for the establishing shots of Xanadu.

I wasn’t able to score my own copy of King Tubbys… immediately. My professor took me along on shopping trips to Toronto’s Caribbean ghettos in search of rootical vinyl. There we would stroll past sullen black women seated beneath hair dryers; the best albums were found in the back of Monica’s, a beauty parlor on Eglinton. Medley Dub was my first purchase on one such foray. The cover was sealed with tape that had stained its cardboard. The price was inscribed on the sleeve with scarlet grease pencil. There was next to no information at all beyond the track titles and an engineering credit. Already worn-looking and smelling of permanent solution, the record promised dark stuff. I had the goods in hand, all I had to do was buy the thing. Needless to add, Medley Dub delivered in spades.

In his excellent notes for the Musical Feast compilation, Heartbeat label proprietor Chris Wilson offers a respectful depiction of Sonia Pottinger, the producer whose High Note imprint originally issued Medley Dub. Her productions, in his words, “…were characterized by a thoughtfulness, and a certain innocence.” (Wilson refers to the producer as ‘Mrs. Pottinger’ throughout, even in the subtitle of his compilation. Manners and respect will always carry the day here at NCIP.) That innocence was balanced by the Mephistophelian touch of engineer Errol Brown. His many early dub releases include the Treasure Isle In Dub series and, alongside those of King Tubby (a deity who walked among us as a man, at least until he was shot in his front yard), helped to define dub in its nascent years during the early '70s.

Errol Brown’s dub mixes make a good case for the position, still held by many a dub aficionado, that great dubs can only be fashioned from four-track master tapes. Even so, Brown manages to isolate fragments of the music at critical junctures, summoning drama, mystery and even comedy when least expected. Hearing the brass section solo’ed as the players tied into the central riff from “Lazy, Crazy, Hazy Days of Summer” must have had dancers in Kingston’s yards smiling in spite of the humidity. Soon enough, dub would enter its surrealist/dadaist phase, where doorbells and test tones and cuckoo clocks accessorized the mixes compiled within Joe Gibbs’ African Dub series or the much-chronicled mid-‘70s output of Lee Perry’s Black Ark studio. Medley Dub was the acme of an earlier moment, when the spry rhythms of rock steady had yet to slow down; the transition to the gravitas of ‘70s cultural reggae rhythms had begun. As you will hear, the dark stuff was already seeping in.

MEDLEY DUB

Leland "Atta" Isaacs, Atta

2005-07-21T10:56:00.000-07:00

I began my last post with an aside on the dearth of female record producers down the ages. Said aside quickly snowballed and very nearly pushed my album notes to the periphery. Since I am fond of the thought that nothing succeeds like an excess of excess, I will now continue in that vein, extolling the merit of one more lady producer: Margaret Williams, proprietor of Tradewinds Records. Allow me first to decorate the stage:

Much has been written about the ‘70s renaissance of roots music in Hawai’i, spearheaded by the immortal Charles Philip “Gabby” Pahinui. Some musically sensitive honkies in G-8 countries are familiar with his slack-key and lap steel guitar playing, owing to a mid-'70s collaboration with Californian guitarist Ry Cooder over the span of two Gabby Pahinui Band albums, both of them thoroughly enjoyable. Additionally, Gabby made a 1976 guest appearance on Cooder's own Chicken Skin Music. Pahinui was the acme of soulfulness. His innate authenticity was evident from note one forward, both in his singing and playing, and in this regard he compares favorably with England's Robert Wyatt. Hawaiians still regard him as musical royalty, which is saying something given that actual titled folk have done their fair share of songwriting in Pahinui’s native archipelago. (He didn't live like royalty, though; Gabby worked on road crews throughout his adult life.) If you can find any of the half-dozen Gabby Pahinui albums issued on the Panini label, the great work of Gabby’s later years being impetus for Steve Siegfried to launch Panini, please buy these without pausing to think about it. You can thank me later.

Leland ‘Atta’ Isaacs was a central figure in the Cooder-produced Gabby Pahinui Band. He and Gabby recorded as well for Margaret Williams’ Tradewinds label; their duet album, Two Slack Key Guitars: A-Livin’ On A Easy, plays like maypole ribbons unfurling in slow motion, mixes well on warmer days with the traditional recipe for Pimm’s Cup, and is too short by half. Possibly aware of this last fact, producer Williams, when reissuing Two Slack Key Guitars... on aluminum, added four cuts from another Tradewinds album she had produced. An instrumental set, Atta also was frustratingly concise, but within its limited playing time managed to showcase all that is beguiling about a most Hawaiian invention, the tuned-down acoustic guitar format known as slack key. Atta also made a very good case for Mr. Isaacs as a stand-alone artist. The pianist George Winston is a slack-key maven non pareil; his Dancing Cat label put state-of-the-art technology in the service of Hawai’i’s best guitarists. Dancing Cat CD packaging might be demeaned by the expression 'labor of love,' with booklets supplying history, tunings, family trees, everything short of the brand of beer consumed during the sessions. Yet, for all Winston’s commendable efforts, I don’t think he’s ever nailed anything like the jeweled movement that is Atta.

And so, to the record’s producer: When trying to locate a copy of Atta many years ago, I mailed a note to the Tradewinds address in Honolulu. Months later, Ms. Williams herself responded with a handwritten letter, explaining that she had closed the label. She thanked me for my interest. She also enclosed a copy of the Atta lp, gratis. I was given to understand that she had retired to Richmond, CA., a place where the right piece of property nets a swell view of huge oil tanks. So this is where Hawaiians retire. Go figure.

For her part in the proceedings, Ms. Williams earned marks as a producer whose good taste will outlive her. Her liner notes point out that “Atta uses a new 12-string guitar with delightful results.” By my own cynical lights, ‘delightful’ qualifies as a treacly Victorian descriptor on all but the sunniest of days. Producer Williams obviously has dignity to spare and her use of that word connotes her joy in knowing the job was done well; it seems obvious that she was proud of Atta in his accomplishment and quietly proud, too, of her own work in the control room. The recordings made by Ms. Williams play to the gleam of Isaacs’ steel strings, his laid-back brio and that of the trio accompanying him on each cut. I’d like to think that Atta’s brother Norman played double bass as other Hawaiian players have, which is to say like just another guitar, the huge instrument laying sideways across his lap.

POSTSCRIPT: Though I’ve tried to keep this journal — blog has an uncomfortably urological ring to it, don’t you think? — free of personal testimony save for that which reinforces the picaresque contours of my own reputation, I will make an exception for the moment. A bright spark in my life, Six Degrees Records publicist Louisa Spier, was recently married in Hawai’i. (Pamelo Mounk’a fans will note that her given name ends in an ‘a.’) As the Emily Post grace period for wedding gifts may have expired, I will dedicate this archival transcription to Louisa and her still-new husband, Rob, the latter a good catch, being both biker and hedonist.

ATTA (@160)

King Sunny Adé & His African Beats, Ajoo

2005-07-15T13:01:00.000-07:00

To describe female record producers as scarce on the ground is to understate the case. Female producers, as opposed to session players and record executives, are next to non-existent throughout the history of pop music. As such the central character of the otherwise regrettable feature film Laurel Canyon, Frances McDormand’s sexually omnivorous record producer, was really the stuff of myth. The women I’m aware of who run recording sessions are deeply impressive, though. Two of my favorites have real-deal engineering chops in addition to possessing good taste, a combination you’ll find not so often as you’d think with their male counterparts. Leanne Ungar has worked extensively with Leonard Cohen, has engineered soundtracks for John Sayles’ films and film composer Cliff Martinez, among others. She shaped the sound of Lewis Furey’s eponymous 1974 debut album for A&M Records; this last item exerted mammoth influence during my formative years and continues to do so. (A wonderfully informative feature/interview with Ms. Ungar ran in Tape Op, No. 30, July-August 2002.)

The other great lady producer I can name is Catherine Lesevre. She was one among a group of French bohemians — Martin Messonier, producer of King Sunny Adé’s three Island Records releases, was another in this group — who went to work as scuba divers on the oil derricks along Nigeria’s coastline, fell under the thrall of Afrobeat firebrand Fela and wound up working in Lagos' music scene. Lesevre has engineering credits on Adé’s second Island effort, Synchro System. However, she recorded and mixed the altogether more satisfying Ajoo; both were put out in 1983, with similar cover photography, though Ajoo was never released in the West.

Ajoo is among my favorite juju albums, possibly one of my favorite dance music collections, full stop. It certainly represents the most satisfying balance of Yoruban rhythms and contemporary music technology. Synthetic timbres are woven into these extended tracks with commendable subtlety and invention by Ms. Lesevre. A ray-gun pulse, which might be the coolest synth patch, ever, forms the spine of “Gbeyo-gbeyo.” The Clavinet of Doom reasserts itself during Ajoo, as do pedal steel guitar notes beamed in from the ionosphere, courtesy of NCIP favorite Demola Adepoju. Ms. Lesevre trims the sails of King Sunny’s backing vocalists and nets the best call-and-response performances found on any of Adé’s records.

When King Sunny Adé and his African Beats first toured North America in 1982, much was made of the all-night sets he and the band would play at his club in Lagos. They played sets of conventional duration in the States; little did any of us honkies know that his Nigerian audience wouldn’t have dreamed of going home in the darkness. Lagos makes Detroit (my hometown) seem like a walk in the park; the band simply had to finish in daylight, out of consideration for its audience's safety. Still, when I hear Ajoo, even now I have no problem imagining a big crowd dancing on a walled-in patio until well after those goddamned little birds start singing at 5am.

Ajoo also occasions meditation on directions not taken and aborted missions. Both Adé and his producer Martin Messonier have mentioned, in retrospect, how much the sessions for the African Beats’ final Island disc, Aura, were influenced by the sound of Michael Jackson’s globally successful Thriller. The sound concocted by Jackson and producer Quincy Jones took then-emerging synth, sequencer and signal processing technology to another level, making Thriller one of the first true examples of cyber-funk. Correspondingly, the sci-fi ambience of Adé’s Aura was not a slick patina applied to roots music like so much digital eyeshadow, but a means to update juju’s staple talking drums and electric guitars with new textures and motorik rhythms, good things both.

Most African music fans in the West, then and now a hidebound lot, found little to like about Aura. I got a big kick out of it, though, and only wished it had been longer. I still wish that Messrs. Messonier, Adé and the African Beats had been able to pursue their Blade Runner-in-Africa vision further still. They did, in fact, on the soundtrack of director Robert Altman’s ill-fated O.C. & Stiggs, filmed in 1984. Then Adé was dropped by Island — even a cameo appearance by Stevie Wonder (playing chromatic harmonica through a harmonizer on “Ase”) couldn't help Aura’s sales — and O.C. & Stiggs went (deservedly) unreleased for three years. The African Beats were then disbanded, Adé’s working relationship with Martin Messonier was terminated and a period of retrenchment began. King Sunny Adé continued to make new records at his accustomed rapid clip, but increasingly his late ‘80s albums released to the African market sounded much like one another: all of them competently played, disingenuously cheerful and, for devotees of long standing, ultimately dispiriting. False bravado and badly-tuned synthesizers permeated many of these post-Island projects, whether performed by his new Atom Park band or a later iteration of the African Beats. As Iggy Stooge once sang: No fun / My babe / No fun. To our good fortune, owing to the thoughtful ministrations of Catherine Lesevre (and the piratical archiving of No Condition Is Permanent), we have Ajoo, being Big Fun and then some.

AJOO

King Sunny Adé & His African Beats, Maa Jo

2005-07-11T16:35:00.000-07:00

Once more, a Nigerian release from juju potentate King Sunny Adé: Maa Jo. Those long familiar with Adé’s music doubtless will recognize a couple of the songs in its lineup, being the title track and “Penkele;” both of these appeared in re-recorded versions on Adé’s second Island Records release, Synchro System, with neither of the latter being nearly so enjoyable as the renditions heard here. Maa Jo and Synchro System were issued in 1982 and 1983, respectively. (As before, thanks and praise most high for the scholarship of that most estimable Mr. Endo !) Following the wonderful Juju Music, where engineer Paul “Groucho” Smykle integrated Jamaican dub mixing techniques alongside Adé’s phalanx of talking drums and electric guitars, Synchro System seemed faintly disappointing, its contents an assembly of fragments that never managed to coalesce. It should be noted, however, that Synchro System still outshone the lion’s share of other releases from the darkening years of the early '80s.

Maa Jo shares good qualities with others among Adé’s Nigerian output, as have been and have yet to be featured on No Condition Is Permanent: prominent roles for vibraphone and marimba, before synthesizers took their place; minimal compression; seriously non sequitur guitar flourishes and solos of quixotic appeal; once more, Demola Adepoju’s pedal steel guitar; the organic miasma of a West African recording facility preserved within the record’s microgrooves, as is happiness in near-palpable quantity. Let’s hear from D.H. Lawrence: “Work can be fun and men can enjoy it.” His words describe, better than any number of mine could, the sound of the African Beats rocking in the deeply non-air-conditioned studios of Decca West Africa (for the dripping wet proof, see the Konkombe installment of director Jeremy Marre's Beats of the Heart documentary series). No subtext, this; Maa Jo’s performances are infused with sweat and contagious enthusiasm in equal measure. I believe it was also Lawrence who said, “I can tell it’s spring, there is estrogen in the air.” There you go, news and the weather, too, from the pen of a transcendental hedonist. When I post the Lijadu Sisters in the near future, I’ll be reminding you of that one.

Wait…there's more. Witness, if you will, a quote from the Maa Jo liner notes, credited to Alma & Co. Promotion, Ibadan:

Chart-buster “MAA JO” lends itself to a dancing forum where even a lame man would never resist temptation to tap his feet in response to the high-calorie effects of the album’s percussive up-tempo vibes.

I didn’t make that up. I do appreciate the sentiment, though, especially the high-calorie bit.

Next up is Ajoo, the second volume of King Sunny Adé’s Nigerian alternatives to Synchro System, and so very fine in its own right, a 1962 Studebaker Hawk Gran Turismo coupe among juju albums. Please stay tuned.

MAA JO

Demola Adepoju, Olufe-Mi

2005-07-06T19:12:00.000-07:00

Pedal steel guitarists are practitioners of an arcane discipline, on par with the medieval harp or the ondes martenot. Possibly for this reason, steel players draw the wagons in a circle at social gatherings. Stand near two or three or more of them at a Fourth of July picnic and you will lapse into a drowsy, dopey state, listening as the guitarists’ compare notes and complain about pedal flexibility or string gauges or the heft and finish of the large piece of smooth metal they use to barre chords and bend notes. The English saloon singer and art historian George Melly once generalized trombonists as the most neurotic of musicians, perpetually worried that their slide might be dented or bent. Melly obviously never met anyone who played pedal steel.

What the pedal steel fraternity made of Demola Adepoju, when King Sunny Adé and his African Beats first toured the U.S. circa ‘82, remains the stuff of conjecture. Demola was not your standard issue Nashville session guy, this much was certain. He was black. He played barefoot. He didn’t use a volume pedal, though he did use lots of signal processing. Sitting at the side of the stage, nodding his head in a near-somnolent state, he’d occasionally tear off reverb-drenched solos whose individual notes sounded like so many comets passing near Earth’s orbit. Demola was the type of pedal steel player (the late O.J. "Red" Rhodes, featured on Michael Nesmith's solo lp's, being another) capable of transforming a C&W cliché into a rural synthesizer.

Olufe-Mi is the only solo lp by Demola Adepoju of which I’m aware; this is the only copy I’ve ever encountered. Its four tracks could be thought of as Nigerian juju in chamber format (well, except for “Igba Aiye,” which sounds like a reggae cover of a Mac Davis song), a very few players simulating the impact of Adé’s much larger band. That band had dissolved by the time of Olufe-Mi’s release in '85; class act that he was, Adepoju still thanked King Sunny in the liners for the latter’s ‘Golden Advices.’ He also thanked Roger “One Take” Steffens, founding editor of The Beat, perennial M.C. of Los Angeles-area reggae shows and prime mover on the Bob Marley postmortem lecture circuit.

In the '80s, Demola Adepoju toured & recorded with the African Beats, played on Paul Simon’s Graceland album and was accorded a sidebar article in Guitar Player magazine. He lived and performed in the D.C. area for a while, post-Adé, before being turfed out of the U.S. on visa grounds. I have no idea of his activities during the past fifteen years. I hope that he’s doing well, as he deserves that much, if only for having made this most impressive album.

TECHNICAL NOTE: Ordinarily, I attempt to excise the scars of overplayed vinyl manually, drawing out the clicks and some of the distortion inherent in elderly microgroove recordings with the help of the pencil tool in Pro Tools editing software. Our last posting, Private Line, required several evenings’ worth of eye-crossing attention and the whole thing began to feel less like a labor of love and more like a morning paper route in winter. Then I scrutinized the sole copy available of Olufe-Mi, which had obviously been played with a darning needle for many years prior to finding sanctuary in an audiophile’s archive. For a day, I inhabited despair. A close friend, who has ridden shotgun on my sanity on more than one occasion, suggested the Restoration plug-in bundle offered by Waves. This suite of TDM plug-ins allows very nearly complete removal of the scar tissue common to decrepit vinyl. Olufe-Mi was my trial run with these tools and I’m pleased to report that they work without eliminating music, when used in moderation. Like that impulsive kid in the NRBQ song, who discovers caution at the last moment, I will live to climb again.

I'll probably do a line of No Condition Is Permanent t-shirts, too, should demand warrant same. Yes, I'm hinting here, people.

OLUFE-MI
(vinyl coutesy of Dan Meinwald, E.A.R., USA)

King Sunny Adé & His African Beats, Private Line

2005-07-02T14:54:00.000-07:00

Bobby, from 1983, was our initial case study of the albums made by Nigerian juju potentate King Sunny Adé for his native market. Next up we have Private Line, a 1978 lp cut by Adé with assistance from the African Beats. One side contains the original “3-6-5 Is My Number (Dial),” later re-cut in condensed form for his first Island label release, 1982’s Juju Music. Stood shoulder to shoulder, the two versions yield telling clues as to juju music's evolution over the brief span of six years. Acoustic instruments (most notably vibraphone, a glistening presence throughout Private Line) were replaced, come the '80s, by polyphonic synths such as the Prophet 5. The French producer Martin Messonier (Amina, Cheb Khaled, Papa Wemba) worked with Adé on all three of his ‘80s releases for Island, and obviously cracked whip on the African Beats. Though still fairly laid back and loaded with loopy charm, most evident via Adé’s come-on line sung in hooked-on-phonetics English, his band plays the later Island version of "3-6-5..." like they were trying to catch the last train out of town. The 1978 “3-6-5…” sounds nearly sleepy by contrast, with not much in the way of compression, its chorus vocals sporting an impressionistic take on intonation.

Several elements coalesce to make this lp a compelling listen. Adé evidently set up his stage P.A. system in the studio (cf. the Stooges’ Funhouse) adding otherworldly reverb to his voice; Demola Adepoju, whose pedal steel guitar at this juncture still represented a novelty within juju, sprayed bent notes and berserk ornamentation in the “What, me worry?” style of pianist Lenny Tristano. Also, Demola toyed with signal processing during these sessions, the radical timbre of his fuzz-tone steel rivaled only by that of Sneaky Pete Kleinow during the first iteration of the Flying Burrito Brothers, some ten years previous.

And then there is the Clavinet of Doom. Both sides of Bobby hung instruments and voices on the clothesline of a cheap drum machine’s beats; here, the same effect was achieved by substituting a Hohner D6 for the beat-box, the former tapping out a slowly mutating riff, its subtext fraught with menace and bad vuggum.

By the mid-‘80s, Adé was dropped by Island Records after failing to conquer American audiences, as Bob Marley had previously done for that label. Adé then dissolved his wonderful band, the African Beats, in a fit of creative insecurity. Many writers of the day — and, possibly, some Island Records employees — hypothesized a fatal flaw in the otherwise winning sound of King Sunny Adé and his African Beats. Consensus had it that Adé's tendency to sing mostly in a language understood only by Nigerians was, for all intents and purposes, his commercial Achilles Heel. Even the aw-shucks transliteration of “3-6-5…” wasn't enough to put him over. I just thought he was too nice a guy to make it in the States. It didn't matter that you couldn't understand his Yoruba dialect; just from the tone of his voice, you knew he was singing about his mom. Ike Turner or Peetie Wheatstraw, he was not. Scam artists, cads, heels, grifters, roués and other such undesirables settled America, and many of their descendants continue to make its best pop music. Others of them write about that music.

Though, I'll admit I hadn’t heard the clavinet snaking through both sides of Private Line when I made that call; that such a rudimentary performance could force a character reassessment continues to impress me. It's nasty.

PRIVATE LINE (@160)
(vinyl courtesy of the collection of Dan Meinwald, E.A.R. USA)

King Sunny Adé & His African Beats, Bobby

2005-06-26T22:03:00.000-07:00

According to a discography prepared by the admirable Mr. Endo, there were literally dozens and dozens of albums released by Nigeria’s leading exponent of juju music, King Sunny Adé, prior to Western audiences hearing his formidable admixture of talking drums, interleaved electric guitars and harmony vocals in 1982. His first album, Alanu Loluwa, appeared in 1967, recorded with the Green Spots Band. In the early ‘70s his musicians reconfigured as the African Beats and it was with a spit-polished version of the latter group that Adé made his bid for international acceptance in the early ‘80s via three releases — Juju Music, Synchro System and Aura — on the Island label (op cit. Pablo Lubadika Porthos, Idie).

Yet while Adé barnstormed North American rock sheds promoting albums tailored for crossover acceptance, he continued to record and release albums cut from markedly different cloth for his Nigerian constituency. Several of these will feature on this page in weeks to come.

Bobby, the subject of today’s post, kicks off our spin through a charmed era of Nigerian pop. The album appeared in 1983, one of a half-dozen albums issued by King Sunny Adé and his African Beats during that year; he and his band toured constantly through this period as well. ‘Prolific’ doesn’t half cover it.

Both sides of Bobby contain epic performances strung atop rudimentary drum machine patterns, possibly those of a Roland TR-66 taught polyrhythmic tricks. Side One is structured as a suite, per Adé’s long-established recording template. Side Two contains an extended eulogy in song to Bobby Benson, a bandleader, musical polymath and guiding light of Nigeria’s highlife scene, who had recently passed away. This recording is an altogether more relaxed-sounding affair, as was seemingly always the case with Adé’s Nigerian releases. There is none of the occasional stridency of his Island lp’s, and the lack of compression in the record’s mix enables something like a sensation of intimacy (or the nearest equivalent possible from a band with eighteen members).

Bobby also features that shiniest of diadems in King Sunny’s crown, the pedal steel guitarist Demola Adepoju. The latter’s only solo lp, rare like winning lottery tickets aren’t, will be the subject of a post in the very near future. Please stay tuned.

BOBBY

Les Quatre Étoiles, Dance

2005-06-22T10:58:00.000-07:00

Listening to the voice of that most estimable African tenor Nyboma Mwan’dido, heard in my previous two postings, it isn’t hard to imagine him as a good natured, earnest type, natty in beret and vest. The band that he fronted, L’Orchestre de Kamalé (later Kamalé Dynamiques du Zaîre), played sweet and hot by turns, lolling in the sun one moment, then challenging the posted speed limit in the next. Most importantly, both Nyboma and his band were purveyors of roots music in its best sense, rough-hewn and sophisticated in one go.

Not so many years after Pepe, the subject of our last post, we find Nyboma a titular member of Les Quatre Étoiles, a supergroup (to Westerners of a certain vintage, an ugly word, but unavoidable here) comprised of rumba Congolaise veterans; its other members were guitarist Syran M’benza, Kamalé bassist Bopol Mansiamina, vocalist Wuta Mayi. Their second album, Dance, preserves for all time one of those ridge-of-the-roof moments, when technocratic impulses began to carry the day, altering the intrinsic character of music.

The Four Stars are pictured on the cover of Dance, celebrating in a Parisian nightclub. Tricked out in suits, each member has become a sapeur, being the term used by Congolese fans to denote a musician with marked clothes horse tendencies. Papa Wemba has served as the poster boy for sapeurs throughout his career, though surprisingly this does little to enhance my enjoyment of his voice. My sole concert experience of Wemba convinced me that he was a sour-natured pimp, macking on his lady singers while fronting a so-so band. Armani will only carry a fella so far...

Elegance in comportment extends to the Four Stars' songs (four of which are heard here; I deleted the eponymous jam ending the album). They dispense with the slower, Latin-flavored intro that had characterized soukous prior to the mid-‘80s. The seben, with its relentless beats and pell-mell tempo, is the sum and substance of Dance. Synthetic facsimiles all but supplant the horn players of yore, though the brass arrangements remain unmistakably Congolese; vivacious and sly, their phrases twist upwards like sumi-e calligraphy rendered in cigarette smoke. Unfortunately, I suspect this album is among the early all-digital recordings (Ry Cooder’s Bop Til You Drop, released from six years earlier in 1979, being the first DDD pop record), which may explain Dance's occasionally harsh veneer.

Add to an already binary scenario that bane of early MTV music, the Linn Drum with its unmistakably fizzy timbre, and the record might have been remembered as one more high-tech travesty from the ‘80s. That it has aged well speaks to the human components of Dance, said humans being of high quality indeed. The songs are consistently good, with all Four Stars in excellent voice. Then there is Syran M’benza’s guitar, a thing of beauty. A zaftig African music maven of my acquaintance once told me that she wanted to live in Syran’s guitar amp. Unless Syran used a Marshall cabinet (doubtful), it never would have worked, yet I could understand her ambition. The guitarist's liquid tone plays as an African counterpart to that of either George Benson or Benson’s Jamaican acolyte, Ernest Ranglin.

Years down the track, having wearied of their existence as journeymen on the world music circuit, most of Les Quatre Étoiles regrouped with renewed energy as the all-acoustic Kékélé. Their two recent albums on the Stern’s label, Congo Life and Rumba Congo, both rank as transcendent marvels, their songs articulating horizontal urges in the best hedonist tradition.

DANCE (@160)

Nyboma, Pepe

2005-06-20T00:24:00.000-07:00

And so we find Nyboma, preferred voice of many a Congolese music aficionado, another furlong down the track in his long-running career. During the early ‘80s, his music evolved from Cuban pastiche to something altogether more local and unique. While the four tracks comprising Pepe still feel Latin, their formal attributes and energy point to the inventiveness and adaptability characteristic of African music and, for that matter, of African culture in general. Many years after my initial encounter with soukous, the dance music indigenous to Congo/Zaîre, I have no difficulty recalling the thrill of hearing something so different and immediately seductive. I still experience what art critic (and biker) Robert Hughes termed ‘the shock of the new’ whenever I hear great examples of this music. Luckily, the sensation seems evergreen, and has yet to fade in any measure. I hope it never does.

These songs will repay several fold the time you give them. They also interface nicely with mojitos (fresh mint, thank you), Patron añejo margueritas and kumquatinis (the last drink lacks an elegant label, but is the staff of life when the mercury climbs above 80º). Again, as with some of the earlier posts, this lp was a shop copy played repeatedly with a crap stylus. Hopefully my efforts to expunge sonic detritus will yield dividends within your media player.

I've always been curious about one aspect of soukous, that being the diminished presence accorded bass guitar in its overall mix. Other cultures have emphasized bass, often because outdoor venues, rather than radio or concert halls, were the only means of exposure for the music in question (cf. Jamaican reggae in the ‘60s and ‘70s). It has been my experience that women respond to bass by means that men can’t hope to know. Many of my favorite bass players are women: Carole Kaye, session stalwart of Hollywood recording studios; Talking Heads’ Tina Weymouth; and Jocelyn Lanois from Martha & the Muffins and Crash Vegas. Whenever Kid Creole & the Coconuts played in New York, I positioned myself near Carol Cleveland’s amplifier. Gail Ann Dorsey added immeasurably to David Bowie’s Earthling, especially “Little Wonder.” And on and on...

Men tend to like Afrobeat, the James Brown-derived funky stuff — with bass galore — from Nigeria, still best identified in the popular mind with Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Possibly owing to coverage in the Beastie Boys' magazine Grand Royal (the latter's influence all the more amazing, given that comets appear with greater dependability), the past decade has seen an increasingly bull market for Afrobeat. On the other hand, many women of my acquaintance ‘get’ soukous straightaway on a deep, wordless and entirely intuitive level. I’d love to know why, and would be happier still to learn it had something to do with that extra layer of subcutaneous tissue. The jury's still out on this one.

PEPE (@160)

Nyboma, Doublé Doublé

2005-06-16T13:08:00.000-07:00

Tenor voices in pop music are as much a part of summer as a cicada’s siren or the chimes orbiting a Good Humor ice cream truck. The fabulous ones, the guys who sing the way a kid skips rope, always transmit something of their own summer experience in their music. Weather is the embedded data in a great singer’s voice: the simmering humidity of Detroit (Smokey Robinson), fata morgana materializing in the tinder box canyons of Los Angeles (Neil Young), the torpid air of a Kingston street corner (Hugh Mundell).

I have not experienced summer in Zaire, and may not want to, but I’d like to think that Nyboma’s voice speaks well for some aspect of it. He, too, is a tenor with vim to burn, a singer who began his career in the ‘70s with Orchestre Bella Bella and Orchestra Lipua Lipua. It was as front man for Orchestre Les Kamalé that Nyboma began to make a name for himself. Today’s album, Doublé Doublé, was recorded with the latter group; its bass player, Bopol Mansiamina, features on subsequent recordings by both Nyboma and the Congolese supergroup Les Quatres Étoiles (Nyboma and Bopol representing two of the Four Stars).

Doublé Doublé plays as old school, despite a 1983 release; Nyboma and the members of Orchestre les Kamalé were still in the sway of the Cuban groups who played post-war hotel dates in the Belgian Congo, groups like Trio Matamoros and Sexteto Habañero. Nyboma's voice is framed by wonderful arrangements throughout, guitars grinding against one another, as refrains from the brass section explode and dissipate like wave upon wave of Roman candles.

This is the first of three posts concerning Nyboma. Next up, a brilliant solo lp, followed by a modern spin on soukous from his later group, Les Quatres Étoiles. Ça bouge? Oui.

DOUBLÉ DOUBLÉ (@160)

Pablo Lubadika Porthos, Idie

2005-06-12T09:34:00.000-07:00

Jamaicans are fond of saying that you don't know who you are 'til your back is against the wall. When the going got tough for American record companies in the late '50s with rock seeming to have run aground — Elvis in the army, Chuck Berry in jail, Buddy Holly and others RIP — the thought occured to someone, probably in Marketing, that Trinidad's calypso might replace it. (It didn't, but my parents insisted on playing Harry Belafonte's Xmas record for years thereafter.) Two decades later, Island Records faced a similar quandry. Aware of Bob Marley's impending demise, that would doubtless stall reggae's commercial momentum, the label cast about for new flavors to entice a jaded pop music audience. Island explored African music, as the eighties began, with two installments of Sound D'Afrique compilations offering an overview of Central and West African dance music. The second volume focused on soukous, a dance music from Congo/Zaire already embraced by African and Parisian tastemakers.

Featured on both volumes of Sound D'Afrique were solo efforts from Pablo Lubadika Porthos. Island later released two 12" singles by the guitarist and singer, one of several Congolese expatriates living in Paris and working as a session player for other African artists (specifically Pamelo Mounk'a) taking advantage of Europe's superior recording facilities.

Island would quickly shift its A&R focus to Nigeria's juju music, the subject of future posts. Outside of Africa, soukous would remain largely a Parisian enthusiasm, as chronicled by Jane Kramer in The New Yorker's pages.

But what of Pablo Lubadika Porthos? Idie, his solo lp produced by the suspiciously named Richard Dick, was released on the Africamania label in the same era as the Island albums. What can be divined about the form and mien of Pablo Porthos' character from this album? There is some ineffable aspect of Pablo Porthos, a complement to the brio of his singing and guitar playing, hinted at in the portraiture that adorns Idie's sleeve. Much can be intuited from the intensity of his gaze: a Congolese kid with massive ambition, a latter-day Horatio Alger with electric guitar in hand storming Paris. Perhaps his natty attire inspires a subtextual reading: the pin-striped velour suit jacket, a gold shirt with Nehru collar, the mad styling of his white patent leather high-heeled boots, the strategically placed multiple karat accessories. Add these visual cues to the flurry of ornaments within a given Pablo guitar solo and his tendency to erupt in broken English ("I love-ah you ver-ry much") when in passion's grip, and there can be but one conclusion: Pamelo Lubadika Porthos was in all likelihood a horn dog of the first order, a transcendental hedonist of admirable scope. As such, he should be added to that roll of inspiring figures whose predilections, professional and personal, are so entwined as should prove instructive to the rest of us: Andre Williams, Baron Corvo, Brian Eno, Stanley Booth, Compay Segundo, Richard Feynman, Russ Meyer, Gesner Henry, Luis Bunuel, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mitchum, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, William Eggleston. I rest my case.

IDIE (@160)

Lea y Domingo, Jalousie

2005-06-09T14:30:00.000-07:00

"L'Argent Apelle L'Argent," being an Op-Ed-piece-in-song that you could dance to, cemented the reputation of Congolese chanteur Pamelo Mounk'a as the '80s began. The title, translating as 'Money calls money' would prove prophetic for those involved with the record. Much like director Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns — insanely successful, to the point where probably Leone's hairdressers and set caterers got to direct their own films — so, too, did many of Pamelo's sidemen hondle their own releases in the slipstream of "L'Argent..." success. PM backing vocalist Lea Lignazi and drummer Domingo Salsero collaborated on Jalousie, with star Parisian producer Eddy Gustave in the control room, releasing the results on his Eddy'son label.

Lignazi had released at least one solo lp prior to this, Dede Priscilla, though regrettably I've never been able to secure a copy of same. Fortunately, a mid-'80s pilgrimage to the original Stern's African record store near London's Tottenham Court Road paid off in good timing alone. As I walked in, the band playing on the shop's turntable was instantly recognizable, though I couldn't place its singers. Then I saw the record's sleeve art, with the given names of Messrs. Lignazi and Salsero set in presstype atop what might have been recycled Xmas gift wrap.

There was one other customer in the shop, a very large African businessman barely contained in an Italian suit, stamping his foot to seismic effect in time to the record. Despite this guy being obviously over the moon with the sounds of Jalousie (and his out-weighing me by eighty pounds or so) I bought the record immediately, and strolled down Warren Street in a trance.

Nearly twenty-five years later, scrutinizing the component waveforms of this fine dance music in the course of digitizing Jalousie, I realized that Mr. Big's footstomps were probably etched into the B-side by the stylus of Stern's turntable. With virtual scalpel in hand, I persevered and have managed to render a favorite soukous record listenable once more.

The sleeve copy for Jalousie carries no date. To judge by the producer's over-use of signal processing, specifically the chorusing effect applied here to vocals and horns, this record is probably contemporary with Pamelo Mounk'a's "Red Album" (see below, circa 1984).

The pair of songs ("Pas Mal" and "Mozele-Paco") comprising Jalousie's A-side nearly eclipse the other two songs contained here; both are cut from a fabric of sheer exuberance. The title track does contain lovely alto sax arabesques, courtesy of producer Gustave.

JALOUSIE (@ 320)

Pamelo Mounka, le premier disque

2005-06-08T18:30:00.000-07:00

For the moment, this quartet of posts in tribute to Pamelo Mounk'a concludes with a brief look at some of his earliest solo work. "L'Argent Apelle L'Argent," drawn from his first sessions at Studio Adam in Paris, was a runaway success in 1981. Hoping to capitalize on this, the Safari Ambiance label rush-reissued an earlier album recorded in his native Zaire. This latter recording was probably made in the immediate wake of Pamelo leaving the employ of Tabu Ley Rochereau, PM having served a term as backing vocalist in Rochereau's band. This new/old disc was confusingly titled Pamelo Mounk'a, also the title of his then-current hit album. The reissue's cover bore a faux-sticker quote, Inedit, le premier disque de PAMELO MOUNK'A dans sa couleur locale, its copy uneasily residing on a urea-colored field against the retinal irritation of the sleeve's primary red and turquoise stripes (cf. Marcel Duchamp's 'Fluttering Hearts' seriagraph).

There can be no confusing the two collections, though. The sound of Safari Ambiance's reissue is loaded with distortion, intrinsic to the master tape itself, sufficiently so that I considered heading this post with a technical note. The band sounds faintly stiff by comparison with the supple ensemble playing of Congolese expatriates later supervised by Pamelo's French producer Eddy Gustave. (The songs recorded by Nigeria's King Sunny Ade during the late '70s also underwent a similar transformation under the auspices of a French producer in European studios, as will be examined in weeks to come.) The band's intonation is either impressionistic in the extreme or representative of a new strain of polytonality, depending on your disposition. Yet the stem cells of Pamelo's greatness are easily detected within these four tracks. The rabbit's foot of his songwriting, a woman's name ending in the letter 'a,' is much in evidence already, as is his signature honeyed vocal tone. The tunes build to the nagging insistence of the seben, that portion of a song where the band slams into overdrive, with the guitarists engaged in suggestive, wordless repartee and the horn players tossing call-and-response phrases around the studio. Also, the album is threaded with quantum kernels of verse (as when the singer, in a burst of anguish so great it could only be addressed in non sequitur English, exclaims "I am sorry dar-ling!") and melody that, with further refinement, would serve Pamelo Mounk'a well in the years ahead.

Though slightly abrasive to the ear, recordings of this stripe more and less represented the state-of-the-art during the '70s, a golden era for Congolese rumba-rock. Many of the best performances of that time, by legendary figures such as Franco & Orchestra OK Jazz or Rochereau, are not as well recorded as the four songs heard here. The key to the enduring worth of Pamelo Mounk'a might lie in the obvious joy evident from stem to stern within these grooves; all concerned sound as though playing these songs represents nothing less than the best possible time they'll have for a while to come. History would prove them right.

The genuinely classic tracks that made Pamelo's reputation will appear in future posts. For now, we party like it's 1979.

PAMELO MOUNK'A, LE PREMIER DISQUE DANS SA COULEUR LOCALE (@ 160)

Pamelo Mounka, No.1 Africain

2005-06-06T23:08:00.000-07:00

I began buying Congolese records circa 1980. The punk music that had drawn me to New York a few years earlier had succumbed to terminal ennervation, with Kingstonian 'cultural' reggae not far behind it. At the time, an African student dj named Lawrence NiNate (spelling approximate) was broadcasting on Columbia University's radio station in uptown Manhattan; his program, emerging from my bedside radio in Tribeca, had a galvanizing effect on this little honkie. He played all the greats: Franco & OK Jazz, Tabu Ley Rochereau, Kabassele, Dr. Nico et al. The songs were all so good, fully as sensuous - to invoke again a metaphor that has resurfaced more than once in my writing - as the flick of a sperm cell's tail. I didn't want them to stop, and they didn't. The novelty of these extended dance tunes was such that if I found an album from Zaire containing four songs, it would be deemed good enough and I would buy it without question. Of course, nothing was or is that simple. I bought a lot of mediocre music in the course of my pilgrimages to Brooklyn's African Record Centre. I did manage, however, to divine a simple, immutable truth while early in the thrall of listening to Pamelo Mounk'a: If a woman's name ended in "a," chances were Pamelo could spin a deathless tune in homage to her.

No.1 Africain, Pamelo's third solo album helmed by producer Eddy Gustave, is offered herewith as proof. "Tamara, Ndjeu Nkasi A Me" and "Nourama" comprise the B side of this disc, both tunes sporting the earmarks of great soukous music: the horn section jabbing and feigning like a prize fighter; multiple guitar interplay that obliterates the line between rhythm and lead roles, as with the Rolling Stones' best London singles from the mid-'60s; and that genuinely pregnant pause when, after a couple of verses sung to a languid 3+2 Afro-Cuban tattoo, the band shifts into high gear for the extended vamps known as the seben, which form the lion's share of a given song. I live for the seben, when drummer Domingo Salsero plays four-to-the-floor, driving the band towards the horizon without obstacles in sight, red-lining in fifth gear all the while. Master Mwana Congo gets off some rude asides on his guitar, the backing vocalist offers props off-mic to the gentlemen of the orchestra and something like genuine trance music materializes.

What's more, Pamelo's songwriting stricture holds water when soaked overnight. Every woman I've ever met (well, there's a lone exception, whom I'll gladly ignore for the nonce) whose given name ended in the letter "a" has become a luminous, valued presence in my life. Pamelo Mounk'a offers a gallery of these alluring creatures throughout his discography: Selimandja, Nora, Camitina and the penultimate, his 'tresor Hindou,' Samantha, whom we'll meet in a later post. What a guy! What a life! What a cream-colored suit! More's the pity, then, that Pamelo and the late Robert Palmer never met, as both were boulevardiers setting an admirably louche example for the rest of us.

One more of Monsieur Mounk'a's solo efforts will appear next, being the first chapter of his solo career prior to working avec Eddy. Beyond that, other soukous discs will be offered as iterations of my soundtrack for warm weather, Arette Gran Clase tequila, buttery women and hedonism in all desirous forms. Then, in a while, the twin peaks of Pamelo's canon, Pamelo Mounk'a and Samantha. Please stay tuned.

No. 1 Africain

Pamelo Mounk'a, the "Red" album

2005-06-04T23:07:00.000-07:00

This post commemorates what I believe to be the final collaboration between Zaire's Pamelo Mounk'a and his French producer/arranger, Eddy Gustave. On this album both men hewed closely to the sound of their earlier work together, augmenting an already celestial template with new coloring, selectively applied (as with the flanging on Pamelo's voice, a piquant touch). This was the third (or quite possibly the fourth) eponymously titled album by Pamelo, causing such few fanatics of my acquaintance who dig M. Mounk'a the most to reference it as the "red" album; against a background the color of a hooker's nail varnish, the cover photo shows our ever-genial singer striding toward the camera. He wears a stylish four-pocket jacket and black slacks and looks, for all intents and purposes, like an off-duty linebacker. Who could tell that such a gentle voice emerged from a guy that, to judge by his ostensible appearance, you really wouldn't want to annoy? Pamelo always took care to present himself in bespoke manner for the packaging of his music. I enjoy the thought that, were The Chap to publish an edition in Lingala, Pamelo Mounk'a would be a likely cover subject.

And so it goes: Pamelo Mounk'a died on January 14th, 1996, a victim of diabetes. During the final months of his life, his extremities were swollen and painful but, fearful that a European doctor might simply amputate, Pamelo opted for tribal remedies. That such a fate should befall an individual who personified charm and levity and insouciance and, ultimately, immaculate sonic elegance is in itself sufficient to confirm my atheism.

The next installment will feature another E. Gustave production of P. Mounk'a. After all, summer is upon us. These sounds, and others like them, should remain significant threads in the social fabric, drifting from every opened window, non?

PAMELO MOUNK'A, THE "RED" ALBUM (@160)

Pamelo Mounk'a, Propulsion!

2005-06-03T18:13:00.000-07:00

Pamelo Mounk'a, a singer from the Congo, made a great many recordings essaying his take on rumba-rock. All of these were filagreed with grace and charm, sounding Cuban-by-way-of-Brazzaville (in the way that Robert Fripp sounds Hendrix-by-way-of-Dorset). Every reason that I love the late Pamelo can be found in his early '80s sessions produced in Paris by Eddy Gustave. The very best albums by Pamelo Mounk'a appeared on Gustave's Eddy'Son label, with each sleeve bearing the motto: "Une Bonne musique / Un bon son / C'est l'affaire d'EDDY'SON." Only two - Pamelo Mounk'a and Samantha - have been issued on a single Karac CD, now probably out of print.

Nearly a quarter-century later it still seems too good to be true, a band with these guys playing in it:
~ Master Mwana Congo (lead guitarist, also made albums for Eddy'Son, playing like a Latinate equivalent of Teeny Hodges from Al Green's band, both men capturing the sound of a guitar telling itself a dirty joke)
~ Pablo Lubadika Porthos ('mi-solo' guitar and bass, his own recordings nearly as great, some appearing on Island's Sound D'Afrique compilations)
~ Lea Lignazi (backing vocals, a perfect timbral compliment & good luck charm adorning all the best PM lp's; to that end he's the Flo & Eddie to Pamelo's Marc Bolan)
~ Domingo Salsero (ultra-fine drummer, his name alone indexing the maniacal fixation of post-war Congolese musicians with all things Cuban)

Together, the band members mesh like the Swiss Movement of Happiness as Pamelo trills and croons. These are wonderful songs, raunchy and refined in the same breath, kept aloft by one of the best dance bands ever. And so I say, with deference to E.B. White: Everywhere, everywhere, Pamelo tonight!

PROPULSION! (@160)