Every Great Song Ever

The Funkees: “Salam” (Now I’m A Man, 1976)

I recently wrote an article for a forthcoming issue of One More Robot, in which the Funkees featured prominently. It had been a little while since I’d listened to the band’s albums, and it was nice getting back to them—this band was one of the best rock groups to come out of Nigeria in the 70s, during that country’s post-Civil War musical explosion.

They formed in the eastern university and oil town of Warri, in Delta State, and the members were veterans of the Biafran Army; their connections to people who traveled abroad often gave them access to a lot of British and American records that competing bands couldn’t hear. Much in the same way that Jamaican soundsystems tried to get their hands on records no one else had, band in Nigeria would try to build unique covers into their set lists to set themselves apart, so it was a valuable resource for the band.

After a series of singles, the band upped stakes and moved to London, where they recorded two LPs. “Salam” is one of the highlights of the second one, Now I’m A Man, mixing a little bit of every ingredient that made the LP interesting into a sharp proto-disco rock song. 

The band didn’t last too long beyond this LP. Band leader and guitarist Harry Mosco became a top producer and popular solo performer on his return to Nigeria (his 1980 Afro-disco LP Peace & Harmony is worth tracking down). He passed away in March. If you’re looking to hear more Funkees but don’t want to have to track down the band’s LPs, either in real life or online, Sound Way just released an awesome overview compilation of the band called Dancing Time. 

Youssou N’Dour & Etoile de Dakar: “Wadiour” (Volume One, 1982)

Before he was adding his voice to big hit singles by Peter Gabriel and holding down the fort as respected world music royalty, Youssou N’Dour was just one of hundreds of young musicians toiling night after night in the clubs and hotels of Dakar, striving to be heard.

N’Dour and the band he was part of, Etoile de Dakar, were pioneers of mbalax, a style that incorporated local tonal drums into the dance orchestra music that dominated the Senegalese music scene in the 1970s, principally in the guise of Orchestra Baobab. You can hear a bit of that transition to mbalax in this song, though “Wadiour” a little more in debt to Baobab than a lot of Etoile’s other music from the 1980s.

The biggest debt is in the guitar work. That floating wah-wah pattern that defines this song and locks in so well with the horns is one of my favorite lead lines ever. The whole song is built around it—even N’Dour, the voice, seems to sing in reaction to it.

N’Dour’s a guy I haven’t followed much. I like some of his music a lot, especially from early in his career (although Egypt, released a few years ago, is pretty damn great), but he’s also done a lot that didn’t interest me. I think he was better paired with startling talking drum eruptions than Neneh Cherry, I guess. This song, though, is among my favorites, electric, alive, and just a little ragged.

The Aktion: “Groove The Funk” (Groove The Funk, 1975)

The Aktion were part of the legion of rock bands that formed in eastern Nigeria in the wake of the devastating Biafran War. At first they were the Actions, then Action 13, and finally The Aktion. The band began to come together in the very early 70s in Calabar, a city in Cross River State not far from the border with Cameroon, when leader Lemmy Faith and Essien Akpobio began playing together.

The group released at least one single under its first name, and two under its second, but by the time they were able to make an LP, they were the Aktion, with a lineup of Faith, Akpobio, Renny Pearl, Tony Essien, Felix Odey and the well-regarded session drummer Ben Alaka.

This is the title track from “Groove The Funk,” and it has rightly become widely regarded as one of the all-time best songs to come out of the eastern Nigerian funk and rock scene. The scuzzy fuzz riff, doubled vocals, “na na” breakdowns, and fantastic bridge (are they singing “funky liberal”?) add up to the sort of thing Afrofunk fans fantasize about, except these guys made it in real life.

After Groove the Funk was released, the band took a regular club gig in the city of Warri, but a military coup and subsequent curfew kept them from performing much, and consequently, from getting paid. Running out of money, the band struggled to keep it together. They made one more LP that I know of (Celebration, in 1977), and split in 1979. Akpobio opened a club and did a lot of production work in the 80s; he passed away three years ago. Faith also became a producer, and the others kept their musical careers going to varying extents. 

There is a great book to be written on the war and the East’s ensuing rock and roll decade—I hope someone who was there gets a chance to write it.

You can hear more of The Aktion here.

Super Mama Djombo: “Julia” (Festival, Vol. 2, 1980)

Guinea-Bissau is a tiny country wedged between Senegal and Guinea on the West African coast. It’s a little bigger than Maryland, with about one and a half million people. It was once a Portuguese colony, and fought a tough war for its independence from 1956 to 1974, when Portugal’s Marcelo Caetano, the last ruler of the long, authoritarian Estado Novo period, was overthrown in a bloodless coup, and all of Portugal’s colonial holdings were put on the path to independence.

During the war, two major bands, Cobiana Djazz and Super Mama Djombo, had been formed, and most of their music was based on modernizing the traditional gumbe dance music of the country. In the hands of bands with electric bass players, gumbe became a quick, slippery rhythm that lended itself extremely well to supporting catchy melodies.

Super Mama Djombo was the longer-lived of the two big bands, primarily due to the death of Cobiana leader Jose Carlos Schwarz in 1977. In the band’s early days, Super Mama Djombo, which was named in honor of a local spirit widely respected among the country’s animist population, operated in a clandestine manner, in rebel-held territory. The milieu they became a band in informed their lyrics, many of which are songs of praise for the revolution and its leader, Amilcar Cabral. 

“Julia” is an exception to their usual lyrical focus, though, and also is an exception to their usual use of gumbe-based rhythms. Instead, it’s a crystalline ballad, with scorching lead guitar by Adriano “Tundu” Fonseca, and a pained vocal—the “Julia” of the title is a deceased lover, and the song is written from the perspective of a man who has been heartbroken twice, once by her death, and again by a new lover who has left him. He is literally asking the band for help getting through the pain.

It’s haunting, and quite unlike most of the band’s other music. It was recorded at the same time the band made all its other recordings: in one marathon 1980 session in Lisbon that produced six full hours of tape, from which all of the albums released by the group during its original run were drawn. The drummer on those recordings is Ze Manel, who later became one of Guinea-Bissau’s most prominent solo artists.

Super Mama Djombo’s excellence was hard-earned. The members all voted on who was allowed to remain in the band, and if it was felt you weren’t keeping up with the rest of the musicians, you were out, no matter how much they liked you personally. Their relatively low profile owes more to their place of origin, a tiny country with little international profile, than to their music, which is on a par with Bembeya Jazz, Super Rail Band, Orchestra Baobab and the other great West African orchestras.

Super Mama Djombo have reunited and released some new albums in recent years.

Dorothy Masuka: “Ba Zali Bami (My Parents)” (MATA 1063/NB2 / Troubadour AFC 115, 1953)

A little jazz ‘n’ jive from southern Africa today. Dorothy Masuka was born in Bulawayo, a railroad town in what was then Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe. In the 1940s and 50s, Bulawayo actually had a strange and cool jazz scene that featured fairly large bands of horn players. Hugh Tracey recorded Cold Storage Band, Los Angeles Orchestra, Bulawayo Sweet Rhythms, Chaminuka Band, De Dark Brownies, The Dick Ncube Trio, and Umtali Chipisa Band during some of his many recording trips through southern and central Africa—they’re collected on an SWP Records release called Bulawayo Jazz that I highly recommend.

Masuka was born in 1935, and probably experienced some of the early rumblings of that scene. In 1947, her family moved to Johannesburg, South Africa, where she attended a Catholic boarding school. Her father was Zambian, and her mother was Zulu, but she sings most of her songs in Ndebele, a language descended from Zulu and spoken in two major dialects primarily in northeastern South Africa and southern Zimbabwe.

Masuka was a talented singer, and had a successful audition with a South African record company called Troubadour while she was still in school. When Masuka was 16, she left school and went to the coastal city of Durban to become a singer with The African Ink Spots, a group led by Philemon Mogotsi. Thing is, her parents and the school hadn’t been told she was leaving, and she was apprehended and returned to school.

It was a temporary setback. When she escaped a second time and headed back to her hometown of Bulawayo, her parents relented and the school made no attempt to bring her back. She joined a group called the Golden Rhythm Crooners, then returned to Johannesburg and spent the rest of her teens singing and establishing herself as a performer and songwriter, touring with her hero, Dolly Rathebe, and gaining fame with a handful of appearances on magazine covers.

She recorded “Ba Zali Bami” in 1953 (most likely—it could have been a year earlier or later), and while it’s not her most important recording (we’ll get to that), it is by some measure her most infectious, in my opinion. I really wish I could publish the name of that saxophonist, but it appears to be lost to history.

Masuka was good friends with Miriam Makeba, and the two of them each caught the ire of South African censors more than once. The Special Branch investigated her and banned her single “Dr. Malan,” for its line “Dr. Malan has difficult laws.” D.F. Malan was Prime Minister of South Africa from 1948 to 1954 and was one of the major architects of the Apartheid policy that held sway there until 1994.

When she wrote a song for Patrice Lumumba, the murdered leader of the Congolese independence movement, in 1961, the Special Branch wasted no time raiding Troubadour, destroying the master and attempting to destroy every distributed copy of the song. She was in Bulawayo at the time and wouldn’t return to South Africa for three decades. Even her original home in exile, Zimbabwe, became untenable during the Ian Smith years, and she left for Malawi and Tanzania, only to return in 1980, when Zimbabwe gained independence from Britain and Robert Mugabe was elected as the first Prime Minister of the country’s post-minority rule era. 

She finally made it back to South Africa in 1992, as Apartheid crumbled. She was very active in the 1990s, recording several albums and touring, and she’s still active today.

Jo Tongo: “Piani” (Jo Tongo, 1976)

That easy-sliding beat from yesterday’s Marlena Shaw song got me thinking of this. And that’s really the only connection—this song doesn’t match the intensity of “Woman Of the Ghetto” and I don’t think it has lyrics about social ills (I could be wrong about that, though—I don’t speak whatever language Jo Tongo is singing in (is it French? I hear some French in there).

Jo Tongo was born in Douala, the main port city of Cameroon. His father and grandfather were musicians, and Tongo played in bands as a teenager in the early 60s. He moved to Paris in 1964 to study to be a pharmacist, but left school early and turned to music to make a living, while taking night classes and studying to be an accountant.

Paris has a large expatriate African community, with a vigorous music scene, and Tongo became an in-demand guitarist on that scene. He cut two singles in 1967 and another in 1968 under the name Jojo L’Explosif for Gerard Akueson’s Akue label. He seems to have spent the next few years trying to balance work as a musician with work as an accountant, but from what I can gather music took over in the mid-70s.

His self-titled album was recorded in late 1975 and is a bit of a mixed bag. “Piani,” which was pulled from the album and released as a single with another album track on the b-side, is its best song. That’s Tongo on lead vocals, lead guitar and bass—I like the way he phrases his lead guitar part, and of course that bass line is awesome for the way it pulls the song along. I also love that intro—that is apparently a tenor sax, sounding distinctly like an oboe

The groove on this is not dissimilar from a lot of Manu Dibango’s work around the same time—Tongo has worked a lot with Dibango over the course of his career, and they’re both from Cameroon.

Tongo at one point returned briefly to Cameroon, but after finding it hard to get re-acquainted with the music scene there returned to France, where he still lives and works. He released a new album back in 2003, and according to his website, seems to have a new compilation of some of his early work out.

Bembeya Jazz National: “Tentemba” (10 Ans de Succes, 1971)

In 1958, Guinea gained its independence from France. The President of the new country, Sekou Toure, launched a cultural program, one of a wave of so-called “authenticity” movements that swept across West and Central Africa during the early post-colonial years. As part of this program, he shuttered all the existed dance bands in the country and set up a system of state-controlled regional bands, all of whom would tour and who were able to earn the right to record for Syliphone, the state record label.

The music was supposed to be African in character, but that directive is vague enough to incorporate a lot of things, and most of the bands did. The biggest influence was Cuban music, which informed the rhythmic underpinnings of the music, but the groups mixed this with local folk melodies, and in the mid-60s, electric instrumentation to make something new and exciting.

Bembeya Jazz formed in the town of Beyla, which is about as far inland as you can get in Guinea. It’s not a huge town, but it is a transport center for iron ore mining and was on the Guinean touring circuit. Bembeya honed itself into a powerful band with a residency at a hotel called Relais, and competed in national battles of the bands each year—they won in 1964 and 1965, and were the first group to receive the “National” title in 1966. As Bembeya Jazz National, they toured throughout West Africa and were afforded the chance to record regularly.

During their golden era, from about 1966 through 1973, the band was indomitable, one of the best in the world. With vocalist Demba Camara and guitarist Sekou “Diamond Fingers” Diabate as the twin focal points of their sound, they had charisma and virtuosity out front, a killer horn section and sharp rhythm section behind and a sound all their own.

Diabate’s guitar had a brilliant, reverberant tone, and he played with great clarity, building cycling riffs into the hypnotic backbones of songs and playing solos that sound like they flowed out of his fingers without coaxing. He starts “Tentemba” off with just such a run, unaccompanied. And then the whole band hits and gets into this polyrhythmic groove that is just out of this world.

This is a live recording, and you can hear the audience respond to the band a few times, particularly on the stop/start passages and after the solos. Diabate’s solo is beautifully phrased, calling back at times to his introductory run and leading nicely into the turnaround. Meanwhile, Camara laughs maniacally and sings powerfully as he praises President Toure. “Tentemba” popularized a whole dance style in Guinea, and the band re-recorded it in a monster 14-minute version a couple years later, re-titling it “Super Tentemba” for the Syliphone Discotheque 73 compilation.

Unfortunately, Camara died in a car accident in 1973, and the band never fully recovered, though it stayed together into the 80s and recently reunited. This is them at the peak of their powers.

Orchestra Baobab: “Kelen Ati Len” (Visage du Senegaal, 1975)

Aggressive, psyched-up funk from Senegal. It’s been that kind of week. There is something about a vicisously slashing guitar drenched in wah pedal that hits a spot for me that no other sound can.

Orchestra Baobab formed in 1970 when members of the Star Band left to form a house band for the new Baobab Club in Dakar. The club quickly became an upscale hangout for the city’s political elite and ex-pat population of Europeans, and the band learned to play what its audience wanted to hear, which included a lot of Western hits. On their own songs, they combined that experience with the Afro-Cuban style that was prevalent in West Africa at the time and Wolof griot styles to make something really unique.

Their lead guitar player, Barthelemy Attisso, was a self-taught musician from Togo. He learned to play so he could earn money to put himself through law school (today, he’s a practicing lawyer in his home country between stints with Orchestra Baobab), and he learned almost entirely by ear, listening to the radio and playing along. His style is versatile but uniquely his own—if you follow Every great Song Ever for long, you’ll definitely hear him again.

This song has some of Attisso’s grittiest playing on it, and is just generally the most smash-and-bash thing in the Baobab catalog. When they recorded it in 1975, they were on a huge roll—they cut five LPs that year, and the three I’ve heard are all spectacular.

Omar Khorshid: “Hebbina Hebbina” (With Love, 1977)

So far, Egypt Week has featured tracks from two of Egypt’s greatest singers, Um Kalthoum and Abdel Halim Hafez. Today, a guitarist who played in the orchestras of both of them.

Omar Khorshid got his start playing in Egypt’s first known beat group, Le Petit Chats, but it was Abdel Halim Hafez that elevated the guitarist to international fame, drafting him into his orchestra in 1968. Khorshid paired with arranger/composer Baligh Hamdi (who we’ll hear from tomorrow) to make a formidable pair—they thoroughly modernized Hafez’s sound, incorporating electric guitar, pedal steel, electric organs and synthesizers. Hafez’s late recordings are wild blends of traditional Arab orchestration and a battery of gadgets and outside influences.

After a stint with Um Kalthoum, Khorshid split for Lebanon in 1973, where remained until the late 70s. Beirut had good studios and a more developed music industry, and he was able to get his hands on numerous effects pedals, organs and synthesizers to make his own space-age version of Arab pop music.

“Hebbina Hebbina” was written by Syrian master oudist Farid El Atrache (one of many spellings; hear his own version here), and it adapts to Khorshid’s cosmic experimentation readily. His twanging, reverb-drenched guitar is a clear sibling to Dick Dale and draws an even more clear picture of surf music’s debt to the sounds of the Eastern Mediterranean than Dale’s own versions of “Misirlou” and “Hava Nagila.” The traditional rhythm that underlies it sounds perfectly natural set against the blasting guitar and organ.

Khorshid was only 36 when died in 1981 in a suspicious car crash. It’s never been thoroughly investigated, much less proven that he was murdered by hard-liners, but he gained their enmity by performing with Yehudi Menuhin at the Camp David peace summit in 1977, and was known to have escaped assassination several times before his death.