Dusted Reviews
Artist: V/A Album: Nigeria '70 Label: Strut Review date: Mar. 31, 2002 |
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Afro-strut indeed!
If you’re a fan of wide-open musical fusions made wit imagination, soul, and passion, and you missed Nigeria 70 -- well, I’d recommend you find a copy soon.
This well selected, beautifully packaged, smartly annotated 3 disc set (2 discs of music, one of audio documentary) is a compelling journey into a time and place -Nigeria in the 1970s- when American soul and funk, along with Anglo-American blues-rock and psychedelia, infected the roots of traditional and popular West African musical styles like Highlife, Juju, Fuji, and Apala.
What makes this music so powerful is the way it’s built from the ground up: the polymetric percussion and rich vocal styles of the indigenous music are a constant foundation; the wah-wah or funk scratch or fuzz guitars, the fat or cheesy organs, the jazz solos and Stax-Volt horns are all poured between the cracks. The slinky Black Power grooves are a welcome and honored visitor once the house is built. After all, Africa is the ancestral home of funk.
With the exception of some Fela-influenced Afro-Beat workouts, formula is hardly to be heard here: each track by each band seems to inhabit its own sonic world, mixing its influences its own peculiar way.
It’s a real treat to hear a cut by the legendary (but often unheard) Sir Victor Uwaifo, who grafts a guitar style of great abandon to thrilling vocals on a thick percussive root. Other highlights include a dub version of King Sunny Ade’s spacy juju classic “Ja Fun Mi” that is as scary and wonderfully strange as a classic Black Ark era Lee Perry track.
Listening to this set, I began to think I might like to write the pilot for a cop show set in Lagos in 1974. Sort of Hawaii Five-O meets Starsky and Hutch meets “The Harder They Come.” You might want to listen to Nigeria 70 for yourself and see what you come up with…
By Kevin Macneil Brown
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View all articles by Kevin Macneil Brown
