Bert Kaempfert - A Swingin' Safari

There was a time when you could pick this record up in virtually any charity shop in Britain, and for all I know from everywhere else in the world! At one time I had four copies of it - I'm still not really sure why.

It's long held a strange fascination for me. Its clearly an example of exotica. I mean just look at the cover!
The picture on the front tells you all that you really need to know about the kind of music you are going to find inside. The pretty girl is dancing or swinging, she is happy, clearly because the music is happy. Around her are signifies of Africa (although I'd swear that its a rubber plant in the foreground). However, she's not really in Africa and, just as the music has only a spurious link to music from Africa (although more than you might think - more of that later), so too does the cover image make no attempt to make you think that the lady is anywhere other than a photographer's studio.
Compare this cover to another exotica classic, Les Baxter's Ritual of the Savage.

Although the couple are still in their evening clothes, they are surrounded by carved idols and seem to be genuinely in a lush, jungle-like landscape. In comparison the Kaempfert cover seems to be revelling in its knowing unreality. The woman swinging away knows she is in not in an exotic location, so do we and what's more none of us care!

Bert is also not trying to fool us with the music either. You won't find any bird calls, unusual percussion, 'hot' backing vocals, chants or indeed any of the other staples of exotica records. This is lightly swinging big band music that wouldn't be out of place anywhere in Europe and America in the late 50s and early 60s. It was very much in the style of Billy May, Nelson Riddle, Ray Coniff, James Last or Ted Heath. Of course it has Bert's signature arrangements but he's nowhere near as experimental as Les Baxter.

However, I defy anyone to listen to this record and not tap there foot or at the very least smile. For me its the playing of trumpeter Fred Moch. Beautifully restrained and lightly swinging, Moch is (uncredited) at the front of every song on this record and his happy tone, together with Bert's arrangements, give the whole record its upbeat and exuberant feel.

But its not just the arrangements that capture my attention. Its the songs as well. Lets start by looking at the ones that Bert didn't write.
First off we have That Happy Feeling by one of my obsessions Guy Warren. That's right, Guy Warren Ghanaian drummer extraordinaire! How did Bert get to hear Guy's song? In 1962 when this record was recorded Warren was leaving America in disgust over the lack of interest in his fusion of African and American jazz. It cannot be an exaggeration to say that more people must have heard Kaempfert's utterly European take on one of Warren's compositions than any of his other tracks. It completely lives up to its title. However, given Warren's passionate Afrocentrism he must have been somewhat dismayed by its adoption as an easy/exotic classic.

He did, however, return to it on his son's album. Perhaps this is more the way he imagined it?

The next cover is Similau. Similau is an old song, the earliest recorded version of which is by Peggy Lee in 1949 and quickly became a standard with versions by Artie Shaw, Jimmy Dorsey and Edmundo Ros amongst many others. Apparently it was based on a voodoo chant from the Caribbean. However, I suspect that it was Martin Denny's version from his 1957 hit Exotica that prompted its inclusion. Bert's version doesn't have the, frankly annoying, bird calls of Denny's instead replacing them with a rather lovely string section and some female wordless vocals. Moch's pure trumpet rounds off the song. Altogether lovely and about as far from a voodoo ritual as its possible to get.

Having made a slight detour to the Caribbean, Bert returns to Africa with the next track. Zambezi, written by South Africans Nico Carstens and Anton de Waal was another well covered track (it was even revived by the Piranhas as a kind of post punk novelty number). Using a jaunty flute section that is clearly intended to recall kwela penny whistles Bert's version of Zambezi is certainly not grey green or greasy and will have you dancing all the way through Southern Africa.

On the B-Side Bert continues to cover Southern African songs, this time Wimoweh and Skokiaan. The story of how Wimoweh became world famous is well known. Written by South African Solomon Linda Mbube, already a huge hit in South Africa, folk music collector Alan Lomax played it to Pete Seegar and the Weavers. Rather than copyrighting the song to its true author it was credited to the fictitious Paul Campbell. Not until the 1990s did Linda see any royalties from a song that had become a global smash hit.

Skokiaan is another song written by someone from Africa, this time from Zimbabwe. Originally recorded by the Cold Storage Band and written by August Musaruwa in 1951. Similarly to Mbube, after becoming a huge hit in South Africa, the record made its way to the United States but unlike that song it was played in its original form and became a hit there too. Covered by numerous people including Louis Armstrong and Bill Haley it was another well known song by the time Bert included it.

Although none of the songs sound particularly African, Bert's arrangements are just too European and easy, I think its interesting that he should chose so many songs that originated in Africa. It would have been easy for him to either use other exotica songs or to use only his own compositions. I suspect that by including songs written by Africans (both black and white) Bert was trying to give his record a degree of authenticity, to somehow include an element of the continent in his music (without actually making it sound at all African).

For his own compositions, Bert seems also to have tried to retain a (Southern) African feeling. The title track is clearly Bert's take on kwela. Although he didn't cover Tom Hark, A Swinging Safari obviously owes a lot the record that put kwela on the international map Make your own mind up.

And keeping with the Southern African theme another one of Bert's originals is called Afrikaan Beat. And wonderfully, just as he covered tracks from overseas, the rhythm of Afrikaan Beat has become a much sampled reggae rhythm. What goes around......

GLENN (GHANABABA) WARREN - RHYTHMS OF HAPPY FEELINGS

 This, unjustly neglected record, is by Glenn Ghanababa Warren. However, it has his father, Guy Warren's fingerprints all over it!
The description on the sleeve perfectly described the music within the grooves:- "Discussed in Africa ... Recorded in Europe ... Mastered in America." So we have a record with a definite African flavour, largely played by Brits and remixed with a light (and sometimes not so light) fashionable disco-influenced style. And when it works its a pure joy!
Released on Ghana's Safari Records in 1980 - what a great record label symbol! Does anyone know if they released any more records?

It seems plausible that a young man would persuade his father to adopt a more modern sound. But I can't help feel that the ever ambitious Guy would have been well aware in 1980, when this record was produced, of the successes of such African musicians as Manu Dibango, Fela Kuti and his old rival Olatunji in the US disco scene. He was certainly aware of the rock band Osibisa as the string arrangements on this record and rhythm guitar were supplied by Kiki Gyan who had played extensively with the band. Furthermore, he must also have been aware of the jazz-funk, jazz-rock movements if for no other reason than the British jazzers on the record were part of these scenes.
Foremost from the British jazz scene on this record was Ian Carr. Carr played with Guy Warren in the sixties on his own records and on Warren's Afro Jazz LP. By 1980 Carr, together with saxophonist Brian Smith and keyboard player Geoff Castle and bassist Billy Kristain had all played together in Carr's jazz-rock-funk outfit Nucleus.
The final elements in the mix are Tom McCarthy and Sharon Shapiro who produced a number of disco records in New York. I think the presence of Michael Benedictus, also as arranger, who would go on to produce Don't Make Me Wait together with Larry Levan as the Peech Boys, must also have helped give this record its dance-floor-friendly flavour.

For a Guy Warren fan such as myself one of the joys of this record is hearing three of the great man's tracks re-recorded. Monkies and Butterflies and Highlife are from Africa Speaks, America Answers (read about it here), while Happy Feeling is, perhaps his most well know track as it was covered by Bert Kaempfert.

Needless to say the playing is exemplary. There is a different feel for each track. The opener, Monkies and Butterflies is a joyous party track with the band chanting and singing over a, sometime shambolic, but always infectious rhythm. Carr provides a great solo.

Next is Eyes of a Fawn which reminds me somewhat of a slightly less tight Brotherhood of Breath - which is a compliment!

The best part of the final track on the first side, Laakpaa, is the second half which consists of nothing more than chanting, singing and basic percussion. Magnetic, hypnotic stuff.

Over on side two we get the full disco treatment. I'd love to hear this in a proper club situation - in fact I'll have to play it sometime! It just builds and builds without a let up as strings, female vocals and even some disco synth stabs are added. Its definitely the most 'modern' track on the LP.

After such a dancefloor killer the last two tracks, both covers of earlier Guy Warren tracks seem somewhat subdued. However, after you have calmed down from Love of Rhythm, both Happy Feeling and High Life have much to offer.

I urge you to track down a copy of this fine record. Although its not super rare, I've seen it in some shockingly bad conditions, so spend a bit of time and track down a decent copy! Good luck

GUY WARREN - AFRICA SPEAKS, AMERICA ANSWERS!

Africa Speaks, America Listens is a truly remarkable record. Remarkable not only for its musical content, an as-yet-unheard-in-the-US-fusion of West African highlife and jazz, but remarkable also for its assertion of a cultural equality between the American and the African continents. Indeed, from the title you might be forgiven for thinking that America is the passive member of the partnership. Furthermore, unlike many of Warren's later solo recordings the other musicians on the record were, with two notable exceptions, white Americans. Although this is Warren's conversation with America, I am afraid to say that my copy is a UK Brunswick copy. The cover on the US album shows Warren playing against an almost Constructivist background and is much cooler that then UK version. There's also an Australian version with its own sleeve but I haven't seen one.
Guy Warren arrived in the US in 1954 and having played in London with Kenny Graham's Afro-Cubists (if anyone has any recordings of Warren with the band let me know!) and in Ghana with ET Mensah, he quickly found gigs, albeit not immediately very lucrative.
Through a contact at Down Beat magazine he met Gene Esposito who hired him to join his Latin Jazz band, which was composed entirely of Italian and Jewish musicians. He also met Red Saunders, again through connections. Saunders was a veteran drummer who had played with Albert Ammons and Joe Williams. Through Saunders, Warren secured a recording date at Decca. Saunders would play on the record but only minimally, despite receiving top billing and a hefty slice of the royalties.
It may, on paper, have sounded like an unpromising combination but Warren was able to marshall his forces and pull of a coup.
As I've mentioned in reviews of Warren's later LPs, he was never interested in producing jazz with an African flavour but was rather determined to produce a hybrid of the jazz played in America and the jazz played in Africa. The music on this record, considering it was his first LP as leader, is an amazing mix of highlife, traditional African music and American jazz. That the mix not only works but that he manages to get the right combination of all the differing elements (and managed to get his diverse band to play at the top of their game) is, I believe a tribute to his advanced vision and musicianship.
The record opens with Guy and band members chanting - presumably Africa speaking! Warren then plays the bamboo drums, the first example of a wide variety of African percussion instruments used throughout the album. Where Warren's playing and overall musical vision differs from those of percussionists such as Olatunji is that he employs traditional instruments in the service of modern music rather than jazzed up versions of African songs. Just as the listener thinks the track is going nowhere it takes a sudden swerve (or should I say fade out) into a more forceful and muscular direction. It is almost as though, having started to speak softly and attractively, Africa is now speaking directly and demanding to be heard as an equal. It is a great introduction.

Ode to a Stream, like the later My Minuet, seems to me to owe something to the European classical tradition, in this case to the impressionist composers. Johnny Frigo plays the violin solo. Frigo would go on to record some interesting but scarce records for modern dance. Maybe we'll get to this one day!

Duet sees Warren playing with Red Saunders. I must admit that while it is interesting, Saunders is just too conventional against Warrens imaginative percussive onslaught. Not I suspect Saunders' fault but Warren is just better!

Eyi Wala Don (My Thanks to God) has some great piano-work from Gene Esposito while Warren plays the drums. Can someone tell me what he is saying?

Monkies and Butterflies on one of my favourite tracks on the record and in fact one of my overall favourite of all Warren's songs. The band really comes together there, particularly Esposito and Johnny Lamonica on trumpet.With the female vocals in the background this is such a happy track.

The first side closes with J.A.I.S.I (Jazz as I see It). While very enjoyable, compared to the previous track, it just seems too conventional to my ears, although the conga and bass interplay and solos are a highlight.
Side two kicks off with Invocation of the Horned Viper. As ever Warren's playing is terrific. I can't help feel, however, that overall it is a little too 'exotica'. What do you think?

Chant continues the adoption of traditional music, in this case, a drum ritual to accompany a dead body being carried to a cemetery. Just as it is about the go the way of its predecessor, the piano and sax come in to add a jazz element.

My Minuet is a very strange song indeed. I would love to know more about it. The sleeve notes very unhelpfully just say that it is "almost 18th Century Drawing Room style". What were Warren's influences to create such a song?

The Highlife is, to my ears, surprisingly flat when you consider that Warren was a key part of highlife music in Ghana. I think the most off-putting aspect of it are the lyrics which are incredibly trite.
I like the Eyes of the Fawn. The horn section really seem to be comfortable with it, perhaps because it allows them space to improvise over the top of Warren's playing. For some reason it makes me think of some of the experiments of Kenny Graham in the UK!

Finally FE-ED-TO-NE closes the record with a bang. What a great track! It perfectly pulls together the various elements of jazz from both continents into a perfect blend that allows both to come out. The beginning of Warren's singing and playing, gives way to Esposito's driving piano solo. He is joined by the horn section which pulls the track in a more 'American', West Coast-cool direction. The Warren comes back in to finish the track. Africa and America are in conversation but Africa has the last word. 

GUY WARREN - THEMES FOR AFRICAN DRUMS & AFRICAN RHYTHMS

Guy Warren, in the late 1950s, was on a mission in the US to show the jazz world, and the rest of the musical community, the importance of drumming. Not only that but he was determined to show people that the drums of Africa were as expressive and versatile as any other instrument in America. For Warren, drums were not just for providing a steady background beat while other instruments took the lead. For him the drums were the centre stage instrument.
Not only that, for Warren jazz was all about the drums, and African drums at that. The music, its development, its history, was for Warren inextricably linked to African music, specifically music from West African, the part of Africa that provided many, but not all, of the people who would become slaves in the US.
Warren had played jazz in the UK with Kenny Graham's Afro Cubists and in the US with established jazz musicians such as Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, to whom he dedicates one of the tracks on this album. He had also played highlife in Ghana as a member of the Tempos along with ET Mensah and Joe Kelly. By 1958, when this record was released, he was an experienced, sophisticated musician with a vision for his music. "This is the album I wanted to make ... This is MY album" he proclaims in the linear notes.
His jazz credentials are for all to see in the linear notes. He thanks critics Nat Henthoff and Lee Shapiro. His band mates include James Hawthorne (Chief) Bey (who would play on Art Blakey's African Beat - here), he mentions Monk, he uses jazz terms such as free-form and jazz slang such as 'laid it down'. How can this be anything other than a jazz record?
That is, unless you ignore the truly obscene cover. From the cover you would think that this record was firmly in the exotica genre.

What is the crazed man in front of a fire supposed to represent? Is it a reference to voodoo, or just a blanket heart of darkness reference? I think it is tragic that a man so proud of his country and the contribution that it had made to world culture should find that his first solo record, the "album I wanted to make", should be packaged in such a crude and insensitive way. I have included a few other exotica sleeves to show that this sort of thing was not uncommon. But it also shows how Themes for African Drums suffered. The record sleeve made it seem as though the music was not authentic, that the music was neither genuine African music nor genuine jazz. On the evidence of the sleeve you might have thought that Warren's music was on a par with Thurston Knudson or maybe Augie Colon.
In fact it is fascinating and amazing music. If you've read any of my other Warren posts you will probably know I am fascinated by him and his music.

Warren, however, was a somewhat confusing proposition to the record buying public of America. For a start, although he is pictured on the reverse in Ghanaian clothes, his music was not a strict 'ethonographic' reproduction of Ghanaian or African music.
The complexities of music from Africa, the enormous range of  external influences, from Europe in the form of church choirs or military marching bands, from Cuba in the form of a wave of Latin records that swept over the continent after the second world war, from the West Indies in the form of calypsos and from the US in the form of jazz, was never acknowledged in European imaginations. Instead, as can be seen from the cover, music from Africa was assumed to be from a place untouched by the influences of the outside world. Wild, primal, sexualised (as can be seen from the cover above) and 'savage' drumming was the music that most Westerners expected from Africa. Jazz, particularly sophisticated fusions of the jazz idiom and African traditional idioms, was not expected. Few Americans were familiar with highlife or any of the other forms of modern music being created in Africa.
Furthermore, Warren's pride in his Ghanaian roots, pride in his country and Continent, proved problematic at a time when many African countries were gaining their independence. The response of jazz musicians was to pen tracks whose names recognised new nations, or the creators of new nations. The response of jazz critics and white audiences was either to ignore this or to label this as some form of racism. Where within this dichotomy could an African jazz musician and his music find a home? Warrren was, I suspect, too proud to accept any easy assimilation into American cultural imperialism.
I would guess that Warren was very influenced by the writings of Ghana's first president, Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah explored ideas about cultural transformation through the traditional culture of his country. He took popular artists such as EK Nyame and the Uhuru Dance Band with him on his trips outside Ghana and he encouraged musicians to use traditional instruments and rhythms and wear national costume. As the cover of Themes for African Drums shows, this could only be interpretedin America through a lens of colonialism and Western superiority, rather than as an equivalent and valid cultural statement. Jazz was American and even if many of its practitioners were not white Americans, for white record company executives and the white record buying public the concept that an African could explore new areas of jazz was just too incredible a proposition in 1958.
Themes for African Drums contains the amazing, Love, the Mystery Of, later covered by Art Blakey on his The African Beat LP only four years later in 1962. It also contains the incredible My Story which, if anyone's autobiography can be written using drums, then this must be it. 

Warren maintained the same musical path for his next record, that is a mix of jazz and traditional African music. To my ears he achieves a more successful fusion on African Rhythms. Again, the sleeve notes make it clear that this record is jazz and not exotica. He is joined by Richard Davis on bass and Ollie Shearer on vibes and marimba. He is praised by the likes of Leonard Feather and Nat Henthoff and is even called "a jazz genius" by Earl Wilson.
Yet once again the sleeve puts the music firmly in the exotica genre. Stylised dancers, looking very similar to depictions of black jazz dancers in the 1920, particularly Josephine Baker, replace the crazed drummer of the previous LP. However, I would say that they reveal nothing about Warren's music, instead giving the impression that it is something to accompany a Tarzan movie. There wasn't even a photograph of him on the reverse.
For me African Rhythms is slightly more pleasurable than Themes for African Drums. Although Warren plays more trap drums in African Rhythms, there are no brass instruments. This means that each track is carried entirely by the drumming - by the rhythm. I find tracks such as My Anthem and both parts of the Third Phase to be utterly hypnotic and captivating.
As Warren revealed in an interview in 1960, he was aware of the problems that his music making created in the jazz community in the US. "I could never play like Gene Krupa, Max Roach or Louis Belson. They have a different culture. So I had to make a choice of being a poor imitation of Buddy Rich or playing something they couldn't. So I started playing African music with a little bit of jazz thrown in, not jazz with a little bit of Africa thrown in. For it is African music that is the mother, not the other way round. But I had to find out the hard way!"
What he found out was that, like many innovators, he was too far ahead of his time. In a few years, in America, the concept of Africa, the concept of the continent's meaning in jazz and for jazz, and the concept of what music from the continent could sound like, had changed completely. Records by Olatunji took the same elements as Warren's records but found a wider audience. Olatunji became friends with John Coltrane and apparently the two considered recording together. Other drummers, Big Black, 'Chief' Bey, Solomon Ilori, Montego Joe, put out records and carved successful careers within the American jazz scene. Symbols taken to represent Africa became more common as did the adoption of musical signs and idioms to indicate that black jazz musicians recognised that Africa was their spiritual home. All too late for Warren who unfairly has been neglected as anything but a footnote in jazz history. Buy his records and rediscover his greatness.

GUY WARREN - NATIVE AFRICA - KPM 1053 and 1054

Did I ever mention that I am obsessed with Guy Warren of Ghana?
Maybe at least once!
Anyway, here are a couple of records he did for KPM in 1968.
In 1968 he was in London (of course) and had just recorded Afro Jazz with Don Rendell, Ian Carr and Amancio D'Silva.
He would team up with D'Silva again for The African Soundz which you can read about here.
The money from KPM must have been good to persuade Guy to make these two records. Why else take time from your career to record two albums worth of material? The suspicion, before you've even put the needle on the record, is that he was going through the motions. A chance to earn some money and just exploit the situation.
But of course when you listen to the music and hear the quality of the songs, it is clear that this was not the case.
I must admit that when I first heard these records I was reminded of lots of very worthy 'in the field' recordings of African musicians. You know the stuff - field recordings of so-called 'ethnic' musicians, which come in worthy sleeves with lots of footnotes about the collator of the music, but little about the people who made it or how it fits into local culture.
By 1968 Guy Warren had moved beyond all of that easily categorizeable stuff.
Having played in London with Kenny Graham (another obsession of mine) and in the US with some of the legends of bebop, Warren was international. He had even been a DJ for the BBC World Service for God's sake!
Nevertheless these are his least jazz-influenced recordings. The usual KPM descriptions (click on the pictures to get a larger image) reference, Watusi (or as we say now Tutsi), Uganda, Asafo and Muslim music. They also talk about natives, lions, insects, tribes and witch doctors. I guess the best you can say is that it was 1968!

You can imagine the kind of programme that these tracks were intended to soundtrack. A white man, perhaps in khaki shorts and with a neat beard, drives a beaten up Land Rover across the veld. Perhaps he is accompanied by a faithful retainer, dressed in a mix of Western and local clothes. As they drive along, the camera pans back to show giraffe or elephants. You can hear drum-based music in the background to show that we really are in the deep heart of Africa!

Listening to these records make me wonder about Warren's relationship to Europe and America. Like many African artists he had left Africa to pursue his musical aspirations. How, did he have to compromise to achieve his aims? Did he relish the opportunity of recording these tracks for KPM or was is a distraction from his more jazz-related work? Did he find it easy to be a Ghanaian in London?

As with all things related to Guy Warren of Ghana it is best to let the music do the talking. I have taken my favourite tracks from each record. Apologies if you favourite isn't here.

01. Talking Drums - Dramatic dancing drums. 3 Odono talking drums of various pitches, 1 Master drum
02. Dancing Drums - Small drum, 2 medium Atumpan drums, Master drum, uptempo dance sequence
03. Uganda Drums and Flute - 1 Heavy drum, 1 medium drum and sixteen inch bamboo flute. General atmosphere
04. Witch Doctor - Gong, medium drums and chanting voices, Voodoo (Juju) dance rhythm
05. Asafo Dance (Semi Military) - 2 medium drums, master drum, Ododonpo chanting voices. Builds to climaz. For warlike events
06. African Suspense III - 2 drums and flute. Mysterioso
07. Children At Play - Drums, small bamboo flute, harmonica, children's voices
08. Gyil Dance (African marimba) - Gyil, 2 drums, ground shaker
09. Gyil Solo (African marimba) - Peaceful scene
10. African Pastoral - The open plain, animals at rest. Hells (sic), bamboo flute, cymbals
11. Vehicle Movement - Snare roll joined by precussice "High Life" rhythm
12. African Kwela I - 2 Bamboo flutes, and snare drum
13. Tribal Calling - Native duologue. Native calling in the stillness of the forest
14. Sanza - Light plucked instrument generally called the "thumb piano". Gentle light sounds
15. Hullcinations and Mirages - Dream sequence - droughts - fishing
16. African Flute Solo - Lonely flute solo. Nature at rest

Native Africa - click here

GUY WARREN - EMERGENT DRUMS

As you may know I am a huge Guy Warren fan.
I don't think, however, in this instance I can say anything that is going to improve on the great man's own sleeve notes for his own record.
I guess I want only to point out his love of his country and continent, particulary at a time of serious political problems, his love of jazz and his interest in using the studio as a tool to develop his music. A man very much ahead of his time

Click here for the music

Hail! The Osagyefo is a rhythm portrait of President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. I borrowed the stirring Atumpan (Ashanti) rhythms of Ghana and used two jazz drums to execute my painting here. I cut this performance at one isttnig and there was no dubbing.
A Recital for Flute and Drums. I had to use the techniques of dubbing for this one. I first played the African bamboo flute, accompanying myself at the same tie with the rhythm of ankle bells tied to my right foot. Next I dubbed in the drum part - and the result is just what I wanted: a loose, swinging rhythm, suporting a swinging loose melody. Are you with it?
I recorde the bell part of An Akwapim Theme first and dubbed the drums on this afterwards. (That clear, tinkling sound, by the way, is the result of my forgetting to bring along a bell to the studio. There were two empty strong glass ashtrays lying around - and one of them came in pretty handy! Which gives me the opportunit to emphasis that, in most African music, it's not so much what yu use to get the desired effect, but how well you can play your part with what you have, and above all, if the sound it right!) The rhythm here is built to urge and move forward... this is the kind of rhythm that was used by the Akwapims of old Ghana, in their wars with the Ashantis. Even now, when it is played, you can feel the same sense of urgency all around...
The Blind Boy again uses the dubbing technique. I first played the African flute, laid it aside and, as this was played back, recorded the jazz drums on top of it as an extension of the theme,returning to the flute for a third track and out. I dubbed the 'talking drum' passage also as an extension of the theme. The title was suggested by a blind youth who wanders around the city of Accra, the capital of Ghana, playing his flute and accompanied by another boy who performs on a single African shaker. This second boy is also the eyes of the team: he plays an accompaniment, dances, collects the pennies, and guides his companion through town.
Black Flute.  When I take my bamboo flute, walk down that little meandering, laterite road somwhere in teh county, and take in nature ... then I blow my blues - the blues that comes from nowhere and goes nowhere because it is part of us. It's happy and it's sad. It's life and it's death. That's the blues!
In Buddhism, Prajana means self-nature, the realisation of the SELF. In the studio, I sat behind my two sets of drums and allowed my self to emerge. That's all I can say about Prajana. (I recorded the jazz drums and voice first, and then dubbed in the conga. Towards the end, the jazz drums had introduced a few break patterns. When I took up the conga, it started to solo in and out and in between. The jazz drums at this point sound as if they are almost twisting around the conga - but in a split second they break away and start to do a ritardo - kind of sliding to a stop. Such was the feel that existed during the dubbing that I shaded the conga solo right there into the jazz drums and the two sets of percussion slid out together in perfect concord.)
Babinga Babenzele! There was no dubbing in this pygmy drum suite from the Congo: it was recorded straight and at one take. I sat behind two sets of jazz drums and distributed rhythms to each drum in the twin ensemble, handling at the same time a bamboo flute for opening and fade away.
The Babingas are a pygmy tribe in the Congo. They are subdivided into the Bangombes and the Banenzeles, though both groups are essentially the same. For their music, the Babingas either yodel or play single-note flutes each of which has been pitched differently. And there are drums, too. For many years it was believed that only nativesof the Tyrol or other dwellers of mountainous areas yodelled. The Babingas - who live in the middle Congo, where there are no mountains - give the lie to this.
This suite is supposed to give you an idea of the music of the Babingas. A team of flautists come together to play on their single-note instruments: they perform in such smooth succession, one after the other, that they produce a hightly rhythmic melodic line. At the same time, the drummers man the drums. Teh village swings. As we approach, the music gets louder, more intense. Now we join in the fun and dance until we are exhausted, knocked out. Finally, we free ourselves from this musical hypnotism and depart. As we get out of range, the flutes fade - but we can still hear the two master drums. They are powerful, this pair - they were the ones we heard first! Now, at last, we still hear them in the distance ... like the alpha and omega of the jungle.
The Agasiga rhthym comes from Central Africa, from Watutsi-land. Like all Watutsi rythyms, it is slow, majestic.  I cut the piano part first and dubbed the rythym and voice on top.
The music you here now paints you a picture of what is happening in Africa today, not forgetting what happened yesterday. Many live have been lost. Many homes have been broken. But out of chaos will yet rise the power of the new Africa.

ART BLAKEY AND THE AFRO-DRUM ENSEMBLE - THE AFRICAN BEAT

You all know about Art Blakey, right? The Jazz Messengers, Moanin', The Big Beat, Holiday for Skins, Orgy in Rhythm?
Blakey is the kind of drummer who makes you think he hates his drums. That's the only reason he could have for hitting them repeatedly and so hard. He must have been one hell of a drum-phobe. Have you seen the way he looks on the cover of Orgy in Rhythm?
Apart from his fierce attacking method, Blakey also knew a thing or two about musicians. Just look at the people who came through his Jazz Messangers!
By the late fifties and early sixties people in the US jazz world had become very interested in the music of Africa. Initially conflating African music with that of Latin American, in particular Cuba and Argentina, the jazz world began to incorporate increasing elements of 'exotic' musics.
It's no coincidence that this coincided with many jazz musicians finding Islam. Many black jazz musicians, as well as writers, poets, academics and others, began to turn their backs on Western modes of thinking and look to Africa for inspiration. As the civil rights movement in America became more prominent and, in some cases, more violent, many black Americans wondered what they owed to the modes of thinking and behaving that had come to them from white America. People wanted to shed their names, names given to them by slave owners. People wanted to shed their relgions, forced on their ancestors by slave owners, and return to religions that they might have had before slavery. People wanted to move even further away from Western approaches to music and adopt musical styles from Africa.
Blakey himself went to Nigeria as a merchant seaman in 1948 and is supposed to have converted to Islam and taken the name of Abdullah Ibn Buhaina. He later denied that he had gone to Nigeria to study drums and indeed said that jazz was emphatically American and owed nothing to Africa.
How then is one to take this record?
Blakey surrounded himself with some of the best musician's from Africa he could find in New York in 1962. Solomon Ilori and James Ola. Folami from Nigeria and Chief Bey from Senegal. From Jamaica came Montego Joe( read about his solo records here). From the US came Yusef Lateef (Read some Yusef Lateef stuff here) and Ahmed Abdul-Malik (Read about him here) both converts to Islam and both already investigating music from Africa,Garvin Maseaux who was studying the Yoruba in Nigeria and finally Robert Crowder and Curtis Fuller.
For me the stand-out track is Love, The Mystery of by Guy Warren (have I mentioned I'm kind of obsessed by him?). (You can read about Warren's original recording here) What a shame he doesn't play on the record itself. The track opens with a snaking sax line by Lateef that is followed by chanting. Underpinning the sax and the chanting are Blakey on the drums and others on various percussion. Lateef moves on to oboe and then Blakey is given the space he needs for a thundering drum attack. Abdul-Malik keeps the whole proceedings together with a rock steady bass-line and Blakey drops one drum bombshell after the other with Lateef adding scrapper in the background. Then Lateef comes back in on oboe with a long sustained note that rises above Blakey's furious drums until the entire track gains an unstainable intensity and the chanting begins again until it is faded out at the end. Altogether beautiful stuff.

GUY WARREN - THE AFRICAN SOUNDZ OF GUY WARREN OF GHANA

Over the last few years I have had moments when I have become quite obsessed with Guy Warren.
In this age of instant Internet information access there is something elusive about him.
His earlier, 'exotica' records are quite easy to come by. I think that is in part because they are seen as exotica rather than jazz. His later records where he teams up with Amancio D'Silva amongst others are much harder to turn up.
Warren, or Ghanaba, as he was later known, remarkably played with ET Mensah in the Accra, then with Kenny Graham's Afro-Cubists in London (although I do not think he was recorded) and then with Charlie Parker in New York (again unfortunately not recorded due to the untimely death of Bird). He appears on landmark recordings by Ian Carr and Don Rendell and one of his songs appears on Bert Kaempfert's Swingin' Safari. What a resume!
I think this quote from Max Roach in 1974 shows how important he was: "I met Ghanaba in Chicago in 1956.... Ghanaba was so far ahead of what we were all doing that none of us understood what he was saying - that in order for Afro-American music to be stronger, it must cross-fertilize with its African origins.... We ignored him. Seventeen years later, Black Music in America had turned to Africa for inspiration and rejuvenation, and the African sound of Ghanaba is now being imitated all over the United States, where ever Afro-American music is played."
I also like this description of him by Ian Carr: "A few months later we had met the African percussionist Guy Warren when we worked with him on one of his own LPs, and the experience had been very stimulating. He played everything from talking drums to maracas, cowbells, Indian bells, gourd, bamboo flute, harmonica and tambourine - but more than his music, his attitude to music, his dress, his uninhibited manner seemed to epitomise a completely and refreshingly opposite approach to jazz. The Rendell-Carr Quintet wore dark suits and primly knotted ties and could have merged into almost any respectable background; our clothes seemed to symbolise the conservatism and safety of our music. But Guy never wore Western clothes. His shaven head would be covered by a black fez or else a kind of straw pith-helmet; over a white African gown he sometime wore a black cape, sometimes a leopard skin. And he always wore dark glasses."
In many ways I think that his music was, as Roach says, so far ahead of his time that he was really waiting for the advent of free-jazz so that his forceful, rhythmic, evolving and fascinating percussion work could be properly accompanied.
He gets close to achieving it on this album. One might not think that a guitar would be the perfect foil to his waves of beat but in fact D'Silva is his perfect partner - perhaps making a connection back to his Ghanaian highlife days. The partnership is still perfect when D'Silva switches to electric bass on African Dance No. 4 producing a very eerie, deep sliding noise that matches the jiggering staccato drums.
Dick Heckstall-Smith provided sax and flute support. He is understated and complimentary and at no point tries to upstage the show although he gets a chance to let rip on African Dance No 2 and plays some wonderfully honking squealing sax.
For those not used to percussion led music this record may, at times, seem repetitive and lacking in melody or very much in the way of song structure. But I urge you to listen again. Perhaps, given the rise of dance music, prominent drums will not seem as strange today as they did when this record was first released. Don't listen as you would listen to an orchestra. Rather listen as though you are feeling the music. Listen as though the music is for a party and is asking you to take part.I think that this is music to envelope the listener, music to try and take over the listener. Its not entirely jazz, its not entirely highlife or traditional African music. Its a wonderful amalgam of all of these. African Soundz indeed.
He also wrote an autobiography called I Have A Story to Tell and, even though I have looked for it in the British Library I can find no evidence of it anywhere!