DOCTEUR NICO KASANDA.

Nicolas Kasanda (1939-85) was one of the most influential guitarists to come out of Africa. He and his brother, Dechaud, as members of Joseph Kabasele's African Jazz (1952-63), pioneered a new style of guitar called mi-solo which interpolated a third guitar between the rhythm and lead. The mi-solo could double the lead or fall back and augment the rhythm creating a more complex sound. The style quickly caught on and was adapted throughout the continent. From Angola to Mali bands covered Nico's sound as he broke away from African Jazz and created an exciting new band, African Fiesta, with Tabu Ley Rochereau on vocals. There is a decided Cuban feel to many of the band's mid-sixties recordings but Nico's ecstatic solos transcended musical genres. He also adapted the Hawaiian guitar with echo for a unique haunting sound on his ballads. After Rochereau split at the peak of African Fiesta's career, Nico went through several new combinations. In 1969 he launched a 6 month tour of West Africa. In Sierra Leone he created a new dance, the Kono that took the continent by storm. His band became the proving ground for many new talents (including Josky & Bopol) but he was clearly a tough boss and his career went into a premature decline. Though overshadowed by the successes of Rochereau and the rival camp of OK Jazz, Nico was a highly respected musician & left an incredible legacy of magical music. This is the first monograph devoted to the artist and places him on a level with better-known African superstars such as Fela & Franco.

D. O. MISIANI & SHIRATI JAZZ

THE KING OF HISTORY 

The first thing you have to be ready for with Benga music is the shrill voices. They are not unnaturally high like Bollywood playback singers, but still they strain up an octave. Then you can get into the sheer propulsive energy of it. It is perhaps the speediest music from Africa, and it is stripped for action: two guitars, bass and drums with only occasional sax, or even bottle percussion. Misiani is (or was) the master: this collection comes from the 1970s, which was his greatest era. Misiani, a talented guitarist himself, brought up on Losta Abele, Bosco, et al, assembled the best possible band -- so you don't have a rhythm guitarist strumming on an open chord, a bass playing the one and a drummer keeping a four-square beat: you have four individuals playing their hearts out from the word go. The bass is the most unusual: he is soloing throughout, paying very little attention to the tune or the other musicians. The two guitarists also don't really play together, they make little musical sorties, only occasionally at the same time. The drums are quite bizarre actually. In his classic novel, The Music in my Head, Mark Hudson has a very funny passage about the greatest air guitar song of all time: He goes on about this gem of rock & roll, and then says that when the drums come in they are so badly recorded it ruins everything. The Kenyan drums are not badly recorded, just badly made, I think. They sound like plastic buckets, very different from other trap drums on record. But the high energy guitars and insane bass soloing completely overwhelm any need for sonic fidelity on the tubs. Amazingly, the two albums released in the UK in the late 80s presented a strong showing of Misiani's music, and hooked a lot of us on Benga, but this earlier material is even better!

The CD notes don't say who is on here. However the 1989 album PINY OSE MER, which has liner notes by Werner Graebner, lists D.O. as bandleader, solo guitar and voice, Ochieng Oninga as first rhythm guitar, Juma Obai as 2nd rhythm guitar, and Nyabuon Nyang as merely the rhythm guitar. Two bassists are identified: Okech Oro and Pasy Aloo, with Caleb Odemba on drums. I don't know how many of them were in the band two decades earlier. Trying to explain the name, a fan said "Benga is the feeling you get when dancing." The music was influential in neighbouring Zambia and Zimbabwe, but also as far away as Nigeria where it was popular among fans of Ibo highlife. The direct influences on the sound might be traced to the orutu, a traditional one-stringed violin, or the nyatiti, the 8-stringed lyre. These can be heard on the Hugh Tracey recordings of the 50s, if you want to look for parallels in the rhythm and lead guitar. Although the Luo are only the third-largest ethnic group in Kenya their music became hugely popular in the 70s and eclipsed the other forms of Swahili- and Congolese-language dance music in East Africa. Misiani's pointed lyrics (couched in fables and folk tales) often got him in trouble with the authorities, and he was once arrested as an illegal immigrant (being from Tanzania) but not deported. At their peak Shirati Jazz sold 20,000 singles a month in the 70s, but in the 80s piracy and cassettes severely dented the African music industry. Misiani, who died in 2006, would have been amused that Barack Obama, son of a Luo man, became president of the United States while Kenya has never had a Luo president, Doug Paterson tells us in his liner notes. The booklet includes photos and translations of all the songs.

Empire Bakuba

Pepe Kalle with Empire Bakuba

When Pepe Kalle was a boy in Kinshasa in the 1960s, he struck a deal with the most celebrated Congo singer of the day, Joseph Kabasele, Le Grand Kalle. In return for working around Kabasele's place, young Pepe got a place to stay and singing lessons. Up to that time, the boy had been singing hymns in Catholic school, an experience he used to say explained the melancholy character of his angelic voice. But it was the experience with Kabasele that gave him his sense of melody, and prepared him to become one of the most beloved singers Congo music has ever produced.
Kalle began his career in the '70s group Bella Bella, which also served as proving ground for Nyboma and for Kanda Bongo Man. Kalle and Nyboma continued to harmonize their rich voices from time to time for years to come. But as the rocking, youth-oriented soukous sound began to take over in Kinshasa, Kalle formed the band that he would lead for the rest of his life. Empire Bakuba took its name from a Congolese warrior tribe, and it pointedly incorporated rootsy rhythms from the interior, sounds that had long been sidelined by popular rumba. At the same time, Empire Bakuba was as hard-driving a soukous band as you'll find, with the inimitable Doris on lead guitar, and a surreal frontline that juxtaposed the elephantine Kalle with a dancing dwarf named Emauro.
In their mid-1980s book African All Stars, Chris Stapelton and Chris May wrote, "Kalle's house is full of wonder. In a white courtyard sit a row of women and children wearing white, holding candles and chanting from prayer books. Inside, the lounge is heaped with furniture, tourist items, spears, raffia mats and a large refrigerator, from which Kalle dispenses regular bottles of Primus (beer). A large plastic chicken sits on the television set, from which President Mobutu is making one of his regular broadcasts."
No one could forget an encounter with Pepe Kalle, six feet tall and weighing a good 300-pounds. Afropop first interviewed him in a Kinshasa hotel in 1987. Kalle arrived in a full-length, sky-blue, West African grand boubou with gold embroidery and a pair of leather slippers. He gobbled down a large steak as though it were a potato chip. When asked to sing a small ditty for the program, Kalle tapped out a tone on his wristwatch to get in tune, and then summoned up that enormous, resonant, velvety voice.
Empire Bakuba remained active and relatively stable during years of tremendous turbulence in Congolese music, and Congolese life. At a performance in Harare, just months before Kalle died of a sudden heart attack, the band had sprawled to the size of an orchestra. Emuaro, who passed away early in the 1990s, had been replaced by three Pygmee dancers, and the performance had the feel of a musical circus. Empire Bakuba had clearly peaked by then, but there was no denying the sense of community the band generated. When Kalle coaxed a solo from his able guitarist Doris, that big convention center crowd seemed to draw close.
Kalle's final recording, Coctail (ETS NDIAYE/Stern's 1998) acquits him well. He harmonizes gloriously over subtle guitar interplay on "Pinos Kabuya." He celebrates the Malian 13th century king in the Latin-flavored "Soundiata Keita." Rumba and roots come together in a high-tech concoction that perfectly represents the passionate jumble that is modern Africa.

— Courtesy Calabash Music