Following the excellent
London is the Place For Me series that covered the role of Caribbean and African music in post-war London life, the admirably assiduous Honest Jon's have taken a plunge into the EMI Records archive to stitch together another fascinating, evocative part of roots music’s rich historical tapestry, and the city's role in it.
These late '20s Zonophone recordings were made in London by West African artists resident in (or visiting) Britain, and sold back to their home market (record players as well as the discs themselves were part of the deal), and thus little of this music contains influence from outside the British colonial nations of their origin (Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast/Ghana).
It’s mostly raw and elemental folkloric fare which has the resonance of field recordings (albeit with a clear, cleanly-mastered sound), with singers either unaccompanied or backed by rudimentary percussion, and with much in the way of call and response, possession or trance songs, and spirituals.
However, melody does have its place alongside tracks heavy on rhythm and mood, the presence of acoustic guitar pointing the way to later, more recognisable genres like Ghanaian highlife and the palm wine music of Sierra Leone. Harry E Quashie pushes the known provenance of the latter genre back a couple of decades with the Ghanaian standard
Anadwofa, and there’s enough of a countrified twang to The West African Instrumental Quartet’s elaborately arranged instrumental to suggest the early shoots of the musical intermarriage with Europe and the Americas that was so important to the region’s popular music in later decades.
What little biographical detail that compiler Mark Ainley has managed to unearth suggests that few of these artists went on to greater musical achievements, and the socio-economic backdrop to the period in which these recordings were made - Africans who came to Britain to work were subject to the typical vagaries of immigrant labour (low pay, poor living conditions and racism) - suggest this collection might be both the starting and stopping place for our knowledge about them. So
Living is Hard is a fine a way as any to mark these mysterious, unfamiliar voices of a newly discovered past.
Honest Jon's websiteThis review first appeared in fRoots magazine.
Seprewa kasa – “the seprewa speaks, the guitar answers” – is about as self-explanatory an album title as they come as the light and airy call of the Ghanaian five-string box harp-lute is answered by the delicate phrasing of veteran guitarist and Osibisa member Kari Bannerman (or Banaman, as his surname is spelt for the purposes of this release). Described as the soul of highlife, the seprewa was traditionally played as a solo instrument, but Kasa Baffour Kyerematen and Osei Korankye have tuned, teased and interwoven its style to produce a chatty, irrepressibly upbeat dual harmony that gives only the merest hint of the funkier genre to which it ultimately led. There's a bright, sunny feel to the seprewa, and although it has been described as a relative of the kora, it has more of the resonance of the lighter sound of the ngoni, and with Banaman's brisk acoustic (and occasionally electric) guitar fills, a lilting back-beat and high, satin-smooth vocals, this is understated but attractive music that seduces in a gentle, unfussy manner.
