VARIOUS ARTISTS - Highlife Time (Vampisoul)

A primer of some of the greatest of ’60s and ’70s highlife — the electrifying dance sound of Nigeria and Ghana — in a high quality, very personal selection by long time collector, compiler and DJ John Armstrong. It’s personal in that Armstrong has not resorted to objectively spreading the exposure amongst artists when making his pick of the output from the legendary Premier Studios in Nigeria’s capital Lagos, the major source for this gritty, enduringly popular guitar-based pop, and home of some of the greatest purveyors of the style. Five of the twenty tracks, then, are deservedly awarded to Rex Lawson’s mellifluous mix of ringing rhumba guitar lines, jazzy horn breaks and lyrics that mix pidgin English with the local languages, a blend that is still highly influential locally and of huge crossover appeal to fans of the Western and pan-African sounds that infuse his music. The influence of the popular, sax-playing ‘Evil Genius of Highlife’ (not a bit of it! This is tender, laid-back, seductive stuff) Dr Victor Olaiya pervades the collection as well, in his own band-leader guise (and alongside the immortal plangent tones of the Highlife King E T Mensah on the opener) and through the soulful, foot-tapping “ekassa” strain of highlife with which genius multi-instrumentalist and former Olaiya guitarist Sir Victor Uwaifo took the genre off into a whole, rhytm and blues based direction. But whether it be these famous band-leaders and musicians with their jazz-infused big band dance music and vivid, shuffling guitar rhythms, or the later, arguably more obscure artists such as funketeers Opotopo and the lead in to a possible Volume Two through the ’80s zouk track by Akana Man that closes the collection, this is heady, vibrant music that will light up any open-minded party crowd.

SIR VICTOR UWAIFO - Guitar-Boy Superstar 1970-76 (Soundway)

The wallet-busting flood of diligently researched and expertly packaged compilations of top-class West African music continues.
The subject of Soundway's admirably focused dig into the archives is Nigerian polymath Sir Victor Uwaifo’s self-styled ekassa music of the early ‘70s. Sculptor, inventor, poet and – as the title of this collection suggests – super-charged guitarist and band leader, Uwaifo is best known for mid ’60s hits with his band the Melody Maestros, such as Joromi and Guitar Boy. A few years on from those records, we find Sir Victor integrating the relaxed, shuffling folkloric music of his native Benin region into a rhythmic, funky dance sound centred round deep, dirty bass and busy rhythm guitar chops that parallel much of the American soul recordings of the period - think Betty Wright session guitarist Little Beaver’s clipped style or those hugely influential early James Brown records, the influence of the latter partially extending to the use of horns (in the form of judicious use of saxophone fills here and there). Over the top of all that, Uwaifo calls and responds with his band in his local Edo language whilst firing out some wild borderline-psychedelic wah-wah lead guitar. The result is a slightly weird, occasionally manic, always funky Nigerian dance genre to file right between your Afrobeat and highlife albums.

Soundway Records website

VARIOUS ARTISTS - Living is Hard: West African Music in Britain, 1927-1929 (Honest Jon's)

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 website

This review first appeared in fRoots magazine.