"Afro-Beat Airways: West African Shock Waves (Ghana & Togo 1972-1978)"

The origins of this compilation read like the plot to an quirky indie comedy: a German musicologist misplaces his passport, loses his luggage, misses his flight, and winds up taking a completely different flight. When he arrives at his revised destination, he spends some time with a compelling eccentric, some unexpected things happen, and the experience changes the course of his life. The eccentric character in this instance was Dick Essilfe-Bonzie, a producer for Ghana's influential indie label Essiebons, and reluctant caretaker of a mountain of forgotten recordings that Polygram never bothered to collect when they took over.

Analog Africa

It is both fascinating and alarming how much of a role serendipity and chance play in musicology sometimes.Altered flight destination aside, curator Samy Ben Redjeb was not planning to embark upon a Ghana compilation at all when Essilfe-Bonzie presented him with a box of recently digitized recordings that he was thinking of emerging from retirement to release himself.Soon after, Redjeb learned that the reissue project wasn’t going to happen after all ("things are complicated")and that Dick had several huge boxes of doomed master tapes sitting on his veranda getting rained on.Given that: 1.) he had no choice but to save the tapes, and 2.) he already had heard quite a bit of great of great music from Essilfe-Bonzie's prematurely aborted digitizing project, it became a forgone conclusion that Samy needed to shelve his Togo and Benin projects and plunge into the sudden windfall of Ghana-iana.I am curious to see how many more albums emerge from this treasure trove, as only 12 of the songs included on Afro-Beat Airways were actually taken from Dick's archive.

For the most part, the focus of the album is placed quite squarely on funky, organ-based Afro-Beat.To his credit, Redjeb avoids the unnecessarily epic song lengths and prolonged, self-indulgent solos that have historically torpedoed many of my Afro-Beat listening experiences.In fact, most of the songs are a punchy four minutes or under, except for the cases where they are excellent enough to warrant departing from that formula.If it weren't for the inclusion of a brief and infectiously propulsive piece by De Frank Professionals, song length would actually be directly proportional to song quality: all of my other favorites tend to go on for a while.In particular, the K. Frimpong and Ebo Taylor pieces are pretty stellar.Notably, two of those were among the tapes liberated from the boxes sitting outside Essilfe-Bonzie's house, narrowly avoiding oblivion to become compilation highlights.I was also quite fond of African Brothers Band's "Ngyegye No So," which features a charming mid-song spoken breakdown courtesy of the very charismatic Nana Ampedu ("Well well well...my people, are you okay?").I'm a sucker for those.

Afro-Beat Airways is a very solid and likable compilation.There wasn't a single song that stood out as a flat-out masterpiece (aside from maybe Ebo Taylor's sinuously funky "Come Along"), but nothing stood out as disappointing either.That is no small feat, as Ghana—like Nigeria—has been anthologized to death in recent years.Unearthing the gems from such a vast and complicated trove of available material is a never-ending (and daunting) sifting process and Redjeb has done a great job of it. I was particularly excited about the K. Frimpong piece, which I didn't have yet (and would never have had, without his intervention).I was equally thrilled to learn from the liner notes that Vis-à-vis were his studio backing band, thus providing me with my next internet scavenging target.

Obviously, a lot of great African music is turning up on mp3 blogs like Awesome Tapes From Africa, but having a knowledgeable guy like Samy around to ferret out all the best stuff and write about it is pretty wonderful and indispensable.Not many people have the resources or patience to try to chase down dozens of long-retired obscure musicians in foreign countries, so a lot of the pictures, anecdotes, and line-up details included here are pretty unique and invaluable. The album itself is certainly enjoyable, but the accompanying interviews and biographical information are even better.

samples:

• African Brothers Band, "Ngyegye No So"
• De Frank Professionals, "Afe Ato Yen Bio"
• Ebo Taylor & the Sweet Beans, "Odofo Nyi Akyiri Biara"