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Trovador
Africando
Stern's through Sandstock

Celebration — The Best of Osibisa
AIM Records through Larrikin
Reviewed by Norm Dixon

The development of modern African music is fascinating and complex. Indigenous African music flowed across the planet with the slaves and evolved distinctive styles wherever they landed — in the Caribbean islands occupied by the British, French and Spanish, in the southern United States and in South America, especially Brazil.

Throughout this century, with the rise of trade and mass communication, many of the musics of the African diaspora returned to again influence the music of Africa.

Trovador, by the Senegalese/Cuban/Puerto Rican supergroup Africando, highlights the deep bond between Cuban and African music. Cuban dance rhythms originated in Africa centuries ago.

In the early 1930s, recordings from Havana and New York's Latino community began to arrive in west Africa. Urban Africans recognised the music's rhythms and embraced it, so much so that indigenous musics were neglected.

After 1945, the stream of "Spanish" releases into west Africa became a flood. It was most popular in the French and Belgian colonies of Guinea, Mali, Senegal and the French and Belgian Congos but also influenced music throughout Africa.

The popularity of Cuban music, with its African roots, reflected a growing mood of assertiveness, cultural pride and African nationalism. In the '60s, as independence struggles were fought and won, Africans absorbed and reinterpreted Cuban rhythms and arrangements, enriching them with indigenous rhythms, instruments and traditions. They sang in their own languages. Thus Zairean soukous and Senegalese mbalax, to name just two, were born.

Africans still love Latin music. African, Cuban and New York musicians regularly tour and record in Africa, in Cuba, in New York and in Latin America. Trovador is proof positive of the continuing rapport that exists between the music of Africa and Latin America.

Africando brings together a huge array of New York's salsa legends and three of Senegal's top singers: Medoune Diallo, Papa Seck and Nicholas Menheim. What they produce is truly glorious Latin music with an extra African oomph: big, brassy arrangements, soulful lyrics sung in the Wolof and Spanish languages, melodic sons, leisurely charangas, the percussive magnificence of the congas, enthusiastic flute solos by Eddie Zervigon, and an enchantingly wry piano solo by Sergio George that incorporates Nat King Cole's "Mona Lisa" in the opening track, "Doley Mbolo".

Osibisa made contemporary African music — albeit a fusion with western rock — very popular in the west over a decade before Paul Simon's Columbus-like "discovery" of it. This band, whose core members were Ghanaians resident in London, became household names throughout Europe, Australia and the United States in the early '70s. The fame and following they achieved in those years is only now being matched by the likes of Youssou N'Dour and Salif Kieta.

Peter Noble, who has collected Osibisa's classic studio and live recordings on Celebration, feels the contribution of this pioneering band has not been justly recognised. "The sheer quality of Osibisa's volume of work is outstanding and now, at a time when the whole world has finally discovered African music, Osibisa, who were there as creators at the very beginning, deserve to be still at the very forefront of African music", Noble observes.

Celebration is more than a historical document. The music on some tracks sounds a little dated, but on most the freshness and vibrancy of the band remain as strong today as in 1971. Osibisa's music came at a time when people in the west had become bored with rock. Adding African cross rhythms (Osibisa means literally "crisscross rhythms exploding with

happiness"), a heavy emphasis on percussion and brass to familiar rock guitar solos and progressions, Osibisa caught the imagination of British audiences and made dancing to music "cool" again.

But Osibisa and "Afro-rock" became victim of the times. They were accused by fans of "authentic" African music of turning their backs on their roots to play rock. This charge could be sustained if you listened only to a few of their most bland studio tracks, but their live cuts and most of the studio tracks on Celebration prove it to be false.

By the late '70s, the disco blight had overtaken the dance floors, and Osibisa was now too "exotic" for record companies. Trumpeter Mac Tontoh explained in 1982: "The message was the same. It was suggested that we change our style, to move towards American soul, funk and disco. But that would have meant abandoning our African rhythms. We have our heritage. We can't just change. Our music wasn't a fake."

Frozen out by the record industry, their fame declined. But the band still performs and tours. Early this year they successfully toured Australia, proving that many still remember their contribution. The release of Celebration is a welcome tribute to this ground-breaking band.