Radio LBB: Roots Vol.33

Now into its seventh year and the 33rd edition. For the uninitiated, the Roots playlist showcases an eclectic range of music from across the globe of unfamiliar, forgotten, or recently discovered, to the most upfront sounds of now, all with the common theme of being rooted in Africa.

Some of the highlights this time round include:

Connie’s Crew - Bang Goes The Clock

It doesn’t get much more obscure than this! Bang Goes The Clock is an idiosyncratic bit of house music from the source, released in Chicago in 1988, on a split EP with the equally mysterious King Tut. The label appears to have been set up for this record, which is the only entry in its catalogue, while Connie’s Crew, credited as Big Mike and Ivan Mackey, don’t appear to have released anything else. A copyright is attributed to Connie Girl Productions, which also had some involvement in an electro / hip-hop record the following year, Cold Crushin’ Crew’s Power of Rock, but again the trail ends here. Records like this signal moments of possibility that never came to fruition, and the nagging bassline of Bang Goes The Clock, which sits loud in the mix and sparsely underpins the vocals, credited to Tasheba, another one-time artist, feels unusual and suggestive of directions that house music didn’t take up. The tireless reissue label, Numero Group, has made this incredible bit of music history available digitally, while original records, priced above £100, haven’t changed hands in a few years.

Wanda Sá & Celia Vaz - Amazon River

Thankfully we have much more available to us of the work of Brazilian singers and guitarists, Wanda Sá and Celia Vaz. Sá has been active in Brazil’s bossa nova scene since the mid '60s, releasing her debut album, Wanda Vagamente in 1964. In the time since, she has worked with such luminaries as Sérgio Mendez and Marcos Valle, and remains active as a musician and songwriter, performing with Valle in New York in 2011. Celia Vaz studied music in Brazil and Berklee, in Boston, in the '60s and '70s returning to Brazil to work as an arranger for Joyce, Martinho de Vila, and Rio Jazz Orchestra. In the '90s she began recording solo albums for Far Out Recordings and Soul Jazz Records, and continues writing and recording with collaborators in Rio today. Their duet album, Brasileiras, is a highlight of their respective catalogues, revealing their complementary songwriting styles and featuring guest vocals from the likes of Gal Costa and Joyce. The album opener, Amazon River, is the standout though, featuring just the pair in duet, their guitars and vocals working together often in unison, or offsetting one another with subtle harmonic and rhythmic differences.

Balla Et Ses Balladins - Paulette

Balla Et Ses Balladins is a dance band from Guinea, also known as Orchestre du Jardin de Guinée after the iconic dance music venue in Conakry. They formed in 1962, after the dissolution of Guinea’s first state-sponsored band, the Syli Orchestre National, and only a few years after the young nation declared independence from France. Named after their leader and trumpet player Balla Onivogui, they released a number of records on the state-owned record label Syliphone up to the early 90s and worked as a backing band for the legendary South African vocalist, Miriam Makeba. Paulette appears on the 1980 album, Objectif Perfection. An incredible bit of Guinean dance music, the pulse is pushed by driving, but minimalistic percussion and sparse, syncopated bass, underpinning the harmonised vocals and twinkling guitar leads, which occasionally recede into funky staccato rhythms to support Onivogui’s expressive trumpet soloing.

Fatouma Diawara - Sonkolon

This stunning track by Fatouma Diawara is a more recent release, coming from the Malian polymath’s 2011 album, Fatou. A star of both contemporary African music and cinema, she moved to France at 18 to become an actor, appearing in feature films that led to an Academy Award nomination for 2014’s Timbuktu. Alongside her acting credentials, Diawara can claim the title of "the first female solo electric guitar player in Mali". Her compositions combine the Wassoulou traditions of southern Mali with contemporary, international influences, and have led to a feature in the 2012 Africa Express project along with Damon Albarn, Rokia Traoré, Baaba Maal, Amadou & Mariam, and Nicolas Jaar. Sonkolon is a gorgeous track, showcasing her combination of the soft sounds of her electric guitar with traditional instruments like the kora harp, and Diawara’s lush and pop-inflected vocals, sung in Bambara, the national language of Mali.

Elza Laranjeira - Serenata Do Adeus

The Brazilian songstress, Elza Laranjeira, was born in Sao Paolo in 1925 and hit her stride with a short-lived series of albums in the early 1960s. Serenata Do Adeus was written by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius De Moraes, with a lush string arrangement and jazz-inflected acoustic rhythm section underpinning Laranjeira’s double-tracked vocal polyphony, recalling the glitz and glamour of early records by the likes of Shirley Bassey, rendered in an inimitable Brazilian Portuguese vernacular. It has found its way back into the ether of popular music with a recent, perhaps surprising, sample in British-American trap icon, 21 Savage’s The Shining-referencing, Redrum.

Alton Ellis - It’s True

The ‘Godfather of Rocksteady’, Alton Ellis, was a bonafide legend of reggae and of Jamaican music culture, inducted into the International Reggae And World Music Awards Hall Of Fame in 2006. For a time, he was considered Jamaica’s greatest and most soulful vocalist, until the incredible ascendancy of Bob Marley. Breaking onto the scene in the ska era, he developed the rocksteady genre through a series of singles on Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd’s Studio One label and in the mid-60s, Duke Reid’s Treasure Isle. His first rocksteady single, Get Ready - Rock Steady, came out of a recording session with legendary keyboardist Jackie Mittoo, when the appointed bass player didn’t show up. Mittoo played the bass part on the keyboard, but had to slow down the track from its frenetic ska piece, giving an angular but laid back rhythm that soon became all the rage. It’s True is a laid back and romantic piece, building on a midtempo backbeat, pulsing bassline, and lethargic staccato guitar riff, led by Ellis’s gorgeous tenor.

Lonnie Johnson & Elmer Snowden - St Louis Blues

Lonnie Johnson’s musical career seemed to be over and done with by the late 1950s, when he was working as a janitor in a hotel in Philadelphia. Few may have known that Johnson had been foundational in the development of blues guitar in the late 20s, with an insane recording schedule that produced 130 wax cylinders between 1925-1932, with a profound influence on artists as legendary as Robert Johnson, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley. Or that he’d had a hand in the development of jazz, recording with Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Duke Ellington’s Orchestra. After a brief resurgence during the second world war, Johnson slipped into obscurity, until the banjo player, Elmer Snowden stayed at the hotel and alerted the influential producer Chris Albertson to Johnson’s whereabouts. His resurgence included the duet album, Blues and Ballads, recorded with Snowden and released in 1960. Featuring lightly distorted electric guitars and melodic influences from central America, St. Louis Blues, showcases an elder statesman still developing with the times and imbibing new influences.

These are just some of the highlights in what I hope is an enjoyable musical journey that spans across continents, generations and genres…

A huge thanks go out to labels such as Now Again, Light In The Attic, Numero Uno and Luv N’ Haight, Analog Africa, Music From Memory, Africa Seven, Far Out Recordings, Strut, Mr Bongo and Soundway, who continue to unearth some of the most unique and amazing music that may have otherwise never seen the light of day.