Fela Kuti

listened to my first batch of fela stuff, figure I will liveblog in case anybody's interested. I'm no funk/jazz guru so don't expect sophisticated breakdowns, just my gut reactions here...

fela kuti & koola lobitos 64-68
not much of note, some good tunes but recordings are ruff and overall the songs are a bit anonymous. for the curious archivist.

fela fela fela (1969) aka the '69 los angeles sessions
taken aback by how solid this is. whatever was in the water in LA in '69 agreed with him something fierce. bitsize fela, most tracks run 3-4 minutes long. leans more toward upbeat/jazz high life style, but there are hints of the hypnotic incantatory approach he mined on later albums. if you can get a hold of the original version, fela fela fela, it's much better than the remixed one called the '69 los angeles sessions. it almost sounds as though somebody tried to remix it like a heavy funk record, when really this is silky jazz played with finesse, and it benefits from being muted + smooth rather than brash + amped up.

fela's london scene (1969)
a transitional album. longer workouts, with the polyrhythms getting pushed to the fore. unfortunately the material isn't very strong here. standout track "egbe mi o" is rendered in stronger relief on...

live! (1970)
first track "let's start" sounds like a warmup number, but after that this thing really takes off. a stuttering bassline fuels fela's howls on "black man's cry", "egbe mi o" weaves between a catchy descending vocal chant and full-on in-your-face horn hits. apparently redhead tailor, some guy from an english rock band called cream, plays on this. you'd never know, so good on him.

why the black man dey suffer (1971)
title track is ground zero for fela's sound in the 70s. amazing that he went from "my lady frustration" in '69 to this. it grooves, but in a yearning + downbeat way, a confidant, fully-realized pastiche of the styles he'd been mixing and matching for the past few years. the social consciousness angle is front and center now: 'dey took our culture away from us / gave us dem culture no one understand'. flip side is an adequate workout.

ginger baker - stratavarious (1972)
this is listed as part of fela's discog on wiki, which is good because I doubt I would've heard it otherwise. first two songs are collabs w/ fela, the second written by him. they're less musically sophisticated than what he was doing at the time with africa '70, but they're a lot more atmospheric and trippy. worth tracking down. some haunting vocal turns by sandra smith, who introduced fela to the black power movement in LA, a big impact on his aesthetic development.

good interview with sandra smith here about her time in LA w/ fela

http://blogs.laweekly.com/arts/2011/12/fela_kuti_los_angeles_sandra_i.php

love this bit

It was really exciting when he auditioned for Disneyland. I was like, "ooh, a free trip to Disneyland!" I was so excited, but at the end of the day, I was disappointed.

Disneyland told Fela that he wasn't playing African music. They wanted him to play in Adventureland.

They had thought he played just stereotypical African music, like what they have on the Small World ride?

They thought he was going to be something else, and they said that he wasn't playing African music at all. How do you tell an African man, playing African rhythms who had studied African music, that he is not playing African music? Crazy. So that was Disneyland.

lol wow.

Didn't know Juno Lewis was the one who introduced him. Only other mention of him I've seen is his Coltrane collaboration, "Kulu Se Mama."

him = them

I've been given as a gift (!) Vol 2 of the Wrasse records boxsets (mentioned above). It includes the following albums, mostly doubled up 2-per-CD:

Monkey Banana
Excuse O
Everything Scatter
Noise For Vendor Mouth
Teacher Don't Teach Me Nonsense
Koola Lobitos 64-68
The '69 LA Sessions
Roforofo Fight
The Fela Singles
Confusion
Gentleman
Shakara
Fela's London Scene
Expensive Shit
He Miss Road
Stalemate
Fear Not For Man

I only have a passing knowledge of Fela and am enjoying digging into this. "Expensive Shit" is on right now - wonderful.

expensive shit/he miss road are his two greatest LPs IMHO, closely followed by the Ginger Baker album

hoping E3 continues his liveblog thru Fela's discography

nascar pony 100% OTM.

I will probably stan harder for No Agreement, but I love He Miss Road and Expensive Shit lots!

nonono my name is STEVIE

and thank you

yeah I guess I should catch you guys up huh

I just dig readin about it, man

Laurie & I saw Seun a couple of weeks ago and it was really really good even though he was a bit sick from the brutal NW weather

that guy playing the shaker gourd was killin it

new Fela live album 3xCD is awesome-- not prime era material, it's all late 80s era, but still fantastic and fun

Wrasse are finally releasing the second vinyl box set in a few weeks time..

Curated by Ginger Baker, it will include...

Live With Ginger Baker (1971)
Roforofo Fight (1972)
Confusion (1974)
Alagbon Close (1974)
He Miss Road (1975)
Na Poi (1976)

looking forward to finally getting some of these on vinyl without paying stupid prices...

Ginger Baker record is killer

^^

There's this weird doc streaming on Netflix right now called Ginger Baker in Africa.

contains my three favourite fela albums - live with ginger baker, he miss road and na poi. i hope they release them separately too so i can get alagbon close.

i have the ginger baker in africa dvd. it's ok, if a little on the short side.

Confusion is such a monster

the Ginger Baker in Africa DVD is worthwhile for the Fela footage alone, but its the live snippet of Segun Bucknor's Sweet Things that makes the film for me... They must have shot loads more footage of those live performances - wonder what happened to it all...

Segun Bucknor is so under-rated...

yeah that doc is great. is that the one that has the cartoon bit of Ginger traipsing around the continent? very lol

and yeah Segun Bucknor sequence is o_0

segun bucknor is wonderful!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctyXw5qgNLo

first real pang of regret that I never ended up moving to Chicago...

So guess who's arrived on Bandcamp.

http://felakuti.bandcamp.com/

This is absolutely awesome

Otm!!!!!!!!

wow

Six individual vinyl LPs to be released on 1 September 2014

* Fela With Ginger Baker Live!
* Confusion
* Expensive Shit
* He Miss Road
* Sorrow Tears & Blood
* Teacher Don't Teach Me Nonsense

not going to lie, would love to have live!, he miss road and expensive shit on vinyl...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CGBu6F9UUAAA63Z.jpg

I WANT TO TELL YOU A STORY

No be story o

E no be story?

At all, very very at all.

man fela gets me so amped up i feel like i can conquer the world when i listen to him

Kind of fell down a fela youtube/spotify hole last night after discovering this beautifully shot footage of Africa 70 live --there's not much of that out there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz2jXHKa7TY

as posted by Ward Fowler on the King Sunny Adé thread:

Fela documentary on BBC2 today:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000pr2n

(starts two hours from now)

That was a fine documentary. It is now on yt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbOXDCqbPZo

yesterday it still was, sorry.

been starting to go through uh... possibly every fela record, we'll see. early verdict roforofo fight is one of the best albums i've ever heard

he has a lot of best albums ever

Trouble Sleep Yanga Wake Am is the best song I've ever heard on the best album I've ever heard

Open and Close is still my favorite but there are so many good ones. Confusion/Gentleman definitely up there for me.

I have discovered recently that "Expensive Shit" / "Water No Get Enemy" is great music for running... A side makes me go fast fast fast, B side nice and slow coming home