palm wine guitar music (from west africa)

here's my palm-wine playlist: http://open.spotify.com/user/mordys/playlist/4v23GlH3nTfURT2mFpKt3s

we took a long walk on the bala heritage trail last weekend and i played it off a speaker in d's stroller - it's pretty much the perfect warm spring day walk music

x-p Haha, maybe a little bit up for my current state of mind. I blundered across this thread in the first place because I was listening to this song on repeat -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDO_o-w9vj0

which is way more where I'm at right now. drunken boredom / kind of loneliness, coloured by a general awareness that things aren't that bad and even if they were, so what? There's some lovely music out there, that'll do for now

thanks for that Mordy, was momentarily baffled as to why it wouldn't open properly but then realised it was because I'm playing 'Twist With The Morningstars' right now anyway as it's after Elizabeth in Rogie's Spotify top 10.

it makes me so happy listening to it

this fits more into wistful Rogie mode

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CecjgFr-Oq8

Ah man, that's absolutely beautiful. Clearly never lost it

i've never heard this Godwin Omabuwa "Dick Tiger's Victory" track before tnite but it's really a gem

that atakora manu youtube track is amazing, NV, more like that plz

who is the female vocalist on E.T. Mensah's "The Tree and the Monkey?"

xp Mordy i've got that whole Atakora Manu record on mp3, the rest doesn't seem to be on Youtube tho, cd Leonardo it if you're interested?

worst day ever. thank god for s.e. rogie + palm wine music

lots of nice stuff on this thread

John Peel used to play the shit out of that SE Rogie album. Never owned it but feel like I know it so well. Need to check out some of these other folks for sure.

love this stuff so much

i can't get enough of it

thx for the spotify mix mordy

honest to god spotify has really made ILM so much more amazing to me now, so cool w.stuff like this or any of the rolling threads

i'm completely infatuated w/ "the tree and the monkey" from the marvellous boy compilation and i wish i knew who was singing on it bc i would love to hear her sing more

i asked honest jon's and they aren't sure but think maybe Juliana Okine - she's got one google scholar reference on a totes out of print book called "flagbearers of ghana" and a slight reference in this article: http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/people/pop-up.php?ID=144

do any ilxors know where i could find copies of either the 'all for you' or 'day by day' e.t. mensah comps for purchase or otherwise?

ha nm, apparently amazon has them for sale

Music appears to have played some role in the construction of social networks among African workers in Lagos. As one elderly guitarist in Lagos described it:

It is from all this sort of music that people got the idea of developing one tune to another. You know, when you hear a record and it's nice, it's likely you'll begin to sing it alone, in the bed or in the bathroom. That is how this thing happens, you know. If you have a G. V. record, and I'm living very near you, I'll be expecting you to play that record in the morning, and I can because of that become your friend. I'll be visiting you, "Mo like record-e" [I like your record], and we'll drink beer and palmwine.

Some of the stuff on your mix really suprised me at how country influenced it sounded

Gramophone discs imported by European firms such as the United Africa Company, Witt and Busch, and the Compagnie Francaise d'Afrique Occidental expanded the repertories of Lagosian guitarists. American country music star Jimmie Rodgers was very popular during the 1920s and 1930s.

Yeah my best friend from high school roomed w a guy from nigeria one year in college and he said his family really liked jim reeves and that real saccharine countrypolitan stuff

how great is that song "she caught me red hot" btw? that whole collection is a++

Been getting heavy into this stuff lately, and African music from '30-'75 in general, but as someone new to a lot of this, can someone help me distinguish between palm wine, high life and juju? Are these genre names just temporal distinctions with increasing immersion of other styles, ie bop > hard bop > fusion, or does it have to do with region of origin, or what? What I've gleaned is that palm wine came first, and is the more country-calypso sounding stuff, and then highlife took those rhythms and electrified (figuratively and literally) the sounds, adding Afro beat, rock and roll, etc. I see Hurting's definition of Juju upthread, but i still have no idea what Juju actually sounds like as opposed to highlife. From the bit of reading I've done, it seems to have come after highlife. Is that corect?

Juju music, a local variant of the urban west african palm wine guitar tradition, emerged as a defined genre in the Nigerian colonial capital of Lagos around 1932… The initial popularizer of juju was a Lagosian guitarist named Tunde King. He incorporated elements of syncretic Christian hymnody, asiko drumming, and ijinlee Yoruba poetic rhetoric into the labile palmwine framework. Although musicians in Lagos were already performing similar styles, "T.K." was the first juju practitioner to develop a following among the colonial black elite, and the first to be commercially recorded. His contemporaries thus generally regard him as the man who "brought juju music out." Early juju style remained remarkably stable from 1932 through the Second World War. As veteran juju musician Ojoge Daniel expresses it, the style's trajectory may be broadly characterized as an initial burst of innovation followed by a long period of "small-small shifts" in performance practice.

That, like the other quotes above, are from Christopher Alan Waterman's Juju: A Social History and Ethnography of an African Popular Music.

Been getting heavy into this stuff lately, and African music from '30-'75 in general, but as someone new to a lot of this, can someone help me distinguish between palm wine, high life and juju? Are these genre names just temporal distinctions with increasing immersion of other styles, ie bop > hard bop > fusion, or does it have to do with region of origin, or what? What I've gleaned is that palm wine came first, and is the more country-calypso sounding stuff, and then highlife took those rhythms and electrified (figuratively and literally) the sounds, adding Afro beat, rock and roll, etc. I see Hurting's definition of Juju upthread, but i still have no idea what Juju actually sounds like as opposed to highlife. From the bit of reading I've done, it seems to have come after highlife. Is that corect?

― Jimmywine Dyspeptic, Wednesday, June 5, 2013 9:38 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I could be wrong about this, but I believe Palm Wine music is usually acoustic, whereas JuJu is electrified and bears some influence of rock, R&B and funk. JuJu is specifically associated with Nigeria, whereas Highlife is associated with Ghana and other countries, although there is Nigerian music that gets referred to as highlife, and I would say JuJu generally favors more laid back tempos whereas Highlife is a more uptempo dance music, but that's also not an across the board distinction. I get the impression that a lot of the afropop/afrorock compilations that have come out in the last decade blur distinctions or pay no attention to them. Another thing about highlife is that I think you hear horns and jazz influence more often, whereas JuJu seems much more focused on guitar and percussion interplay.

All of these styles bear the imprint of rumba's popularity in Africa during the WWII era.

oh another distinguishing thing that occurs to me is that in JuJu you often hear a heavy presence of pitch-alterable "talking drums" because of the Yoruba influence. I don't think you hear that so much in highlife.

For example, if you listen to Sunny Ade or Ebeneezer Obey, two of the biggest juju artists:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7vZ5yzYboA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YANSNL6bp7Y
you hear what I'm talking about -- languid tempos, spaciousness, talking drum, lots of interplay between percussion and guitar, still a noticeable rumba influence, but almost more of a spiritual than a dance music feel

Whereas highlife music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xyTYDNdTz8

horns, more uptempo, more dancy, tighter, rumba influence is more obvious, etc.

But both juju and highlife have gone through many stylistic changes and permutations over the years so it's hard to simplify. I mean what's the difference between funk, rock, R&B and blues? There's funky rock, and rocky blues, and funky R&B, and bluesy funk, etc., but you still probably have a sense that in a general sense there are some loose parameters.
a

Extremely helpful, thanks everyone (especially Hurting - those Youtube clips were something of a revelation. I always see King Sunny's albums cheap but never pick 'em up). And I agree with this -

I get the impression that a lot of the afropop/afrorock compilations that have come out in the last decade blur distinctions or pay no attention to them.

- which makes parsing this stuff even more difficult.

Yeah I find it to be an annoying drawback to stuff like the Soundway comps -- great music, but not much respect for the music. They present it like it's all part of some Old Weird Africa.

my impression is that these genres terms are somewhat unstable in the original context too

no moreso than other genre terms I don't think

I find myself wishing the songs on those Nigeria Special and Ghana Special comps had less vocals. To my Western ears, a lot of the chanty call-and-response stuff starts to sound tediously similar. How are the Nigeria 70 comps?

I like the Nigeria 70 comps better than the Soundway comps

not for a particular reason, I just think those guys choose better tracks

Yeah I find it to be an annoying drawback to stuff like the Soundway comps -- great music, but not much respect for the music. They present it like it's all part of some Old Weird Africa.

― i don't even have an internet (Hurting 2), Wednesday, June 5, 2013 2:19 PM (57 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

90% of that stuff is post-1960s and palm wine stuff has it roots much earlier and indeed s.e. rogie probably would have been considered to have an "old-fashioned" repertoire when he was recording in the 60s and 70s

oh I know, I didn't mean Old Weird Africa in time period, I more mean that it all becomes this single, vague, exoticized place with a BIZARRO version of rock and funk.

i'm not sure you can levy that accusation what with all the detailed liner notes and stuff

but it does strike me that all the interest in post-rock african music hasn't really excited that much interest in earlier genres.... or so it seems....

i think a lot of the older stuff isn't as available as the 70s music. Waterman mentions a bunch of recordings that he says he couldn't locate --

The earliest recordings known to me of Yoruba songs with guitar accompaniment were made in England in the late 1920s by the Zonophone Company. The Catalogue of Zonophone West African Records by Native Artists, published in Hayes, Middlesex in 1929, includes a number of songs in Yoruba with guitar and tambourine accompaniment, performed by Domingo Justus. None of my older informants mentioned Justus, and I haev no been able to locate any of these discs for analysis. The first recordigns of palmwine music with guitar accompaniment made in Lagos, performed by Irewolede Denge and Dickson Oludaiye, were part of the Odeon series previously mentioned. The masters of these recordings were likely kept in Germany and lost during the Second World War, and I have not managed to find any of the discs.

I'd love to hear some more palmwine recordings than the few that have been reissued. Maybe there's an archive we could get access to somewhere? Actually, I was hunting around for these discs recently: http://www.afrodisc.com/parlophone_po_500_599.79.html but I can't figure out who has them.

here's a motherload of west african music in various genres, albeit only some that might be categorized as "palm-wine guitar music": http://sounds.bl.uk/World-and-traditional-music/Decca-West-African-recordings

i actually managed to download the 100s of tracks in this collection and converted them to MP3s. i could try to share but it's like 10 GB.

oh man that;s beautiful thank you thank you

I always see King Sunny's albums cheap but never pick 'em up

Oh man, most anything pre 1985 or so from Sunny is awesome

i think the british library's "sounds" site is kind of underutilized in general, maybe because everything is streaming as opposed to easily downloadable, and it's not as user-friendly as it could be. but it's an amazing resource.

i mean check out http://sounds.bl.uk/World-and-traditional-music/Ethnographic-wax-cylinders

i'm sure i've been to the sounds site before and then forgot it existed

http://sounds.bl.uk/World-and-traditional-music/Decca-West-African-recordings/025M-1CS0043769XX-0200V0

(listen to that one!)

You know what's a good album ? Seven Degrees North (2000) by King Sunny Adé.

I tried (bottled) palm wine two weeks ago. It was light, sweetish, slightly tart, not bad but not something I'd trade a beer for.