A few days before the announcement of the death of the immense Charles Duvelle, the soul behind the Ocora label, Hisham Mayet goes back to the relationship he had with this musicologist, who showed him the way to create his own label, Sublime Frequencies. A friendship that allowed the publication during the summer of 2017 of a Photo Book, showing photographs taken by Duvelle during this many trips, from West Africa to Eastern Asia.

When and how did you start this book project ?
The project was a result of a meeting I had with Charles Duvelle in November of 2015. I had been wanting to meet him for over 15 years. I finally had a liason (Jharna Bhattacharaya, widow of Deben Bhattacharaya) make the formal introductions. I visited him at his home in Paris and we immediately became fast friends. We shared many of the same philosophies in regards to the work we had both been doing in regards to musicology. He wanted to work on something together, so I proposed a book detailing his wonderful photography during his years recording with the Ocora label.

What was your perception of the Ocora label, a model for Sublime Frequencies?
Ocora was certainly for me, one of the biggest inspirations for Sublime Frequencies. It was the first name given in our mission statement of many influential labels that had inspired my record collecting and various recording expeditions.

You published a long interview with Charles Duvelle… We learned a lot of stories about the venerable sound researcher, who was a reference for David Byrne and Brian Eno, among many others. For example you described how Duvelle was at Fela’s home in 1977, a day before the republic of Kalakuta was attacked by the Nigerian forces! A true novel character?
The stories that Charles had given me would take an entire book to disclose. To say that he had many fantastic experiences is an understatement. There were many that would not fit in the narrative of his work for Ocora, so as you can imagine, recording all over the world for 40 years, there are many more stories.

There is a lot of cliches about ethnomusicologists, often seen as rather austere people, researchers disconnected from the realworld but Charles Duvelle was different. Did that aspect surprise you?
Yes and no. I was surprised by how accessible he was once I became friends with him. I think before the age of constant social media surveillance in the present time, most people seemed much more inaccessible. Everyone now is trying as much as possible to market themselves via social media. But you have to realize before this phase, people could exist in the shadows without trying too hard. Charles was certainly not looking to be a celebrity in the sense of an attention seeker. He is a private man and his work as a composer is a private art, so in a sense he just liked to be out of the spotlight.

Do you think that today it is still possible to a similar work to Charles Duvelle’s?
Yes. I feel like I’m the extension of what Duvelle has been doing. My work with Sublime Frequencies certainly carries the legacy of what Duvelle has started. There are many others today that are continuing the process of traveling and recording all over the world. Its quite different now, because the technology is different and there are less surprises in the world. It seems with the Internet and Youtube, almost every story and music has been discovered. BUT, there are always surprises to be found and discovered.

How have you worked together for the selection of pics? Was there a lot? Thousands?
There were several hundred photos in his archive. Charles sent me all he had available. I went through every photograph and chose what I felt represented a rich tapestry of photographs that had a nice composition, showed many types of instruments, had a broad geographic area, etc. I chose a combination of black and white and color photographs. Many were unpublished. It would have been a 500 pages book had we included most of the photographs.

Sakara Orchestra from Benin


 

Do you think that just like with the music, the images of the Ocora label show us a world that has since disappeared?
Yes and no. Most of the people he photographed are no longer alive, and a lot has changed in the respective areas where these images were taken. Modernity and «progress» is constant. All these areas have been affected by technology. But, I’ve done a lot of traveling to the same areas that Duvelle traveled to and many times, the same scenes can be found today. It’s becoming less and less so, but there are remote areas that have remained relatively the same.

You are publishing unreleased tracks to accompany the reading. Can we expect a vinyl edition of these gems?
Yes, in the future, many vinyl projects will come for the Duvelle archive! And also, the music of Charles Duvelle will be published as well. He was a brilliant composer on piano and the Prophet synthesizer.

And are there other unreleased tapes on Ocora?
I’m not really sure. There were many recordists working for Ocora and I do not have access to all the archives. It’s quite difficult to ascertain how much material has been unpublished.

Here’s a record that sounds like nothing else – a unique cross between Highlife and Afrobeat – the type that will never sleep on your record shelf for too long. Enjoy!

When most people think about the music of Nigeria, the first thing that comes to mind is probably afrobeat, the darkly funky African jazz stew popularized by bandleader Fela Kuti, himself a Yoruba from the southwestern region of the country. Or perhaps they might mention other Yoruba musicians such as King Sunny Ade and Ebenezer Obey, the twin pillars of the southwestern juju style. Maybe their thoughts would glide more towards the eastern extreme of the country, where Igbo highlife stars such as Stephen Osita Osadebe, the Oriental Brothers and Oliver De Coque have made a mark upon the arena. More imaginative thinkers might look northwards to cite Hausa and Fulani griots like Dan Maraya Jos, Alhaji Mamman Shata and Alhaji Musa Dankwairo. It is rare though, that the spotlight is leveled towards the mid-western region of the region of the country, the territory encompassing the modern-day Nigerian states of Edo and Delta. Edo in particular boasts of a wealth of musical traditions that is both deep and broad, yet shamefully underexplored; and among this assortment of musical traditions, one of the richest is the music of the Afemai, or Etsako people. And in the field of Afemai music, the undefeated champ is Alhaji Waziri Oshomah.

Afemai music has for some time been the best-kept secret among the more discriminating connoisseurs of Nigerian highlife, and for many it is almost addictive, driving them to search madly for more and more music in this semi-obscure style. It’s hard to describe exactly what makes this music so intoxicating: it is in parts gritty, hypnotic, ecstatic, lilting, soulful… but when words fail, the adjective most would employ to describe it is deep. The difficulty of discussing it is compounded by the fact that the music does not exactly have a generic label or an emblematic figurehead to lead it in that way that, say, Fela serves for afrobeat. However, Waziri Oshomah—“the Etsako Super Star”—generally functions as the most accessible and consistently rewarding entry point into the wondrous world of the Afemai sound and he has reliably acted as its ambassador for more than 40 years.

Waziri Oshomah was born Isah Sule in the mid-western town of Osomegbe, in 1948. Osomegbe is situated in the territory of the Ekperi clan, and its population is culturally and religiously heterogeneous. “We are about 40% Christian, and 60% Muslim,” Oshomah says. “My family is Muslim.” His family also happened to be musically oriented, participating in the performance of traditional social music. “My parents were composers,” he remembers. “They were also lead vocalists in such local cultural groups as Agbi, Izi, Agie, to name a few.”

Given his musical familial heritage, young Isah took to performing quite early in life, by age 7 already leading the school band at St. Mary Primary School, Ekperi. While he had a natural interest in the indigenous cultural music of his community, he was obsessed with the new music capturing the hearts and minds of the young generation: highlife. “As a small child, I used tossing verse by verse or stanza by stanza, records sung by highlife musicians like Bobby Benson, Victor Uwaifo, Eddy Okonta and I.K. Dairo.” Drawn to this music, Isah had already started attending and performing at nightclubs before his tenth birthday, much to the consternation of his devout parents.

“My parents now saw me as a spoilt child”, he says. “They later disowned me because they felt I will sacrifice my Muslim religion for music.” However, contrary to his parents’ fears, he did not drop out of school or out of the Islamic faith. He successfully completed his high school education at St. Andrews Secondary School, Fugar and secured a respectable government job as a gauge reader with the Ministry of Water Services and Hydrology. Still, he could not escape the lure of music.

By 1965, Isah Sule had created an alternate identity, dubbing himself “Waziri Oshomah” as he performed locally with traditional percussion orchestras while still maintaining his workaday lifestyle as a civil servant. By this time, the sphere of Afemai music had slowly begun to expand beyond its immediate locality thanks to the rising popularity of Anco Momodu, the first Etsako bandleader to make a significant impact on a national level. Momodu had actually made it to the big stages, performing in clubs in Lagos. Cardinal Rex Jim Lawson—Nigeria’s biggest highlife star of the day—was a fan, and had even started integrating elements of Momodu’s repertoire into his own music. Anco Momodu’s success indicated that there was a future for this odd music from the obscure Afemai community and his was the hottest local band in the Edo region. In 1967, Waziri Oshomah joined Momodu’s group as a singer and keyboard player.

Working under Momodu gave Oshomah a taste of what life as a professional musician could be—he got to travel to different towns, and even got his first exposure to the recording studio as he participated in the records Momodu’s group made for the local Benin City label Akpolla/Agbede, the same imprint that boasted Rex Lawson amongst its roster. However, Oshomah felt that the music could be taken even further. After the end of the Nigerian civil war of 1967-1970, tastes had begun to change: the rustic, low-fidelity aesthetic of traditional sounds was starting to feel quaint as audiences demanded state-of-the-art sounds like the amplified bass guitar, electric organ, funky drum patterns. Oshomah decided that it was time for him to break out on his own and pursue a new direction for his music.

Quitting both Momodu’s group and his civil service job, Waziri Oshomah formed his own Traditional Sound Makers band in 1973. The group started as a rather shambling, low-key affair: “We did not have equipment”, Oshomah remembers. “When we played, we didn’t have professional amplifiers. We used a locally-built amp that was powered by ordinary torchlight batteries.” Despite these shortcomings, the Traditional Sound Makers were still able to score a contract with Decca West Africa Records and release a single “Agiode Ofe Emo Mie Ise,” which did well enough to allow Oshomah to acquire his first set of modern instruments the following year. He then set about a series of experiments with the goal of modernizing Etsako music for a new, broader audience.

Sir Victor Uwaifo had been a revolutionary figure in the mid-60s, as the first musician to add a modern sheen to the traditional music of the Edo region by infusing it with highlife and rock n’ roll. Oshomah idolized Uwaifo and closely patterned himself after him (even taking on the honorific “Sir” himself). “I wanted my music to speak to both the old and the young”, says Oshomah. “At that time, what was popular among the youth was soul music. So I mixed some of that with the traditional sound. Or other modern sounds like reggae, rock, I would take all of these and mix them into my music.” He also drew inspiration from Fela, whose new afrobeat was the hottest thing in country, illustrating that you could create a modern funk-oriented style that was still firmly grounded in the bedrock of indigenous folkways.

Sure enough, the fusion paid off and Waziri Oshomah’s national popularity soon dwarfed even that of his mentor Anco Momodu. His profile rose considerably when he joined the stable of the ascending juju-oriented label Shanu Olu in 1978 and over the next six years released a five-volume series of eponymous albums that received strong national distribution. Superfly Records is proud to present here, reissued for the first time ever, the third installment: Sir Waziri Oshomah and his Traditional Sound Makers Vol. 3.

Vol. 3 is certainly Oshomah’s tightest, most focused effort as it distills the varied elements of his influences to their essence that somehow exceeds the sum of its parts: Simmering grooves built from afrobeat-inspired basslines, palm wine guitar chords, space-age electric organ lines, honking R&B saxophone refrains, all of them laid over the solid foundation of the distinctive Etsako rhythm, and held together by Oshomah’s confident, plaintive vocals. It’s quite a concoction that serves well either for dancing or for quiet reflection.

While his Shanu Olu albums are perhaps his most popular, Waziri Oshomah did not stop recording after parting ways with the company in 1985. In fact, he continued to produce records on an assortment of regional labels as well as on his own imprint. He remains busy and in demand even today, and while he cannot definitively state exactly how many records he has made throughout his career, he estimates the figure to be around 150. And he takes his position as the long-running Etsako Super Star very seriously indeed.

“I call my music oyoyo”, Oshomah explains. “It means ‘the best.’ In my community, when there is a feast of masquerades, the best masquerade is usually called oyoyo. And when that masquerade plays, nobody expects any other to come after it.” While Waziri Oshomah’s music is most certainly the best, we hope that more will come after it, and that it will serve for new listeners as an introduction to the Etsako sound, the gateway through which they might discover more and more of this fascinating realm of music.

Liner notes by : Uchenna Ikone (Comb & Razor)

http://www.zebulonla.com/

 
 
 

Nina Simone
Ain’t Got No… I’ve Got Life

«Let’s all sing along with Nina as we celebrate the transmigration of the spirit of Zebulon to its new home in Los Angeles!»
 

Fela & His Koola Lobitos
Obe

«Fela in Los Angeles… It’s beautiful to hear the effect of a place on a musician, and as we well know, inspiration flows in both directions!»
 

Sun City Girls
Space Prophet Dogon

«The 2010 Zebulon residency of Sir Richard Bishop was a thrill-ride through the full range of his instrument. This earlier musical incarnation was a Zebulon favorite.
 

Robert Wyatt
At Last I Am Free

«This soulful song was a staple of Zebulon playlists and Robert Wyatt is certainly one of the enduring patron saints of the venue. Nothing Can Stop Us!»
 

Marshall Allen
Live At Zebulon

«For those lucky enough to attend, Marshall Allen’s appearances at Zebulon were consciousness-expanding excursions into other dimensions. Also a master of the here-and-now, here’s Marshall outside of Zebulon on his 81st birthday…»
 

Zebulon is raising money to complete the new performance space. If you care to donate, please visit the GoFundMe page
https://www.gofundme.com/zebulonla