Back in 1989, green activists and musicians Desmond and Sheila Majekodunmi left a unique musical testimony to their fight for the preservation of nature. This is how it all happened.

By Uchenna Ikonne
November 2018

When Sheila and Des Majek released Green Leaves in 1989, the husband-and-wife musical duo were certain that it was an LP like none other that had ever come out of Nigeria. They were right. Musically, it’s dark, dubby synth-pop and slick, slinky afro-reggae grooves stood out from the dominant standards of the day. And then there was Sheila’s voice; she sounded like nobody on the scene, combining the cool poise of Sade with the incandescent warmth of Chaka Khan. But what really distinguished it was its thematic focus. Its songs—with titles like “Mother Nature,” “Korrup Forest (In Africa),” “Green Leaves,” “Let Us Plant A Tree Today”—maintained a single-minded, ardent emphasis on nature, the ecology and human beings’ responsibility as custodians of the planet.

“It’s not something many people were talking about back then,” says Desmond Majekodunmi a.k.a. “Majek,” “especially in Nigeria. But it was an issue we were passionate about and determined to cast light on.”

The album didn’t generate much buzz in the Nigerian market, but it did earn the pair a meeting with the then-very hip Virgin Records in London to discuss a possible major record deal. “So we went to Virgin and the guy listened to it intently. He’s saying ‘Well, the voice is great. And I really like the music, but… every single song on the album is about the environment! Can’t we do maybe just… one song about the environment and then do some, you know, commercial material?’”

Faced with this proposal, standing at the crossroads between abandoning their values to access potential international stardom and holding firm to those values in relative obscurity, Sheila and Des Majek instinctively understood that there was only one pragmatic choice for them to make.

“We walked out,” Majek says. “Just like that, we walked out on Virgin Records and never looked back.”

Some three decades later, Majek looks back on that brash decision from the perspective of maturity. “Yes, that was youthful arrogance,” he concedes. “Of course we should have compromised a little bit, maybe done half and half, some environmental material and then some other stuff. Given them at least a commercial single. That probably would have been the sensible thing to do. But we were so caught up in our passion, we were like ‘Raaaaaaahhhhh we’ve got to save the world!!!’”

“I don’t regret it, though,” he says.

Mother Nature

As Majek talks about the ups and downs of life, he never sounds regretful but rather equanimous, and deeply grateful. He and Sheila were together for over twenty years, having first met in the nineteen seventies in Lagos, when he was an up-and-coming technician in the music industry and she was a promising young vocalist. Their respective paths through life that had brought them together, however, could not have been more different: While Sheila had had a hardscrabble upbringing with her bohemian parents, Desmond Majekodunmi had grown up in relative privilege in the southwestern city of Ibadan, where his Nigerian father was a doctor and his English mother was an educator. Later in his teens, his parents sent him to continue his studies in Ireland. (“I think that must have been around 1967,” he says, “because I remember that soon after I got there I attended the Jimi Hendrix Experience concert at the Olympia in London—amazing show!”) It wasn’t long before he joined a band himself and started gigging around the Dublin club circuit and contemplating a career as a professional musician.

“In 1969, I met this guy named Phil Lynott who was singing with a band called Skid Row,” Majek says, “and he decided he wanted to start his own group.” Lynott in many ways cut a rare figure that paralleled Desmond’s in the Dublin music scene. They were about the same age, both tall, both from mixed, black and white parentage. “He needed a drummer and of course I had been playing drums since I was in a pop group in high school.”

“So I came in and auditioned, and I got the green light,” he continues. “But then something went off in my head and… I started thinking about my parents. I just thought about my father sitting at a dinner party, and everybody is talking about their successful children. You know Nigerian parents, they want you to be a doctor or a lawyer, an engineer… especially back then! So everybody is talking about what their children do, and then ask my father ‘What does your son do?’ ’Oh, he’s a drummer in a rock n’ roll band!’ Ugh… I just couldn’t do it.”

Torn between his passion for music and his desire to please his parents, Majek compromised by studying to become an audio engineer. That way he could keep his foot in the world of music while maintaining a job that suggested relative respectability. After all, the job had “engineer” in the title so it sounded important at dinner parties. Who could beat that? “And,” Majek adds, “I was the first black audio engineer in London.”

Doing his apprenticeship at De Lane Lea Studios at Wembley, he worked with the cream of early seventies British rock, including Fleetwood Mac, Wishbone Ash and Deep Purple. In addition, Majek himself also played with Kokosachi, one of the many London afro-rock groups that sprouted up in the wake of the success of Osibisa. Soon enough, he crossed paths again with his old mate from Dublin, Phil Lynott, and his new band Thin Lizzy, as they were recording in London. “Phil needed a flatmate,” Majek remembers, “so I gave him a room at this place in West Hampstead and we stayed there for a while. We collaborated on songs and stuff, and I engineered their album.” The Thin Lizzy album Majek worked on was the band’s second, 1972’s Shades of a Blue Orphanage but by the time they scored their big hit “The Boys Are Back in Town” in 1976, Desmond Majekodunmi was already moving on, having accepted an offer to work for PolyGram back in Nigeria.

“I helped PolyGram set up a multitrack studio and worked with a lot of artists there,” Majek says. Some of the musicians who benefitted from the Majek Touch in the studio included Sir Victor Uwaifo, pop-soul crooner Perry Ernest, teenage rock idols Ofege and the legendary Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. He also continued to work with artists on the other side of the Atlantic, such as the Jamaican crossover reggae band Third World and their breakthrough 1978 Journey to Addis album. (Majek: “The one that gave them the big hit with the cover of ‘Now That We’ve Found Love.’ I think I actually played a drum track on that song.”) But one of the associations Desmond made during this period turned out to be one that would change his life.

“When I came back to Nigeria, that was when I met Sheila,” he says.

Sheila Andrea Green’s parents—African-American jazz musician Ivan and white American nurse Jeanne—like a lot of beatnik youth in the Eisenhower era, had fallen under the sway of Kerouac-esque wanderlust. They left America in 1957 to trek through Mexico and Guatemala, where Sheila was born in 1960. Over the course of a few years (and a few more kids) they would make their way across Europe before motoring across the desert into West Africa, finally arriving in Nigeria in 1971. As they made their way into Lagos, the family’s rickety van broke down in the middle of one of the city’s infamous “go-slows,” causing a major traffic jam in an episode that got featured in the popular Lagos Weekend tabloid. Immediately, this strange, nomadic multiracial family became minor celebrities. For the next few years, Ivan got work playing with Fela and writing columns about his travels in the Nigerian Punch newspaper. As Sheila came of age and showed signs of being a gifted chanteuse, she joined her father, working with prominent dramatist Moses “Baba Sala” Olaiya and juju superstar King Sunny Ade.

The Greens achieved further fame when Ivan Green’s story took a curious turn: Shortly after his arrival in Nigeria, he was confronted by an old Yoruba woman who insisted he was her long-lost son who had disappeared as an infant back in the nineteen twenties. Green described this meeting in From the Bottom to the Top, he and Jeanne’s third-person memoir, published in 1983:

“Now,” the old lady began, “a long time ago, over 40 years to be exact, my son Bolaji, was stolen from me when I left him with my mother. Oh, it was a terrible thing. For years, I looked for him, spending money here and there. Two years ago, I had a dream. My son returned to me and he brought a wife and five pickins with him. You, are my son,” she said firmly.

“Whoa now, wait a minute,” Ivan said. “I understand your concern for your son, why that would be a terrible thing to happen; but why do you think I’m him? I have no tribal marks like yours. I don’t know anything about Africa except what I’ve learned in the short time I’ve been here. “

“I did not put any marks on your face, but I did put a mark on you so I would always recognize you. Let me see your right arm?” she asked.

Ivan looked bewildered, but he held out his right arm.

“I am correct,” the old woman said, pointing to a mark on his right forearm.

“That’s fantastic,” Jeanne said.

“It’s too far-fetched to be true,” Ivan concluded. “I can’t believe it.”

“It’s true-oh. I, Esther Afoloju Bamijoko say it’s true.” She turned to the women and they began speaking in Yoruba again. Just then, Mr. Kamson joined the group. He spoke at length with the women, and then turned happily to Ivan.

“I see you’ve met your mother,” he said.

“It was crazy,” Majek says. “He had grown up in a foster home in America so he never really had an idea of any family or where he came from before that. And here’s this old woman telling him that he got missing by the riverside when he was five years old. There were a lot of sailors around the seaside then and so they thought maybe the sailors had somehow taken him with them. And now these people were telling him he was back home. So if he wasn’t Nigerian before, the whole family became Nigerian then!”

Feeling Good

Taking on the name “Bolaji Bamijoko,” Green became the living personification of the “back to our roots” mood pervading the black diaspora in the seventies. All of which was good for his visibility, but his focus was on launching Sheila Bamijoko as a star. When Desmond Majekodunmi entered their lives, Sheila had been singing with the Swiss-Nigerian jazz-funk bandleader Tee Mac, performing at his Surulere Night Club and on his weekly television show.

“Sheila had some incredible, incredible talent,” Majek recalls. “Fela bowed to this girl, man. When she sang, when he heard the notes she was hitting, he had to give her that respect!” Other music heavyweights they encountered agreed: “We’d actually met Stevie [Wonder] earlier in Lagos when he came for FESTAC 77, and then we met up again in London. I remember when we went to his hotel room, Marvin Gaye was there, and Sheila sang a bit for them. Man… Stevie was just swaying his head in ecstasy, and Marvin was just nodding, really digging it. That was the effect she had on anybody who heard her voice. Mick Jagger, all of them… they just loved her singing.”

Meanwhile, Sheila was having a different, more intimate kind of effect on Desmond, and he on her. The two fell in love and quickly got married, despite Ivan’s fears that marriage would distract her from focusing on her career. The opposite was the case. The newlywed Majeks moved to Nairobi, Kenya where Desmond had gotten a job as a producer and engineer with CBS, and at the new sixteen-track studio Desmond set up there—the first in East Africa—they started working on Sheila’s solo LP to be entitled African Connection.

“And then Wayne Vaughn who used to play keyboards with Earth Wind and Fire. He came to Nairobi for a one-week holiday and he was staying in the same apartment block as us. He and Sheila hit it off like a rocket. He wanted to take her back to America to tour with EWF! I told her to go, it’s an amazing opportunity. But she said no, no… she can’t just leave her husband behind and go off with these guys.”

“We all collaborated on some stuff together, though,” Majek adds. “There was a song we were working on, called ‘Catastrophe’… Later, when he got back to the States I guess he ended up working some more on that idea with Maurice [White] and it ended up being a big hit for them as ‘Let’s Groove.’”

However, Kenya would change the direction of the Majeks’ lives in even more profound ways, giving them a new inspiration and sense of purpose. “I observed how much of Kenya’s economy was built on taking care of the environment,” Majek says. “Agriculture and ecotourism makes up more than ninety percent of their income. When I came back to Nigeria in the early eighties, I decided that I wanted to become a farmer. So we joined the Nigerian Conservation Foundation and started an agroforestry farm.”

The Majeks continued work on advancing Sheila’s career as she went on to work with South African musician Themba Matebese a.k.a. T-Fire. The release of African Connection, however, was hamstrung by politics. Still, their new commitment to the environment and agriculture took more of a central position in their lives, even becoming the focus of their music as they started to work on songs that would combine the two worlds, and hopefully wake up Nigeria and the world to the importance of protecting the environment. “We had pretty big goals,” Majek laughs.

The result was Green Leaves. While the album is credited to “Sheila and Des Majek,” Desmond mostly plays the background, leading the band and working behind the mixing desk. “I wasn’t allowed to sing on that album,” he says. “She wouldn’t let me sing! So I was relegated to doing some rapping, and if I behaved myself, maybe the occasional backup vocal. I couldn’t sing next to her because she had such perfect pitch… When she’d sing a note, it would be like a shockwave. To sing with her, you have to be very, very precise with your musical abilities, and my ear was just not up to hers.”

Korup Forrest (in Africa)

The album received a relatively low-key rollout on Polydor upon its release in 1989. It just seemed too… different from anything that was going on musically, and the subject matter was alienating. Nigerian listeners were not used to music asking them to think about the environment. It seemed preachy, elitist and distant from what could be considered as the concerns of common people. But the record received a much more enthusiastic response within the environmentalist community, a statement of purpose for the still relatively small, nascent movement in Nigeria. “The people in the Conservation Foundation were quite excited,” Majek says, “and they were very high-level people with access to leadership in the movement around the world. They were the ones who invited the Duke of Edinburgh to Lagos and gave us the chance to play for him, and present him with the album… We played, and we totally blew him away. He was over the moon for the record. At the end of the day, the Palace wrote a letter of recommendation for us to go to England to meet with Richard Branson.”

“And that’s how we got the recommendation to Virgin Records, even though that didn’t work out.”

“But still, a lot of good things came out of it. As a result of all that, we were able to persuade the federal government to establish a Ministry of Environment and set up forest reserves. We had a considerable influence on the culture of environmental protection. We started conservation clubs in the schools, got environmental issues on the education curriculum. We got a lot of work done to protect the Nigerian environment. In retrospect, not nearly enough—we still need to do far, far, far more. But at least it was a step in the right direction. And it continues today.”

Unfortunately, one thing that did not continue was the union between Sheila and Des Majek. The couple had decided to end their marriage by the end of the nineties, but they remained the best of friends as Sheila relocated to the United States. Sadly, she fell ill and died while still in her forties, but Desmond Majek remembers her fondly, and cherishes the time they spent together, and the work they did together. And that is the subject for which he expresses the most gratitude.

“It was such a privilege to have a relationship with an artist as talented as Sheila was,” Desmond muses. “Such a privilege! What an incredible musician. What an incredible person. I’m so glad we were able to do what we did before she passed on. And she’d be very happy about what’s happening now. Because people are finally catching up to what we were trying to do.”

And yes, in Nigeria society is catching up to the message Sheila and Des were preaching years ago, as the government allocates more and more resources to anticipating climate change and caring for the environment. Today, Desmond Majekodunmi heads LUFASI—the Lekki Urban Forest and Animal Shelter Initiative—a twenty-hectare forest park in the upscale Lekki section of Lagos. He also runs the agroforestry farm Majekodunmi Agricultural Projects and the consulting firm Desco Tourism & Trade Developments, producing documentaries and broadcasting a radio show to spread the message of conservation.

But we’re catching up to what they were trying to do musically too: Green Leaves was an album that was ahead of its time, thematically and sonically. And what sounded completely uncommercial and out of place in 1989 sounds fresh and contemporary thirty years later.

So listen to this sinuous, sexy, otherworldly music from Sheila and Des, and if you get a chance… plant a tree today.

photo(c) Jean SaintJean

Greg de Villanova is a multi-talented french/brazilian character! Fellow digger, heavy collector, tropical DJ, music historian as well as music consultant! But he’s also a label owner at Oriki Music, where he (re)releases the music he loves! Let’s share this wise guy’s opinions on the LP market!

When did you start digging records?
Around 1987-88, digging for rap records when those were badly distributed in Paris.

What Lps did you buy at first? Do you still listen to them?
Jazz funk and funk classics, first record ever was Herbie Hancock’s ‘Manchild’. I still buy and listen to 70’s classics, those are the real deal, not the super obscure stuff I’ve been collecting for the past 20 years.

Do you have a particular style or favorite period?
60’s hard soul and early 70’s deep funk.

Are you still digging’, buying vinyl, visiting record shops?
I dig on a regular basis but not in stores, try to link up with private owners, collectors, buy cheap and in large quantities.

What was your first release on Oriki ?
Orchestre Baobab’s ‘A night at Club Baobab’.

Orchestra Baobab
Souleymane

What could be your editorial/esthetic line?
Afro ! Oriki has 6 African music releases and 2 Afro Brazilians.

What could be the label’s leitmotif?
Modernity and beauty are universal.

What is the Oriki LP you are prouder?
Baobab’s : it’s our biggest sales and media hit (about 15.000 copies sold) and it’s surely one of the most consistent African bands of the 70’s, ultimate work .

Did you have any references labels when you started ?
Not at all, I always do my stuff with the heart and don’t buy or listen to reissues. I also barely know what’s being done by other labels.

Do you think the adventures of diggers have changed over time? Do you keep going to the field?
I don’t really know what you mean with the first question, my work as a digger remains the same, go to the field, hunt intensely, discover new stuff, keep eyes and ears wide opened, never give up even if it’s the 10th mistaken lead I’m following.

Your first references were on the West African zone. Is it still easy today to find rare, unedited records?
There is more to do than done, always… Question is how relevant some reissues would be.

Moussa Doumbia
Femme d’aujourdhui

And how do you negotiate with the right owners?
Patiently!

You have released some Brazilian records, and you are known as a great connoisseur of this country. Why not more reissues?
Most of the relevant stuff is owned by majors which don’t allow licensing.

Could we dream to listen on LP the fantastic Obaluayê!?
All dreams are possible, but I won’t do it, worked on that on cd 15 years ago, changing the format is not really challenging, and I need the project to be so to get interested in doing it.

Can you introduce us to the new Ivorian selection? Its particularity, its difference compared to all the others that come out on the market?

I’d say it’s more interesting than most stuff out there for three reasons.
1-It’s super obscure, ultra hard to get and extremely expensive stuff which you can spend years looking for. Most collectors have a very vague notion of how rarer this or that African record is compared to another, the Société Ivoirienne du Disque funky catalogue is simply the ultimate when it comes to French speaking Africa.
2-It’s a coherent compilation focusing on a single label, and more particularly on what could be spotted as a collection within the label, even though it’s never been marketed as such by the producer. Most tracks have the same funk and fusionny, African American music influenced sound, a lot has the same sidemen and / or arrangers.
3-Finally, a lot of the music has that raw and deep funk vibe, completely unique in French speaking Africa, when it was much more common in English speaking Ghana and Nigeria. The compilation focuses, with a few exceptions, on what I consider to be the ultimate in terms of solid deep funk and jazz funk coming out of Ivory Coast.

De Frank Jr
Ayee Menko

Why such a long silence before this come-back ?
Well, the label is my own little dancer, I don’t make profits out of it, which means I need spare time to work on it. I lacked that spare time. Also, when the first releases came out years ago, most didn’t sell enough to cover expenses (I used to buy advertising space in magazines and pay for a press attaché). What customers wanted was the funky stuff and I didn’t specifically focus on that because I thought there was much more interesting stuff to be reissued. Even if this new compilation rocks, most artists included within it have quite anecdotical carriers. Our first reissues focused on heavy weights of modern African music, but I guess Western ears were not ready to leave their funkocentric approach and listen to modern African music for what it is and not for how much it’s been influenced by James Brown or Fela Kuti.

Nowadays, there are many LP labels who follow this model, I mean more quality even if it’s more expensive… but in same time, there are also another « new » LP market, with major companys come-back and other labels, who prefer to sell cheaper. Is it the (re)creation of two camps for the LP ?
Vinyl is trendy, and there are different ways of doing it. Some labels try to make money out of limited quantities, which is impossible, so all they can do is shitty pressings and bootlegs. That really sucks, they should try to get into another business to make profits. Majors have a different, but also opportunistic approach. They sell vinyl records to people who didn’t really give a shit about the format until recently, they just think it’s cool, today, don’t know how long this « coolness » will last. Then there is the passionate, hard working, accurate people doing amazing reissues, deep historical work with consistent liner notes and tracklistings. Those contribute to something bigger than us, universal knowledge and beauty.
But if you’re just into music, you don’t really give a shit about that, all you want is the sound, and from this point of view, anything is good. This discussion is mainly for the passionate professionals, most of the audience is not interested in such considerations.

Sewa Jacintho
Secret Populaire

There are more and more reissues of old LPs, and more and more record labels (major or indie) now release their new artists on LP, or EP. Do you think that the LP reissue market could ever reach saturation point?
No idea at all, but at some point I guess this will happen. Customers into vinyl have limited funds, but I don’t have numbers as to the extent of this market. But frankly, how many thousand copies maximum of a vinyl title are pressed ? Several tens of thousands ? How many people on the planet ? It’s just a drop in the middle of the sea which the music industry is. Mp3 rules.

What are your other next releases ?
No idea yet. Right now I’m in my hammock, recovering from the hassle the last one was with all the boring crap I had to do to put the record out, sending emails, phoning, dealing with pressing, graphic design or digital distribution. If you wanna listen to good obscure stuff, you should come join me in the hammock, we’ll be able to deal with much more music within much lesser time !

What is the LP you dream of issuing/reissuing?
None. Or maybe Nicole Croisille’s debut album. Or any other hard to get French stuff that’s not interesting to grooveaholics nor anyone else. And I’ll get someone deal with the boring part. Need to get rich first though, cause this won’t sell.

http://gregdevillanova.com/mixes

Each month, we are focusing on a record label founded by an active digger. This month, Julien Lebrun from Hot Casa, the french label created in 2002 with Djamel Hammadi. This hot label is behind many releases by forgotten artists with a speciality for uncovering rare vinyl gems but also new talents. Julien talks about his passion : music, from west African road trips to French backstages.

When did you start digging records?
Djamel and I come from a Funk family culture. My brother introduced me really young to Soul and Funk but I can say that I was introduced to “digging” through Hip Hop culture: we had to find the unknown loop, the rare record that nobody could find or had already used. It was the perfect link between all the soul culture from the past and the turmoil of this present culture. At the beginning of the 90’s in Paris, labels like Pure or Big Cheese were also organizing great underground soul parties, they played amazing rare soul records and, as a teenager, you tried to be part of it. So we were a small crew of collectors who ran all over record fairs, started travelling to London or NYC to dig, trying to professionalize ourselves, organizing parties in locals clubs such Café de la plage back in 1995. We also travelled to Japan to sell French jazz, would wake up early to go to flea markets in the outskirts of Paris or in the East Village in NYC. DJs like Gilles Peterson or parties like Giant Step in NYC during the 90’s had a big influence on our generation. The principle of playing rare grooves was also part of the digging process or mentality: finding the perfect and unknown LP.

What Lps did you buy at first? Do you still listen to them?
My brother introduced me really young to Funk, so it was mostly mainstream artists like George Clinton or Roy Ayers. But the first records I bought were all the James Brown productions: Lyn Collins, Marva Withney… then we went further and further with soul 7 inches, traveling to the Camden Town market in London to buy rare jazz and soul or waking up early to attend the Paris (Porte de Champeret) record fair.

Did you have a particular style or favorite period?
Latin, Brazil, jazz, soul, funk, and all the funky breaks from the world that is the beauty of music, Soul is everywhere from Peru to the Philippines.

Are you still digging, buying vinyl, visiting record shops?
The word digging can represent many things: a guy going to a record shop or an antiques market can say he is digging, but he is just buying records! The quintessence of “digging” is to find rare unknown records that have a good sound, melody or break.
Yes we are still digging, we can consider that as a drug addiction or a psychological addiction. Djamel and I traveled a lot in Africa these last years but we also went to Brazil or India in the past. Even though it has become harder to find good quality records, we still continue to look for rarities. Ebay and Discogs have changed the rules these past ten years, it’s funny to see all those new reissues done by “Youtube diggers“. It’s a lot, easier to discover new stuff nowadays. I remember the English soul compilation bootlegs in the 90s, it was the only way to discover some new stuff at that time, now everything is easier and that’s cool because it opens this “culture “ to a bigger crowd. The thing the new generation needs to learn is just to be curious.

Djamel Hammadi in action !

What was your first release on Hot Casa?
Our first release was a 7 inch by Franck Biyong, an artist that we met a few years ago at the Cithéa, a soul jazz club piloted by Superfly’s Manu Boubli where we used to DJ. He was also performing there and we understood that he was the man behind a first release in NYC, on Lenar records. The idea was to produce him in France, so we organized a home made recording session that had a limited release of 500 copies. It was sold out in a few months and was the beginning of a long work with this artist until the beginning of 2010.

How did you meet Djamel? And what did you have in common? And what were your differences (background, vision…)?
We met each other in 1997 during a radio show hosted by DJ Bronco for the Generations 88.2 radio station when the radio was still really independent and played real soul and Hip Hop. We found the same affinity and approach about music, we became friends and became resident DJ’s in Paris, we organized funk and soul parties and became resident DJs in various trendy places making a loving out of it. I think we played 150 gigs a year between 1999 to 2005. Nineteen years later, we still have the same passion for rare grooves, rarities, and music altogether.

Why did you choose this name: Hot Casa?
We didn’t want a name with groove or soul, everybody used it in the 90’s, we wanted something unique that had never been used. The idea of the label was to do it ‘home made’, with our connections, faith in soul, we don’t have big studios or money but we wanted to become producers. “Hot” was a common name in the jazz history, the radio Hot 97 in NYC was really popular also in the 90’s with Hip Hop and soul shows, the word “Casa” because it had a universal dimension to it. Our good friend Louis Davis with whom we started producing and collecting was also half nicaraguan and it was a joke between us.

What could be your editorial/esthetic line?
The label DNA could be Afro Soul from past to present. Djamel and I are both from a jazz and soul background and from a Hip Hop generation, these are our roots and both of us were in love with Afro Soul. We have this common goal of spreading underground soul culture, trying to share our passion of unknown and beautiful music with others. Without being pretentious, it was about going further, avoiding the easy way, make obvious choices just because they would sell better.

Roger Damawuzan and Les As du Benin
Wait For Me

Djamel and you were both DJs before creating Hot Casa. Does that give your label a special color?
Everybody knows that the dancefloor has its own rules and they can be different from the records that you like to appreciate on your sofa. Because we are still DJs, we unconsciously try to link those two worlds with a series of edits that brings nu beats on old rare grooves and can open a younger audience to this kind of music. This was the idea behind the Afro Soul edits and remixes when we asked DJ Vas, Umoja or Alma Negra to share their vision of 70’s sounds. We are also friends with Nickodemus, Rich Medina or Osunlade and really appreciate this movement, where you can mix Fela with new afro or electronic breaks. On the Melllotron radio show or on 22 tracks, we try to playlist tropical news to remain connected to the new scene. The label is not only about reissues, it is also dedicated to production and remixes.

Is that the reason why you chose to release 7 or 12 inch singles?
Yes 7 and 12 inches are more dedicated to the DJ audience, the format is really important. It’s a way of paying tribute to the past and perpetuate the tradition. In this era of dematerialization and streaming, we keep fighting even though it was hard in the beginning of 2000 to release vinyl. Even if we are living with our time, we put our music in digital, Spotify or Deezer and we also DJ USB. On the dancefloor the most important is music, skills and sound quality.

How do you decide on the choice of reissues?
First of all, the fact that it can be licensed. We don’t bootleg even though it can take years like for Francis The Great in Cameroon the Ivory Coast Soul compilations. Obviously other criteria are the music itself, the rarity, the history and the cover artwork.

Which Hot Casa reissue are you the most proud of?
Pierre Antoine, because it is physically and musically rare. Afrobeat had its own music standard with Farfisa and Rhodes synths, but Pierre Antoine backed by the Vis à Vis used a piano which gave a perfect fusion of jazz, soul, funk, and traditional Ivorian and Ghanaian horns, kind of a quintessence of the best musical elements.

Orlando Julius
Disco Hi-Life

One of your specialties is to produce forgotten artists, rare records… Is it something still possible in 2015?
Finding unknown and rare will be more and more difficult due to the fact that the generation of producers have started to become old or the dust on the record itself. Reissues are long sellers, we’re not as worried as for new albums. For a new artist if it has not worked after 5 months, you know it will be hard. For reissues, they can sell forever.

Recently, you were in Togo. What did you find there? Could you tell us more about that trip…
We are working hard on a Togo Soul compilation with an aim to release it around spring. I went there twice, first to find records even if Djamel had already a lot of the selection, and a second time to finalize the licensing process (agreement, money, interviews, photos). Our dream is to make a movie or a short documentary about all this process because Togo is so beautiful, its people, history… and the musicians and producers that I met are so powerful and beautiful that the “world” has to see them. It will be a 13 track compilation about the Soul and Funk scene in Togo from 1971 to 1981 with amazing music from deep soul jazz to crazy psyche funk synths at the end. We had the chance to work with Roger Damawuzan that we also reissued and featured on the Vaudou Game album. He helped us find a lot of the musicians and producers for contract purposes.

After supporting the Setenta band for a long time, you produced other new bands among which Vaudou Game in 2014. They became really famous. Were you surprised by this success? And does that give you other ideas for the future?
We didn’t work with Setenta on their third album, they decided to do it by themselves, but it was a beautiful adventure. We traveled to Lituania, Ireland, etc., and went on stage with Erykah Badu in Amsterdam. The Vaudou Game story has been amazing since the very beginning and we are very happy to work on a second record due for release in September 2016. They toured all over France and Europe, they did more than 120 concerts last year and were one of the bands that toured the most last year. They deserve it and it helped us a lot, because living of the only sale of records is very hard nowadays. They also had a smash hit which crossed all the regular borders, they had a “pop” destiny with a really underground Afro Funk style all recorded analog with a pure philosophy : Togolese speaking. And the day the speaker on the big national radio sang it live, we understood the song, the sound of the band had worked and marked their time.
Working as an independent structure is way cooler because you bring the artist in the project, we almost co-produced sometimes to be fair with them and shared the profit. We want it to remain a family adventure. Most of them understand that the music industry has crashed and that we need to find a solution, new ways of producing records.

How do you find brand new talents? On the internet? On stage? Through friends?
We have been booked the Reservoir club in Paris for the last 17 years we stay connected with new talents. We also check bandcamp or Juno frequently as well as cool radio stations like Le Mellotron.

And who is the next?
The next will be Shola Adisa-Farrar, a female jazz singer from NYC who lives in Paris now. We had the idea to connect her with our good friend and talented pianist Florian Pellissier with a view to explore an original fusion of instrumental Hard Bop and her beautiful voice. A really beautiful ten songs album called “Lost Myself”. It will be released in April.

What could be the label’s leitmotif?
Afro Soul & Tropical quality funk, good melodies, good philosophy, easy to manage, vinyl quality, no bootleg, interview the artist as much as possible.

What is the best deal/business: to make reissues or to produce new records?
The reissue market is a growing business especially with the good sales of vinyl these last few years but I think that with artists you can have a bigger audience in terms of promo, visibility, radio, licensing, media interview. Reissue is a niche market, dedicated to people who want a collectible, with new records it’s more dangerous but you can have a bigger audience, Vaudou Game made more than 110 concerts this year, in every city you have a radio, newspaper that spreads the info.

There are more and more reissues of old LPs, and more and more record labels (major or indie) now release their new artists on LP, or EP. Do you think that the LP reissue market could ever reach saturation point?
Like every music, quality will make the difference, sadly some labels still do bootlegs or shitty covers without any info and multiply unnecessarily the numbers of reissues on the market.

Vaudou Game
Lazy Train

Have you received many negative answers on some of the LPs, artists, unreleased tapes, you were trying to reissue?
It had never happened over around 50 licensing requests that we did since 2006, until last month with Ofege, the famous Nigerian band.

What are your next releases? And could you give us your feeling about each…
We are very excited, because we have almost 8 albums scheduled for release this year including a “Togo Soul 70” compilation with Afro Soul & Voodoo Soul from 1971 to 1981 including 13 tracks that we finished to license, finalized the interview, the translations, photos… It was a beautiful and long work but we’re very proud of it and we start to work on a documentary about it with a Kiss Kiss Bank Bank campaign to organize a release party in Lomé with some artists included in the compilation who still perform and play.
Francis The Great: After the success and the so incredible story of this kid from 7 years old who recorded an album, his parents decided in 1978 to produce a second volume. So we reissue his second album that we will called “Maboya”, and due to the success of the first volume and the timing of the original version we’re going to add an instrumental unreleased version, a radio edit and an edit for the DJs.
Keni Okulolo: A super rare record and brilliant one from The nigerian Bassist, who played with everybody from Fela, to Orlando Julius, to Joni Haastrup, to Tee Mac… and we had an unreleased one a bonus track. The original was sold 800 dollars last month. It’s good to share this one!
Tee Mac: a brilliant Nigerian flutist, we are going to make a best of his brilliant afro funk and good disco tracks. It will be taken from his 1978, 1979, 1980 discography. A beautiful trip between rare afro soul to Afro Funk.
Shola Adisa-Farrar: a jazz singer from Us who lived in Paris since few years now and that we produce with Florian Pellissier Quintet, who’s one of my best friend too and it’s easy to work with, focus on good music, hard bop and few soul references
Reissue of a French Afro Pop band called “DjeuhDjoah & Lieutenant Nicholson” that we produced last year and we want to deliver on vinyl format as well included three new tracks. As I said, we are going to work on a Vaudou Game second album, during this spring for a release party in September! We are very excited on that on too.

What is the LP you dream of reissuing?
We have few dreams. But we are looking for a rare album Of Orlando Julius called “Love Peace And Happiness” produced on obscure label Jungle. Baba Orlando doesn’t have any copies ! The last one was sold around 1000 dollars… If you have any tips we are open. But it will be a beautiful story that we started ten years ago with Orlando and his wife that I consider as a true members of my family.

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