“Golden Afrique vol.1”, a compilation 1971-83

It is hard to resist this golden melting-pot from West Africa’s musical heydays. The 2005 release is compiled by the same German Network label that gave us the beguiling “Desert Blues” and “Musica negra in the Americas” collections. Here we are served up two-and-a-half hours of gems steeped in optimism as new nations bathed in an independence that was as hard-earned as costly. "Golden Afrique" is classic dance music from Guinea, Mali, Guinea-Bissao, Gambia, Côte d’Ivoire, Chad and Senegal. It mixes remasterised classics from the likes of Rail Band, Bembeya Jazz, Etoile de Dakar and Miriam Makeba, with more obscure names like the Orchestre de la Paillotte (“Kadia blues”), Ernesto Djédjé (“Ziboté) and De Mi Amor (“Lonlon Nyeku”).

“No African popular music exists in a vacuum,” underlines Graeme Ewens in his brilliant reference book “Africa O-Ye!”, “it is always related (...) to the cultural background of the performers”. In “Golden Afrique, vol.1” the three compilers are at pains to describe these fundamental links, not just to the musicians’ ethno-linguistic cultures, but to their urban realities. The most hilarious example is arguably found in “Taximen”, Amadou Balaké’s meeting with a cab driver in Abidjan. Out of change, hungry and comforting his wife in labour, Balaké describes the frustrations encountered by urban dwellers worldwide when faced with a “complicated” taximan.

“The popular music of the continent is in most cases the product of two parents, one internal and African,” pursues Ewens in his book introduction, “the other external or alien”. This double-album underlines the external influences of calypso, rumba and jazz on the fantastic explosion of invention and joy fomented by West African artists in the 70s. These imported styles lifted traditional sounds and rhythms from the village context and placed them firmly in a nascent but booming city life. They can be heard in the trumpet solo by Djigui Touré in “Kadia blues”, for example, or in Idy Diop’s version of the Senegalese standard “Yaye Boye”.

So there are plenty of gripping songs to marvel over in this double-CD The Frankfurt-based music label promises us a second helping soon, this time visiting the riches of Congo. Just a pity the sleevenotes end with this questionable statement: “We’ll be mining the mountains of Black Gold to pick out some more precious musical nuggets from other regions”. Hardly the most tactful choice of language for a continent ravaged by colonial and neo-colonial greed over the past five centuries...

March 2005

Daniel Brown

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