Filed under: Dahomey
I don’t have too much to say about this one. Luckily, the record more than speaks for itself.
Ferry Djimmy was, as far as I know, from Benin – or maybe Côte d’Ivoire. He released at least two singles on EMI / Pathé, as well as a single and an LP on his own Revolution Records – which I do know was based in Cotonou. Everything I’ve heard by him has been scorching. Surprised his stuff hasn’t been reissued, or even popped up on a compilation yet…
If you have any further information about Ferry Djimmy or his backing band the Dji-kins, please contact me or leave a comment.
Catalog number 2 C 006 – 15173 W on EMI / Pathé, pressed in France. No release date listed.
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UPDATE: 06/06/22 Acid Jazz Records has reissued Ferry Djimmy’s album – ‘Rhythm Revolution” – as well as all of his singles as a gatefold double album. The liner notes finally shed some light on his history:
Acid Jazz presents one of Afrobeat’s most mysterious and rare records by a former schoolteacher, boxer, Jacques Chirac’s bodyguard, and Beninese musical visionary: Ferry Djimmy – Rhythm Revolution.
The album was originally recorded in the mid-1970s in support of Benin’s revolutionary leader Mathieu Kérékou. Rumour has it that less than two hundred copies survived a late-‘70s fire.
Ferry Djimmy’s life story is one of the most extraordinary you’re ever likely to hear. Born in 1939, Jean Maurille Ogoudjobi (the nickname Ferry comes from ‘ferry djimmy’ being short for ‘please forgive me’ in Yoruba as he was a very smart but unruly kid), Ferry had 43 siblings. By the late 1950s, he started a career as a schoolteacher. As a tall and imposing young man, Ferry also started a parallel career as a boxer. When he wasn’t teaching or fighting, he also caught up with the emerging night scene in the city of Cotonou, where local folklore, Congolese rumba, highlife and Cuban adaptations were favoured by local audiences as well as some blues, jazz and rhythm’n’blues.
By the late 1960s, Ferry had relocated to Paris where he became a policeman, often asked to assist Jacques Chirac on various missions before the future President of France became mayor of Paris in 1977. It was here in the early ‘70s he recorded his first two singles, ‘A Were Were We Coco’ and ‘Aluma Loranmi Nichai’. These songs met little interest and by 1974 Ferry was back in Cotonou.
His return to Benin coincided with 1972s revolution’s journey toward Marxist-Leninism. The country’s leader Mathieu Kerekou was impressed by Ferry’s charisma and striking look and became fast friends with him. He saw in him a personality that could seduce the younger generation in a funkier way than straight Socialist speeches. He allowed Ferry a certain budget to start his own record company called Revolution Records.
Inspired by Afrobeat, Nigeria’s Fela Kuti and his musical journey over the past decade, Ferry recorded Rhythm Revolution in Cotonou at the Satel studio. Wanting his musical vision to stay as intact and raw as possible, Ferry played most of the instruments himself – guitar, saxophone, drums/percussion and keyboards.
The resulting album is one of the toughest and deepest slices of African funk ever cut, combining raw African rhythms with distortion, energy and wit. In spite of obvious nods to James Brown, Fela Kuti, George Clinton and Jimi Hendrix, Ferry managed to create something very unique. Eight slices of raw garage-funk from Benin as evidenced by the raw ‘Carry Me Black’, a definitive ode to blackness sung in the West African language Yoruba. A dozen years past Benin’s independence from France, ‘Be Free’ tells the never-ending story about a country’s disillusions and the importance of keeping some African roots, no matter how westernized it could be.
The album’s sleeve, designed by Ferry’s friend and local artist Gratien Zossou, perfectly captures the time and the African revolutionary struggle. It stands as one of the fiercest African LP covers ever designed, inspired by the ANC’s struggle in South Africa as well as the Black Panthers movement in the US.
Ahead of his time with an original artistic vision, fifty years after his heyday, very few Beninese remember Ferry Djimmy’s name. Mathieu Kerekou ordered his ministers and administration to buy this album when it came out. Very few did so. The proceeds were supposed to fund the association for Benin’s paralytics and crippled persons. It was a total failure, nobody bought the album in spite of being played a few times on Benin national radio.
Way too wild, too far out, Rhythm Revolution couldn’t sustain the Ehouzou (Revolution) ideology and Kerekou lost interest in Ferry as his plan to speak to the youth didn’t work out. By 1977, on the advice of Fela Kuti, Ferry had relocated to neighbouring Lagos with his family. He often visited his friends Fela, Orlando Julius and Geraldo Pino and hung around with Juju music master King Sunny Ade. In early 1980, he got to meet up with his long-time idol, Mohammed Ali, who was on an official visit to Lagos in order to convince Nigeria to boycott the 1980’s Moscow Olympics.
Keeping his artistic vision intact, Ferry continued touring and recording music with his family band, the Sunshine Sisters, but these songs were never released. A heavy smoker, Ferry died of a heart failure on 29th May 1996 in Lagos.
Filed under: Indonesia
Ernie Djohan was born on April 6th in Indonesia. She was the daughter of M. Djohan Bakhaharudin, and spent much of her youth in Den Haag, the Netherlands and Singapore. In 1962, she began her singing career for Radio Talentime in Singapore in 1962. That same year, she won the All Singapore’s School Talentime and recorded her first record for Philips Recording Company. In 1966, she became the first Indonesian artist to go Platinum with the song “Teluk Bayur” and starred in her first film Belaian Kasih.
Ernie continues to perform across Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and – as well as a recent performance in Geneva, Switzerland – to this day.
You can find a gallery of her early singles at Toshi’s A Go Go Asian 60’s Beat • Pretty Flamingo 2 site and a few of her albums and videos at the mind-bogglingly endless Madrotter blog.
Catalog number PMT/MEP/51/67 on The P. M. T. Organisation of Malaysia. No release date listed.
Filed under: Morocco
One of the benefits of running this site, is that occasionally people will e-mail me with their questions. My favorite is when people ask me if I’ve ever heard of _________, and it’s someone I’ve never heard of. Usually, I’ll do a search right then – but I also add that name to my record list.
When Philippe Gassin e-mailed me back in September of last year, I had not even heard of Abdou el Omari. At the time, I did some poking around and found nothing. Then, when looking for material for my radio show (R.I.P.), I saw that one of his songs entitled “Fatine” had been included on an early cassette compilation that Mississippi Records had released called Chaabi Music From Al-Maghrib.
But just recently, I managed to find a little bit more information. Abdou El Omari was born in Tafraout, Morocco in 1945. He is – as the Google translator puts it – “considered among the pioneer generation of musicians who have tried to move the Moroccan song more appealing to the heavens while keeping its original rhythms.” Abdou El Omari died on March 3rd, 2010 in Casablanca.
I know that, other than this single, he recorded at least five other songs – but I do not know if that was an album or a couple of singles. If you have any further information, please contact me or leave a comment.
Catalog number GB161 on Disques Gam of Casablanca, Morocco. Released 1976.
Filed under: Zaïre
Somewhere, I put in my notes that Gab Coolson was from Zaïre – now know as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Not sure where I got that tidbit.
Just about all of Pathé‘s African singles with this type of cover and red label – versus the generic sleeve and blue label singles, like the ones you see from Kenya and Rwanda – were from Zaire. Or at least, that is what I thought. Just after typing those words I received one from Benin and also saw that Fela had a few singles on the label, too. But this record raises more than a few questions. And that’s even before you put the thing on the turntable. It just doesn’t sound like anything I’ve heard from… Well, anywhere. The studio production, the wild fuzz, English vocals… Where did this thing come from? Mars?
If you have any information on Gab Coolson (AKA Gabb Coolson), please contact me or leave a comment.
Catalog number 2 C 006 15135 on EMI / Pathé, pressed in France. No release date listed.
Filed under: Hong Kong
♬ 四傻狂想曲
I have come across many songs that pay tribute to Western songs – especially in South East Asia. The Cambodian Rocks, Thai Beat A Go Go and Thai Funk series are littered with songs that sound a whole lot like songs you’ve heard before. What you think might be a version of Ray Charles‘s “What’d I Say” is actually called “Why Do You Walk Like A Drunkard”. But an outright parody is something I had never really seen before I got my hands on this single.
The name of the band is The Four Dummies, which was comprised of four comedians from Hong Kong. The person who sold me this single told me that one of them was Chen Kwan Min and another was Sai Kua Bao, but he could not remember the names of the other two. Beyond that, I have not been able to find anything further.
If you have any further information on the band, please contact me or leave a comment.
Catalog number YE 202 on Beauty Records or Malaysia. No release date given.
Filed under: Turkey
The same cultural shifts in Turkey that brought about Anatolian Rock, also gave birth to a film industry that was… Well, let’s just say produced some rather racy films for a country that is 99% Muslim. Known as seks filmler. these films – which ranged from soft- to mid-hardcore pornographic – were produced from the late1960s until the end of the 1980s. But if it were not for the country’s policy of secularism, or laïcité, these films would have most likely never have been made.
Apparently, it was a common view of film producers of the time that films were shot not as parts of a single work but as source material for production of multiple films. Erotic scenes, especially, were often cut and pasted to assemble new films from various parts of existing ones. This peculiar practice was called “parça” (“fragment”), and the term was extended into the movie theaters themselves to include the practice by the projectionists of inserting hardcore material, which was European most of the time, into Turkish erotic films.
Whereas Figin Han may not have been the most famous seks filmler actress, she supposedly was the most infamous, and retains a cult following to this day. Other actresses of the time include Feri Cansel, Zerrin Doğan, Zerrin Egeliler and Arzu Okay. This single was her only foray in to music, perhaps in attempt to make her seem more like Bridget Bardot.
Catalog number SP / 73 on Saner records of Turkey. No release date listed.
Filed under: Nigeria
I was recently asked if there was any sense of community among my fellow bloggers – a term I not quite fond of, but there just isn’t any other way to say it. The question was specifically aimed at the other folks out there who focus on the music of Africa. And at the time, I said ‘No’. But as I started working on this post, I realized that I have had some kind contact – directly or indirectly – with just about everyone who posts music from the Dark Continent on my links page. I think the only ones on there that I have not had any contact with would be the people behind Awesome Tape from Africa, Voice of America’s African Music Treasures and the World Service sites.
But I am not so sure that I would use the term ‘Community’. The word that does come to mind is ‘Competition’. Finding the records to post – ones that have not been compiled by the likes of Miles Cleret‘s Soundway Records and Samy Ben Redjeb‘s Analog Africa labels or posted on sites like John Beadle’s Likembe, Frank Gossner’s Voodoo Funk, Uchenna Ikonne’s With Comb & Razor plus the sites listed above – is becoming harder and harder. But that’s not to say that the well has run dry.
The Magnificient Zeinians were apparently the first band by Tony Grey – who wrote both of the songs on this record. I have seen one other single by the band, with the song ‘Ije Udo’ on the A side and ‘She’s My Love’ on the flip. Tony Grey went on to record with a band called The Ozimba Messengers. According to With Comb & Razor, he was supposedly known for wearing headpieces with tiger skin and feathers on stage, but is now currently a gospel singer. I had thought maybe that the Ngozi in the song’s title might have referred to Zambia‘s Paul Ngozi, but come to find out that ngozi is the Igbo word for “blessing”.
Catalog number HNS 1513 on HMV of Nigeria, no release date given.
Filed under: Thailand
Thailand… I was pretty sure that all of the music that I thought I would have be interested in had pretty much been covered by the time Subliminal Sounds had issued their third Thai Beat A Go Go disc. I picked up some Johnny Guitar, Pocket Music / Son of P.M. and Sodsai Chaengkij records, and I figured I was done.
The first clue that I was wrong, was Sublime Frequencies‘ second volume of their Molam: Thai Country Groove From Isan compilation. They had also released the first volume of their Thai Pop series around that time as well. Not too long after, I happen to stumble on Peter Doolan’s Monrakplengthai site. Not too much longer, as Angela Sawyer was writing her guest post on Luk Thung, ZudRangMa started their Thai Funk series… By then, it was crystal clear that I had only scratched the surface.
The music of Thailand is reflected its geographic position at the crossroads of China, India, Cambodia, Laos and Malaysia, as well as the country’s long history of trade with The West. Though Thailand was never colonized by colonial powers, pop music was imported from America and Europe, and pressed on local labels. This had a direct influence the indigenous music. Thailand is one of a handful of few countries where the electric guitar was integrated not only into the local popular music of the day, but regional forms of music – like Luk Thung and Molam – as well.
Suphap Daoduangden (สุภาพ ดาวดวงเด่น) was, and as far as I can tell, still is from the town of Selaphum in Roi-Et Province. She started singing Molam at the age of 15, and this may be her first album. But beyond that, I can not tell you anything more.
If you have any further information on the band, please contact me or leave a comment.
Thanks to Peter Doolan for the information and translation.
Release by Orient Records Ltd. Partnership of Thailand. No catalog number or release date listed.
Filed under: Bangladesh
♬ Africa
Besides Libya, the other country that I have been really wanting to cover has been Bangladesh. When I sent out the call back in January, Peter Doolan – who curates the amazing Monrakplengthai – sent me this track. Originally I had intended for him to write a guest post, but then he up and moved to Thailand. So, he left it in my hands to fill in the blanks. All he could tell me was that “I found the tape in a sort of Bangladeshi plaza at Jackson Heights in Queens, New York.”
Bangladesh is a relatively new country, only officially being established in 1971. The country, which had previous been called East Pakistan after the partition of Bengal, won it’s independence in the Bangladesh Liberation War. After independence the new state endured famines, natural disasters and widespread poverty, as well as political turmoil and military coups.
Bangla music has been traditionally classified by the region of origin and / or the creators of the musical genre, such as Nazrul geeti (written and composed by Kazi Nazrul Islam), ghombhira (unique to a specific area in Bangladesh), etc. But in the post-independence period, several new minor musical groups emerged, mainly as playback songs for movies. These songs failed to fit into any particular genre, but seemed to be tied together by common theme of “music for the masses”. Most of the music tended to be aimed at the mainstream audience – popular catchy tunes with simple words that were far moved from the classical ragas. Hence, a miscellaneous category called Adhunik songeet – or Modern Song – was created.
M. A. Shoeb, along with Nazibul Haque, Kumar Biswajit, and Andrew Kishore released some very first Bangla pop songs in the beginning of 1980s. Shoeb has recorded at least a dozen albums, with a total of somewhere around 500 songs – some of which were for film and television soundtracks. His son, Saifullah Shoeb, has recently followed in his father’s footsteps in the music industry. As of 2007, M. A. Shoeb was living in Los Angeles, California and was still performing around the United States.
Catalog number D001 (listed as DV01 on the front cover) on Disco Recording. No other information available.
Filed under: Libya
I have been dying for a post on the music of Libya pretty much since day one. It is one of those countries that stares back at me from the map. Just a big blank. Nothing. Having never even seen a record from there, I figured that I would have someone write a guest post. But something would always come up. E-mails went unanswered, connections missed, and so on until I started to think that it would never happen… Until now!
There’s not a whole lot of information available about the music of Libya. The Wikipedia page only talks about Ma’luf, Chaabi and Arab classical music, as well as the music of Tuareg – which is a whole other thing all together. But no mention of modern popular music. In an interview I conducted with Alan Bishop for Chunklet Magazine, I asked him why there was such a lack of music from Libya. His response was: “Libya is perhaps a wrong geographical colonial creation to be judged musically as a nation. The borders or the way Libya was carved give it far less population and therefore, less cultural possibilities to produce as many interesting styles and ideas as Morocco, Algeria, or Egypt – all much more heavily populated and culturally diverse musical powerhouses…”. But that is not to say that there is nothing to be found.
Nasser Omar el Mizdawi was born on September 5, 1950 in Tripoli. He studied at the Jamal Eddin Elmeladi Institute of Music there. Mezdawi’s first band was called Annusur, which translates to The Eagles. The band released their first album, Ughniyat an Elghurba, in 1975 which went on to become a gold record.
Mizdawi’s popularity grew outside of Libya, especially in neighboring Egypt. So popular in fact, that a fellow Libyan – Hamid El Shari – made a career out of doing Mizdawi’s songs, even going so far as to name his band Al Mizdawyia. Meanwhile, Mizdawi was touring the world, playing shows in Europe and both North and South America. But he was also known to vanish throughout the years, to the extent that people thought he was dead – only fueling El Shari’s career. He eventually moved to Egypt in the Eighties to escape Ghaddafi‘s rule. There, he has worked with Amr Diab. Mizdawi’s last live performance was at the Cairo Opera House.
Thanks to Azzam Ben Hmeda and Hany Zaki for the information.
Catalog number MIZ 2 – MT 10589 on Mizdawi Music, pressed in Greece by EMI, released 1983.
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