Various Artists - Ivory Coast Soul: Afrofunk In Abidjan From 1972 To 1982
SKU
05-HC 014
Is there no end to the great riches of African pop music from the 70s still to be discovered? Certainly there's no end on this title! Recommended!
This compilation is the result of nearly three years' work by Djamel Hammadi aka Afrobrazilero, an extraordinary collector and vinyl digger who traveled all over Africa from Ghana, Benin, Togo, Mali to Senegal. After 12 beautiful but dangerous trips throughout The Ivory Coast (featuring fake policemen at border controls, political instabilities, deep economic crisis, malaria, and one big fear when he opened a vinyl box in a small abandoned bus station and found a scorpion) he selected 13 rare or unreleased tracks. All these tracks have been fully licensed with the tireless help of DJ Julien Lebrun. As Hot Casa explains: "It was almost always impossible to find the original master song, as most of the producers we met didn't have them anymore. As you can imagine, tropical climate and humidity are not friends to vinyl preservation. Still, we did our best to clean and use different copies of each song to have the clearest sound."
"At best, compilations of this sort offer snapshots into the music of a time and place -- its measure of accomplishment based on your desire to seek out, and dive in, further. Ivory Coast Soul accomplishes this, on multiple fronts, and one can only hope that interest in this particular microcosm is only the beginning."-Aquarium Drunkard