Listen: “El Rego – Dis Moi Oui”

Link to Egon’s NPR piece here.

Though Benin’s 60s and 70s recording scene certainly rivaled that of neighboring Ghana and Nigeria, the European compilers that helped make Nigeria’s Fela Kuti and Ghana’s K.Frimpong (relative) household names have only recently rediscovered the country’s musical heroes.

The earliest benefactors of this resurgence were the inspiring Orchestre Poly Rythmo de Cotonou, whose numerous LPs and 45s offer a funky oeuvre hard to match in West Africa. But the man that Samy Ben Redjeb, producer of the top-notch compilation African Scream Contest Raw & Psychedelic Afro Sounds From Benin & Togo 70s and Legends of Benin credits with kick starting Benin’s funk, or jerk, movement, and whom Poly Rythmo bandleader Melome Clement cites as a direct influence on his ensemble’s sound, has remained a footnote.

Perhaps this is because Theophile Do Rego, better known as El Rego, et Ses Commandos released their groundbreaking tunes on the easily disposed 7” format. With a series of songs now compiled on Analog Africa’s trawls through the Beninois 60s and 70s scenes, and a rumored Voodoofunk/Daptone compilation forthcoming, we can only hope that El Rego’s other killers soon see the light of day.

Above: El Rego et Ses Commandos greeting Miriam Makeba at the Cotonou Airport, circa 1973

As if you needed someone in a position of authority to tell you so: Forge Your Own Chains is one mind-melter of a comp. Check a review in this week’s Rolling Stone.

“… haywire brains are what make this freak-rock compilation so awesome!” We agree.

Link: Rolling Stone.

Now-Again, in conjunction with Uchenna Ikonne (the man behind the perennially-dope Comb & Razor blog) and New-Zealand based psych-zealot Heavyfuzz, is knee deep in assembling an anthology of the best Nigerian psych-fuzz-funk tracks from the country’s golden years of the early to mid 1970s. This compilation will be officially licensed through the bands themselves – a first for a Nigerian comp of this sort, so far as we can tell.

Included in our ever expanding track list: selections from The Hykkers, The Hygrades, Tirogo, Faces, Forge Your Own Chains’ The Strangers, and Wrinkar Experience. Wrinkar’s leader, Ginger Forcha (pictured above with some adoring fans in the early 70s), licensed us his breathtaking “Ballad Of A Sad Young Woman.” You’ll have to wait till our comp comes out (some time in mid 2010) to check that tune. In the meantime, we’re posting Wrinkars’s biggest hit, “Money To Burn,” here – as well as a link to a mix by Frank/Voodoo Funk where you can check out the band’s funky “Soundway.”

MP3: Wrinkar Experience “Money To Burn” – click here.
Link: Voodoo Funk’s “You Can Shake Your Bones” Mix with Wrinkar Experience’s “Soundway” (first track) – link here.

Yes, it’s Forge Your Own Chains madness ’round here, but we were bumping this tune this morning. To be released as a giveaway with the Whitefield Brothers’ Earthology in January.

More news to come.

Read the full liner notes here.

The stories of great high school funk bands are, thanks to an abundance of reissues, commonplace. The tales of great high school soul-bands are still rare. A ballad or two on the random Douglass High School Stage Band album or Timeless Legend’s mesmerizing entry on Columbus’s 1972 1st Annual Inner City Talent Expo notwithstanding, high school bands rarely struck into the realm of “grown folks” music. Enter The Equatics and their brooding masterpiece Doin’ It!!!!

If this is categorized as a “funk” album – and it was for the last ten years, by those few lucky enough to own an original copy – it holds its own. But it was as a soul band – one as inspired by the melancholic musings of Bill Withers as the psychedelic-pop of the self-proclaimed “Black Moses,” Issac Hayes – that the Equatics shone. These young souls offered world-weary, beat-heavy ballads that stand on par with any of the great independent organizations of the early 1970s. That a group of teenagers could offer such an angst-ridden plea as that of Leo Davis’s “Merry Go Round” not only transcends the limitations that came from the band’s average age (seventeen, at the time of the album’s recording), but also the barriers the stood in front of this group of small-city hopefuls.