Music
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Here’s the first from a new series (can’t wait for the others!) of rare legendary recordings from seminal bands that formed the explosive Zimbabwe music scene in the 1970s. The Green Ar...read more
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This was the year of African compilations. So many great ones came out (three on Soundway alone), we could devote a whole page to them. This one was perhaps the year’s best. Strut being more ...read more
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This two-CD package comprises the music from a 2001 box set that also included a third disc with an audio documentary with interviews (a note in the booklet shows where that’s available for free on...read more
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This compilation covers just one small country—but a lot of territory in terms of time (1969-81) and style (Afro-funk, Cavacha, Agbadja, Afrobeat). Aside from Antoine Dougbe & Orchestre P...read more
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We were all expecting great albums from Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear and Flaming Lips in 2009, but this record arrived with little fanfare and knocked us for a loop. Mulatu Astatke (born 1943) i...read more
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This two-CD set comes from the people who’ve previously compiled the Nigeria Special and Ghana Soundz series. This album is less psychedelic than the former and much closer to the first Nigeria Spe...read more
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The second volume of Analog Africa’s OPRC reissues is subtitled From the Vaults of Albarika Store 1969-1979. This disc sounds much better than the fine but motley volume 1, for the material here wa...read more
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Back in the white-bread 1950s, world music was considered too raw to place before the record buying public in unadulterated form. Add some strings, some white people, call it exotica, and then mayb...read more
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We normally don’t list reissues in with our Top 50, but we’re happy to make
an exception for this wickedly cool Zambian rock record — and besides, to whom
...read more
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Soundway has done a great job with this. Even the Fela Kuti cut — an early 7” version of “Who’re You?” that’s rawer than the more familiar version — has not previously been reissued. Th...read more
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This album’s lengthy subtitle still doesn’t encompass all of the sounds on display here. The Don Issac Ezekiel Combination has gospel-group harmonizing, several groups deploy jazz-tinged stylings, ...read more
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From 1969 to 1974, after Ethiopia’s liberation and before the country’s 1974 fall into Stalinist repression, Amha Records’ Amha Esèté released a huge volume of the country’s unique “Abyssian groove...read more
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The meaning of the title has little to do with the genre of jazz: This
album compiles the early recordings of the eventual founders of
Tout-Puissant OK Jazz, one of the two most popular Congole...read more
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Another month, another compilation of cool '60s/'70s African music. Yawn... HEY!!! Do not sleep on this one! Analog Africa, one of a few unimpeachably fantastic labels dedicated to such pursuits, b...read more
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On to Zambia we go, where frontman Rikki Ililonga and his Musi-O-Tunya band pioneered the sort-of genre known simply as Zamrock back in the '70s. As put forth on the awesome two-disc set Dark Sunri...read more
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Strut's spectacular Nigeria 70 series is about as foolproof as compilations get these days. This is the third installment, and while it doesn't reach the highs of the stupendous first volume, it's ...read more
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The past decade has seen an explosion in both the quantity and quality of '70s African-music reissues, and among the specialists in this field, a few match but none surpass the Analog Africa label....read more
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Chances are good these legends from the tiny west African nation of Benin didn't call their 1973 debut The 1st Album -- can you imagine the cajones that would've taken? Then again...wow, this recor...read more
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Several albums into a remarkable career that has made them one of the most popular groups in the (sorry, hate this term) world-music scene, Tinariwen, the band of nomadic sub-Saharan former rebels,...read more
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It's a fantastic and disorienting time to be a fan of African music. While genius imprints like Analog Africa, Soundway and (now) Dust-to-Digital excavate the incredibly rich musical history of the...read more
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There are many worlds out there, and, given the time, the Dust-to-Digital label would give us the grand tour on all of them. The Atlanta imprint's latest vital artifact is a lovely, compact, four-d...read more
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Followers of the past several years worth of African-music reissues have likely noticed the way that certain Caribbean sounds had manifested around the continent during the 1970s (Congolese rumba, ...read more
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At the time these sweet jams were committed to magnetic tape, the western Africa nation known as Burkina Faso was still called Upper Volta, but that's splitting hairs. At the risk of sounding like ...read more
Tags:
70s
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78s
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african
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afro-pop
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awesome
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blues
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caribbean
,
dance
,
ethiopia
,
folk
,
funk
,
garage
,
jazz
,
pop
,
psychedelia
,
psychedelic
,
reissue
,
soul
