Honest Jon's Records - Marvellous Boy LP
Calypso From West Africa
The inter-war dance bands of British West Africa are
often strikingly similar in sound to Trinidadian orchestras
like Lovey’s String Band (credited with the first calypso recordings, in 1912).
However, the first West African calypso recordings in the modern style are from Freetown,
Sierra Leone in the early 1950s, by Ebenezer Calendar and Famous Scrubbs.
In arrangements blending African and European instruments,
the brass plays out the legacy of colonial military bands,
albeit hair-down and a little ramshackle now;
and the beautiful creole lyrics are as upful, quick, current,
musical and intimate as any classic calypsonian’s.
Decca also organized the first calypso recording session in Ghana,
down the coast, where a sound interchangeably designated ‘calypso’ or ‘highlife’ ruled urban dancefloors,
courtesy of The Tempos — fronted here by Julie Okine — and its spin-offs The Black Beats,
The Red Spots, and finally The Rhythm Aces.
The invasion of King Mensah of Ghana, and The Tempos’ money-spinning tour
of Nigeria at the start of the 1950s sparked a decade of musical innovation.
Bobby Benson’s new highlife eleven-piece included the great trumpeters Victor Olaiya and Roy Chicago
— both leaving to lead the bands featured here, the Cool Cats and Rhythm Dandies —
and his calypso Taxi Driver was their first, huge, signature hit.
(By contrast, little is known about the Nigerian Rolling Stone,
whose real name was Roland Onaghise, singing here in the Bini dialect with such rootical frankness.)
The Mayor’s Dance Band was the second lineup run by the celebrated Erekosima ‘Rex’ Lawson,
after the Nigeraphone Studio Orchestra Of Onitsha, and highly successful throughout the 1960s.
With Lawson’s trademark blend of Igbo lyrics over a Calabari rhythm, reflecting his mixed parentage,
and his superb, Caribbean-flavoured trumpet-playing,
Bere Bote is the latest of the recordings here.
Honest Jons
DER Platten Laden überhaupt am Ende der Portobello Road Londons. Egal ob spektakuläre Reissues oder super aktuelle und grossartige elektronische Musik - Honest Jon's hat die Finger im Spiel. "Informal University for music lovers" - wird der Laden liebevoll genannt und ist seit 1974 das Herz der Londoner Musik Community. Das Label Honest Jon's wird unter anderem von Notting Hill local Damon Albarn mitbetrieben. Seit 2008 veröffentlicht Honest Jon's immer wieder Leckerbissen aus den 150 000 78 - rpm Aufnahmen aus den klimakontrollierten archivräumen der EMI archives in Hayes England.
Erhältlich bei: Kitchener Bern
www.honestjons.com
EN: Honest Jon's is an independent record shop based on Portobello Road in Ladbroke Grove, London, operating since 1974. The shop is owned and run by Mark Ainley and Alan Scholefield, who took over from one of the original proprietors, "Honest" Jon Clare. Their record label of the same name is run in conjunction with Damon Albarn, who has been quoted as saying: "I don't really like the term world music. Wherever it comes from, it's all just music, isn't it? Hopefully that's what Honest Jon's is about - to open a few minds to what's out there."[1] The shop sells a multitude of genres of music on vinyl and CD, specializing in jazz, blues, reggae, dance, soul, folk and outernational. It runs a mail-order business from www.honestjons.com. Formed in 2002, the label has released compilation albums such as its London Is The Place For Me series, excavating the music of young Black London, in the years after World War II ("a fascinating archive of material from the 1950s and 60s, chronicling a time when diasporic rhythms were more or less the sole preserve of the small communities responsible for bringing them to these shores");[2] also collections of British folk, Port-of-Spain soca, Afro-Cuban jazz from the Bronx, Jamaican dancehall; and retrospectives of artists including Moondog, Maki Asakawa, Bettye Swann and Cedric "Im" Brooks & The Light of Saba. It has released original music by Candi Staton, Actress, T++, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, Mark Ernestus, Trembling Bells, The Good, The Bad & The Queen, Simone White, Shackleton, Michael Hurley, Terry Hall, and the Moritz Von Oswald Trio. It recorded the chaabi orchestra of Abdel Hadi Halo on location in Algiers; Lobi Traore and Kokanko Sata Doumbia in Bamako; and Tony Allen in Lagos. In 2008, Honest Jon's began a run of compilations of early recordings — mostly drawn from the EMI Archive in Hayes, Hillingdon — stretching back to the start of the twentieth century, covering all corners of the world: from the break-up of the Ottoman Empire more than a hundred years ago, to 1950s Beirut, to late-1920s Baghdad, to 1930s East Africa. wikipedia