Menahan Street Band, a veritable supergroup of some of today's most prolific songwriters, arrangers, and producers return with this beat-forward, cinematic masterpiece. Their unique brand of instrumental soul has not only been the foundation for some of modern hip-hop's most successful beats, it has also become the perennial soundtrack and veritable vibe-generator for countless parties, art shows, and restaurants throughout NYC and abroad. While this album carries the aesthetic torch that MSB has skillfully woven into the tapestry of their DNA, it also delves deeper into the experimental, exotic sounds that fill many of the coveted Sound Library and Soundtrack LPs of the late sixties and early seventies - an amalgamation of moog synths, electric pianos, drum machines, and a bevy of analog instrumentation, that ebb and flow in lush swells of Morriconian grandeur.-Includes MP3 Download Card

Sudan Archives steht für diverse Stile, eine packende Mischung aus kraftvollem, hymnenhaftem R&B und elektronischer Musik. Ihr Violinspiel ist beeinflusst von Nordostafrikanischer Geigenmusik, aber auch Westafrikanische Rhythmen finden den Weg in ihre Musik.Für Athena hat sie mit einer Vielzahl von Songwritern, Produzenten und Musikern zusammengearbeitet. Die Stücke auf dem Album klingen voller denn je, Sudan Archives bleibt sich und ihrem einzigartigen Stilmix aber treu, der ihr so viele Fans auf der ganzen Welt eingebracht hat. Zu sehen: Eine Bronzestatue von Sudan Archives.

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10th Anniversary Edition Indie Exclusive Dirty Money Splatter Color VinylIncludes MP3 Download Card The unstoppable, irresistible rhythms and melodies of Antibalas have influenced scores of artists across rock, hip hop, afrobeat and beyond.Born in a Brooklyn warehouse in 1997, 12 piece ensemble Antibalas is credited with introducing Afrobeat to a wider global audience, influencing countless musicians and developing a live show that is the stuff of legend. Members of Antibalas served as musical directors and the house band in the Broadway hit FELA! and penned original music for the show. Members have also recently collaborated/performed with Iron and Wine, Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, Mark Ronson, TV on the Radio and The Roots.On the heels of the hit musical FELA!, Antibalas ended up reuniting with former member and producer Gabriel Roth, who was at the helm for their first three albums. This self-titled album was their first on Daptone Records.

Back in stock! Ghanaian Afro-Rock From Producer/Composer JJ Whitefield, Inspired By His Karl Hector & The Malcouns And Whitefield Brothers Projects JJ Whitefield, who in the early ‘90s revived the gritty, analogue Funk sounds of the ‘60s and ‘70s with his Poets Of Rhythm, has been working with Now-Again Records for over decade, releasing a flock of acclaimed projects with Karl Hector & The Malcouns, Whitefield Brothers, Rodinia and the Original Raw Soul anthology. He first started exploring African rhythms with the Whitefield Brothers in the late ‘90s, continuing in the ‘00s with Karl Hector & The Malcouns. He’s been instrumental in launching Ghanaian Afro Beat/Funk legend Ebo Taylor´s international career, decades after the maestro recorded the landmark albums that have inspired thousands. Whitefield recorded two new studio albums with Taylor and toured in his band between 2009 and 2013, where he met Taylor’s son Henry and percussionist/Singer Eric Owusu. The trio now front the Johnny! band and find inspiration not only in Ghana’s hypnotic grooves, but also the full frontal fuzz guitar assault heard on the legion of 70s Zambian Zamrock albums reissued by Now-Again. Indeed, Whitefield credits his tours with Zamrock godfathers Rikki Ililonga and WITCH’s Jagari Chanda as instrumental in creating the Johnny’s sonic backdrop. The band is rounded out by Turkish drummer Bernd Oezsevim (Woima Collective, Rodinia) and Indonesian bassist/multi instrumentalist Tomi Simatupang (Whitefield Brothers). This is what was oft-called “Afro Rock” at the core, with the possibilities to stretch out into swinging highlife, sweet soul or psychedelia . The results, point at a new direction for the music inspired by the Great Continent. One that takes a direction once mocked as derivative and asserts its importance on the globe’s current musical stage.

In the same year, 1981, that Orchestra Baobab recorded their second album under the direction of budding young Senegalese producer, Ibrahima Sylla, the Japanese electronics company Sony, held a press conference in Vienna to announce their version of the Compact Disc. In attendance was Herbert von Karajan, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic and the urban myth – albeit possibly true – that the maximum length of 74 minutes of music then available for a CD, was because this allowed the entire length of Karajan's recording of Beethoven's 9 th Symphony, to fit on one disc.Fast forward 12 years to London in 1993 and Sterns' release of Baobab's 'Bamba' CD which combined tracks from the two vinyl albums 'Mouhamadou Bamba' & 'Viva Bawobab S1/ Si Bou Odja', and Sterns had a problem. What tracks to keep, what to drop and once you'd decided that, how to fit them all onto a CD in under 74 minutes? The solution was to edit, primarily by fading early, one of the longest tracks of the selection.Accordingly the first track of this album, “Sibou Odia”, was reduced from 14'35” to 13'41” and, in most cases, none were the wiser as the suggestion to call the CD version an “Edit” had been dropped on the basis that nobody would believe a 13+ minutes track was an edit! Now of course, such restrictions don't exist and either via a repiication of its original format on vinyl, or through the digital medium, you can hear the full-length version as first intended.And it's fascinating, not just this track but the whole album. The band is young, energetic and confident of their abilities. In the 'missing' 66 seconds you hear them live, in the studio, working together to close what indeed was something of an epic performance. And it's not just the musicians who have greater confidence. The recording itself is more accomplished, better balanced. However effective the echoey ambiance of, for example, “Mouhamadou Bamba” was on the first album, you don't find the same tricks here. They're not needed. Instead the core unit of bass, drums and guitar, ably abetted by more percussion, a second guitar and on-the-button horns, provide a solid foundation from which the five vocalists and featured instrumentalists can launch and then soar. creditsreleased November 20, 2020

Performed and recorded over three nights to a sold-out crowd at the World Famous Theater in Harlem, NY, this album brings the electrifying performances that put Daptone on the map right into your living room! Featuring live performances by: Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, Charles Bradley and his Extraordinaires, Naomi Shelton and the Gospel Queens, Antibalas, The Budos Band, Menahan Street Band, Saun & Starr, The Sugarman 3 and our host Binky Griptite. This album is lovingly dedicated to the memory of our dear friends Sharon, Charles, Naomi and Cliff.

Yaoundé, in the 1970´s, was a buzzing place. Every neighbourhood of Cameroon´s capital, no matter how dodgy, was flled with music spots but surprisingly there were no infrastructure to immortalise those musical riches.The country suffered from a serious lack of proper recording facilities, and the process of committing your song to tape could become a whole adventure unto itself. Of course, you could always book the national broadcasting company together with a sound engineer, but this was hardly an option for underground artists with no cash. But luckily an alternative option emerged in form of an adventist church with some good recording equipment and many of the artists on this compilation recorded their frst few songs, secretly, in these premises thanks to Monsieur Awono, the church engineer. He knew the schedule of the priests and, in exchange for some cash, he would arrange recording sessions. The artists still had to bring their own equipment, and since there was only one microphone, the amps and instruments had to be positioned perfectly. It was a risky business for everyone involved but since they knew they were making history, it was all worth it. At the end of the recording, the master reel would be handed to whoever had paid for the session, usually the artist himself..and what happened next? With no distribution nor recording companies around this was a legitimate question.More often then not it was the french label Sonafric that would offer their manufacturing and distribution structure and many Cameroonian artist used that platform to kickstart their career. What is particularly surprising in the case of Sonafric was their willingness to take chances and judge music solely on their merit rather than their commercial viability. The sheer amount of seriously crazy music released also spoke volumes about the openness of the people behind the label.But who exactly are these artists that recorded one or two songs before disappearing, never to be heard from again? Some of the names were so obscure that even the most seasoned veterans of the Cameroonian music scene had never heard of them. A few trips to the land of Makossa and many more hours of interviews were necessary to get enough insight to assemble the puzzle-pieces of Yaoundé’s buzzing 1970s music scene. We learned that despite the myriad diffculties involved in the simple process of making and releasing a record, the musicians of Yaoundé’s underground music scene left behind an extraordinary legacy of raw grooves and magnifcent tunes.The songs may have been recorded in a church, with a single microphone in the span of only an hour or two, but the fact that we still pay attention to these great creations some 50 years later, only illustrates the timelessness of their music.

Neuauflage dieser super-seltenen LP von 1978. Remastert von Grammy-Gewinner Frank Merritt im Londoner The Carvery Studio. Die einzig bekannte Aufnahme dieser obskuren Band und mit das Beste was der umfangreiche Katalog des legendären Albarika Store Labels aus Benin an Afro-Boogie und Afro-Funk zu bieten hat.

Ein Meisterwerk. Unter der musikalischen Leitung des Saxophonisten Issa Cissoko, dessen dezente, jazzige Bläserarrangements sich durch das gesamte Album ziehen, und des Gitarristen Barthélemy Attisso, dessen hypnotische, virtuose Soli hervorstechen, wurde das Album im "Golden Baobab"-Studio in Dakar aufgenommen und dort von dem jungen Ibrahima Sylla produziert. Die Verwendung des Affenbrotbaums, sowohl im Namen als auch in der Symbolik, unterstreicht das Bewusstsein der Gruppe für die traditionellen senegalesischen Werte, wenn sie mit denen von außen kombiniert werden, in diesem Fall mit der afro-kubanischen Musik, die in den 1960er Jahren so populär war. Issa Cissoko: band leader and tenor saxophoneBarthélemy Attisso: lead guitarCharles Ndiaye: bass guitarPape Bâ: guitarPeter Udo: clarinetMontaga Koite: percussionThione Seck: vocalsMedoune Diallo: vocalsNdiouga Dieng: vocals and maracasBalla Sidibe: vocals and timbalesRudy Gomis: vocals

It was in Benin City, in the heart of Nigeria, that a new hybrid of intoxicating highlife music known as Edo Funk was born. It first emerged in the late 1970s when a group of musicians began to experiment with different ways of integrating elements from their native Edo culture and fusing them with new sound effects coming from West Africa´s night-clubs. Unlike the rather polished 1980´s Nigerian disco productions coming out of the international metropolis of Lagos Edo Funk was raw and reduced to its bare minimum. Someone was needed to channel this energy into a distinctive sound and Sir Victor Uwaifo appeared like a mad professor with his Joromi studio. Uwaifo took the skeletal structure of Edo music and relentless began fusing them with synthesizers, electric guitars and 80´s effect racks which resulted in some of the most outstanding Edo recordings ever made. An explosive spiced up brew with an odd psychedelic note known as Edo Funk. That‘s the sound you‘ll be discovering in the first volume of the Edo Funk Explosion series which focusses on the genre’s greatest originators; Osayomore Joseph, Akaba Man, and Sir Victor Uwaifo: Osayomore Joseph was one of the first musicians to bring the sound of the flute into the horn-dominated world of highlife, and his skills as a performer made him a fixture on the Lagos scene. When he returned to settle in Benin City in the mid 1970s – at the invitation of the royal family – he devoted himself to the modernisation and electrification of Edo music, using funk and Afro-beat as the building blocks for songs that weren’t afraid to call out government corruption or confront the dark legacy of Nigeria’s colonial past.

Limited edition of 1000 copies in exact replica

180g vinyl, incl. bonus CD's, Collection of recordings from one of Tanzania’s most revered but short-lived bands of the 1970s, Sunburst. Covering their entire output from 1973 to 1976, this first retrospective features music from their 45 RPM singles on Moto Moto and TFC label, as well as their sole album, "Ave Africa", and an unreleased radio session recorded in Tanzania in 1973. This release comprises of the double vinyl and a copy of the CD version, which contains extra tracks.