A stupendous blend of scintillating highlife, smoking Fela and spaced-out, funkdafied Black Jazz, from 1975 — Mari Affiong Usuah from Oron town, by way of Calabar in southeastern Nigeria, fronting a knockout band led by Daniel ‘Satch’ Asuquo from the Atomic 8 (and formerly of Bobby Benson’s orchestra).
The Afrofunk cuts are especially killer — with James Brown just percolating through by the end — but it’s a stunning, magnificent album, through and through.
Beautifully sleeved, too, with excellent notes by Uchenna from Comb & Razor. ‘Gob, smacked,’ he recalls, of his first listen; ‘mind, blown’.
Ka-boom! The legendary digger re-ignites the Lagos Disco Inferno and kicks off his very own mouth-watering imprint with two sides of boogie-down bliss.
Afro-space-disco murder — shuffling and wiggling, synthy and bubbling — from this re-incarnation of Willy Nfor’s Mighty Flames, recruited mostly from the wave of Cameroonian musicians drawn to Nigeria in the late-1970s by its heavy new funk sound. It’s a long way from Ohio, but the Troutmans are in the mix.
Boogie-down cosmic funk — like full-throttle Roy Ayers. Jimi Adams packs his inner Hendrix off to Funky Town; the horns are the horniest; Mona runs it all down with an irresistible West African tilt.
Classy, spaced funk, originally issued in 1981 by Phonodisk, the most ambitious Nigerian label at that time. The Mighty Flames band expertly blends an Afro-cocktail of Roy Ayers, Kool And The Gang, Chic…
The bullion-clad masterpiece of these pioneers of Nigerian Funk and Afrobeat at their deepest and heaviest — tearing, wailing, mid-70s funk, heady with spirituality. Superbad from start to finish, no let-up.
Storming vintage boogie from the Afrodisia studio, loose and thunderous, with killer freaky effects and old-school rapping. You can hear Eno’s Edo roots in Papa French’s scorching horns chart. Leroy Burgess goes to Lagos…
At the close of the 1970s, just a couple of years after the classic psych-funk of Float, Wilf Ekanem and crew trained their frazzled peepers on Disco. Two classics here to blow your soul on fire.