From Makossa to Kuduro: African Music in New York City

When did African music recordings and artists first make their popular presence known in the Big Apple? Was it in the postwar fascination with rumba – the music of Congolese descent and Cuban origin, featuring guitars, pianos, and polyrhythmic percussionists – which became a main current at dance halls like the Palladium Ballroom? Was it with “Wimoweh,” Pete Seeger and his group the Weavers’ early ‘50s folk-style re-imagining/plagiarizing of South African composer Solomon Linda’s Zulu vocal piece “Mbube” (the song later immortalized as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”)? Or was it in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, the dawn of Africa’s postcolonial period, when musicians began making their way across the Atlantic to NYC, blending the continent’s modern sounds with the music of the American century?

As New York native and professor of history Robin Kelley notes in his excellent tome Africa Speaks, America Answers, Guy Warren of Ghana (also known as Kofi Ghanaba), is often credited as the first Afro-jazz instrumentalist – Warren was a cofounder (with ET Mensah) of the superstar highlife band the Tempos, who were internationally renowned for accompanying the continent’s inaugural democratically elected president, Kwame Nkrumah. Warren came to the US in 1955, making a name as a jazz drummer and composer; his song “Eyi Wala Dong (An African’s Prayer)” was later an orchestral hit by Bert Kaempfert, under the name “That Happy Feeling.”

Yoruban percussionist Babatunde Olatunji also made a lifelong impact at the musical crossroads of Africa and America. After studying on scholarship at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Olatunji came to NYU, where he started playing music. He was signed to Columbia Records (by John Hammond, who famously signed Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen), and recorded the hit 1960 album Drums of Passion, before going on to collaborate with the likes of John Coltrane and the Grateful Dead.

South Africa’s first couple of song, the jazz singer Miriam Makeba and the singer/trumpeter Hugh Masekela, made a deep mark on the musical history of New York. Both long-exiled for their anti-Apartheid creative expressions, Makeba became Africa’s first global star before the ‘60s were done, dueting with Harry Belafonte at President Kennedy’s 1962 birthday party at Madison Square Garden, and winning the Grammy Award for Best Folk Recording for the 1966 album An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba. Masekela came to New York to study at the Manhattan School of Music in 1960 and stayed; by ‘67 he was performing at the Monterey Jazz Festival alongside Jimi Hendrix, and in ‘68 scored a #1 pop hit, “Grazing In the Grass.”

Which is to say, that as Africa’s recording industry began to export its swing in the late 1960s, its dance music found welcome ears in New Yorkers increasingly well versed in the continent’s diverse music accents and time signatures. Over the last 40 years, makossa, highlife, Afrobeat, jùjú, Zulu jive, Tuareg blues, Ethiopian jazz, taraab, traditional drumming from Burundi to Ghana, kwaito, kuduro, souk, and many more styles have all made an impression on the city’s musicians, DJs, and dancers. New York is a “secret African city” says Yale professor Robert Farris Thompson. So if you’re looking for one secret ingredient of its culture, follow the musical pathways back and forth across the Atlantic.

Manu Dibango once wrote, “African music spreads out from its cultural base in circular ripples.” Though the recordings that follow may not always move in such neatly concentric circles, they are undoubtedly some of the richest, most resonant sound waves to connect the Big Apple with the Bright Continent.

Manu Dibango - Soul Makossa

Cameroonian saxophonist, singer, and bandleader Manu Dibango was almost 40 years old when he recorded “Soul Makossa” in Paris in 1972. By that time he was established throughout Europe and Africa as a solo artist and as a featured player with the great Congolese rumba band Le Grand Kalle et l’African Jazz. He’d been broadening his musical language since the mid-‘50s, when he went to study in Paris and Brussels, playing alongside the other musical giant of Cameroon, Francis Bebey. “Sometimes I used to play jazz, sometimes the twist, sometimes Latin music,” Dibango says in the 1992 book Africa O-Ye! “I think I started to develop my own style at the end of the 1960s.” At the time, makossa was a Cameroonian urban original, mixing local children’s handclap dances and folk melodies with popular, imported Nigerian highlife and Congo party rhythms. To these, Dibango added his love of American soul.

The first version of “Soul Makossa” was cut as an instrumental afterthought, the b-side of a single celebrating Cameroon’s hosting of the prestigious African Cup of Nations tournament. And though the single and the Cameroon team both flopped, Dibango took “Soul Makossa” back to Paris to rerecord it. The new version caught on. As documented in Peter Shapiro’s NYC disco book Turn the Beat Around and Vince Aletti’s anthology The Disco Files, “Soul Makossa” landed as an import in New York in late 1972. The influential DJs David Mancuso (The Loft) and Frankie Crocker (WBLS) made it a staple, and before Atlantic Records could release it domestically, “Soul Makossa” began to be covered by a myriad of artists (resulting in as many as 23 different versions, according to Shapiro).

Dibango followed his tune to New York in 1973, where his voracious musical appetite led him to sit in with the Apollo Theater house band and jam with the Fania All-Stars at their classic Yankee Stadium concert in August 1973, where “Soul Makossa” was performed. By the time he left the city at year’s end, his global star had ascended.

But even then, “Soul Makossa” wasn’t through. In 1982, Michael Jackson invoked it in the coda of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” the fourth single from Thriller. It took a lawsuit and an out-of-court settlement for Jackson to acknowledge that his chant of “Ma Ma Se, Ma Ma Sa, Ma Ma Kossa” was not a Swahili original (as he claimed) but an appropriation of Dibango’s Duala language invocation, “Ma Ma Ko, Ma Ma Sa, Ma Makossa.” Even the King of Pop, it seemed, wanted a little makossa in his sound. - PO

Fela Ransome Kuti & Afrika 70 - Expensive Shit

Writing in 2015, the shadow of Nigerian bandleader and Afrobeat master Fela Kuti is the most pronounced of any upon New York’s cultural landscape by an African musician. Though that wasn’t necessary true in 1975, his name was already beginning to ring out. Stories of Fela as an African champion of black power were crossing the ocean, Afrika 70’s flurry of releases were becoming available locally via the Editions Makossa sublabel of New York’s Makossa International Records (distributed by the Brooklyn-based African Record Centre), and the domestic 1974 release of “Shakara Oloje” was being caned by DJs exploring more Afrocentric music for the dancefloor.

Then came “Expensive Shit.” The song mythologizes an infamous tale – the May 1974 raid on Fela’s Lagos compound, when the Police Central Intelligence Division tried to entrap the rebellious singer with a stick of marijuana, but “Fela was able to grab and swallow the stick, causing police to detain him in a prison cell until he passed the incriminating evidence,” according to Michael Veal’s Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon. The classic Afrobeat drives what is essentially a nose-thumbing, truth-to-power sermon. Combining rhythmic dancefloor experimentation with the rebellious nature present in the musical air of the mid-‘70s in NYC, “Expensive Shit” crossed over from the disco and toward the progressive punks. Speaking to journalist Jay Babcock in 1999, Talking Heads’ David Byrne called “Expensive Shit” an influential favorite: “The first ones you pick up make the deepest impression, cuz it’s something that you haven’t heard before. There’s a song [Talking Heads] did called “The Great Curve,” where we tried to do a Fela-type groove and then take it in another direction. There are some sections that are straight Afrobeat riffs.”

That interview took place toward the beginning of Fela’s New York revival, which began after his death from AIDS-related illness in 1997. “Expensive Shit” was at the center of this newfound interest, but now in a cover version by the dons of the city’s house scene, ‘Little’ Louie Vega and Kenny ‘Dope’ Gonzalez, aka Masters At Work. Having originally tried to recruit Fela to work on their album opus Nuyorican Soul and finding him too unwell to participate, in 1998 the duo brought together an incredible array of Latin- and African-minded players and singers, including the Lagos-born vocalist Wunmi, for a tribute. The result, “MAW Expensive (A Tribute To Fela),” is “Shit” as a hard-charging Afro-Latin-beat banger – it both pushed and eclipsed the deep house scene’s Afrocentric moment. The track also felt like the opening of a floodgate. Its immediate aftermath saw the popularization of New York’s modern Afrobeat orchestra, Antibalas; the US reissue of Fela’s gigantic recorded catalog; the 2001 founding of DJ Rich Medina’s influential Afrobeat-centric “Jump N Funk” party; the 2003 opening of a group exhibition at downtown’s New Museum, which considered Fela through the lens of contemporary art; and in 2008, the premiere of Bill T. Jones’ Fela! musical. By the first year of the Obama presidency, African music’s own ”black president” had made it to Broadway. - PO

King Sunny Adé and His African Beats - Syncro System Movement

In 1976, Nigerian bandleader and entrepreneur King Sunny Adé released his album Syncro System Movement, a local Nigerian hit that featured Adé on electric guitar and lead vocals. Adé led (and still does), a band of more than 15 musicians, including talking drums, a synthesizer, a steel pan guitar, bass, four electric guitars, singers, and other percussionists.

The style Adé and his musicians play, jùjú music, has been around in various forms since the 1920s. It combines musical forms that are themselves echoes and mutations of one another: palm wine, highlife, Christian hymnals, Congolese rumba, American country music, and Yoruba praise-singing genres such as apala. In the hands of Adé, it also began to reflect the strong influence of Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat.

Adé’s talent as a jùjú bandleader is partly his skill at synchronizing these diverse strains within the ambit of the jùjú tradition that he inherited and eases forward. “Dance gently,” Adé croons on “Syncro System,” with a scratch in his voice. “Dance gently so that it seems you stay in one place.”

Five years after releasing Syncro System Movement, Adé and his 16-piece band arrived in the US for the first time, with the support of Chris Blackwell’s Island Records and French producer Martin Meissonnier. They shocked audiences across the country, performing in a variety of American contexts, including immersive all-night shows aimed at West African immigrants, rock clubs, and jazz festivals. This first tour – jùjú music’s debut on the world stage – reoriented many a New Yorkers’ path through life and culture.

Among those most touched was radio producer Sean Barlow. Jùjú music inspired Barlow to build Afropop Worldwide with journalist Banning Eyre, now the longest-running African music program on American public radio. Jùjú music also inspired writer Greg Tate, who penned a long-form feature article in the Village Voice in March 1983. Ruminating on race and diaspora, Tate praised Adé’s performance of “life and music as two forms of the same joy.” Yale professor and Fela biographer Michael Veal also recalls hearing Adé and his band live in ‘83: “The groove the band generated was unprecedented. Those concerts changed my life.” - WG

Boyoyo Boys - 3 Mabone

If there’s one moment that sums up and symbolizes the impact of African music on American pop culture – and the sound of New York in particular – it is undoubtedly Paul Simon’s 1986 appearance on Saturday Night Live, where the singer-songwriter’s famously reedy falsetto joined with the lush harmonies of South African choir Ladysmith Black Mambazo. As with many such mythical moments, the history of the creative labor that went into producing it is complex. In the case of Graceland, that history was largely inspired and set in motion by the work of a much lesser known group of South African musicians who, secretly, had a profound impact on the dancefloors and radio waves of NYC.

Among the first songs written for Graceland was “Gumboots.” Both the concept and the compositions for the entire project were inspired by scats improvised over a cassette dub of a (possibly bootleg) compilation of South African mbaqanga, or township jive music, labeled simply Gumboots: Accordion Jive Hits Vol. II. The cassette was passed to Simon by singer-songwriter Heidi Berg, a guitarist for the SNL house band, who Simon took under his wing. Although there is no “official” song list to Gumboots the compilation, Simon aficionados have unofficially fingered the track “Small Time No. 4,” by Lulu Masilela and the Boyoyo Boys, as the ur-jive which ultimately became the Simon song, also called “Gumboots” (tellingly, Masilela is officially credited as a cowriter). And though Boyoyo Boys were unknown (and remain so, for the most part) in the States, they already had their hand in a hit that helped define the sound of ‘80s New York.

In 1983, Malcolm McLaren released his first LP, Duck Rock. McLaren had already made a name for himself as the manager and impresario behind the New York Dolls, Sex Pistols, Bow Wow Wow, and Adam & the Ants, even introducing the latter two groups to recordings of traditional African drum patterns recorded in Burundi, which leveraged hits like “Ant Music” and “I Want Candy.” Duck Rock, however, took McLaren’s global-culture mixing to another level, combining hip-hop scratches and vocal ad-libs from NY radio jocks the World’s Famous Supreme Team with snatches of J.S. Bach, square-dance calls, and the voices, instruments, and distinctive grooves of Zulu jive musicians like Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens and, yes, Boyoyo Boys.

Any doubts that Duck Rock was a New York record were dispelled on the album’s second single, “Double Dutch” (the follow-up to “Buffalo Gals”) on which McLaren explains, in meticulous anthropological detail, the synchronized jump-rope art of double dutch, while singing the praises of New York double dutch teams like the Fort Greene Angels and the Ebonettes. A hymn-like invocation of the Ebonettes, in fact, provides the tune’s hook, sung in unmistakable Zulu jive style over an upbeat mbaqanga groove that strongly resembles both “Gumboots” and the various South African releases thought to have inspired it (before breaking down into an extended 12” mixdown of fragmented vocals and echo-y Afro-Latin percussion specifically tailored for the speakers of early ‘80s NYC discotheques).

Club and cult hits in NYC and other major US cities, “Double Dutch” and “Buffalo Gals” were Top 10 hits in the UK, helping to introduce the young sound of New York hip-hop to a worldwide audience – with a little help from South Africa. Boyoyo Boys eventually brought legal action against McLaren for the similarity of “Double Dutch” to their hits “3 Mabone” and “Puleng,” a dispute ultimately settled out of court via payments to songwriter Petrus Maneli and South African publisher Gallo music, the same imprint purported to have released the now out-of-print Gumboots compilation. - EH

Ata Kak - Obaa Sima

Rarities, re-releases, remixes, compilations – African music sold in the West regularly falls into these categories, often in beautiful packaging with rich, archival information. Much of the African music that crosses over here (circa 2015) is marginal, marginalized, forgotten, or even unknown in its country of origin. So it goes with Ghanaian producer and rapper Ata Kak’s 1993 cult classic, Obaa Sima, a work the artist himself has described as “sounds that I thought no one in my country liked.”

Ata Kak only recently discovered that his wild amalgam of disco, rap, and funk had actually been circulating for almost a decade across the web. His music was first posted in 2006 by then-Brooklyn-based blogger and DJ Brian Shimkovitz on his website-turned-record-label Awesome Tapes From Africa. Shimkovitz picked up the rare Ata Kak cassette while studying abroad in Ghana. “This is it,” Shimkovitz wrote when he first posted the tape. “You may never hear anything like this elsewhere.” Thanks to that blog post, Ata Kak’s music became widely admired in and out of New York, among artists and music heads interested in left-field African pop. The viral popularity of the tape is historically significant – Obaa Sima marks a paradigm shift in the transmission of African music to the West via the Internet.

“This was not for the ponytail and Birkenstock crowd,” says Shimkovitz. Ata Kak’s album wasn’t your typical world music, beholden to old authenticity standards or touristic marketing pitches. Instead, this was DIY dance music and rap, oddly reminiscent of Chicago’s hip-house, created on vintage electronic instruments in a home studio in Toronto. Obaa Sima was a leading indicator of African electronic music to come – everything from Shangaan Electro to the dominance of Afro house across the continent today.

Ata Kak credits Little Richard for inspiring his scat-like delivery, but it was Melle Mel and Grandmaster Flash who made him want to rap: “My first song, ‘Obaa Sima,’ took me a few months to record. Initially it was in English, but I couldn’t flow the way I wanted to, so I said, ‘Why not in Twi?’ because music is international. It’s not about the language you use, because I remember when I was young we used to listen to musicians like Stevie Wonder and James Brown, Elvis Presley, and the rest, and I didn’t understand English, but I liked them. [chuckles] So, as long as I had dancefloor dynamics, what came out of my mouth wasn’t as important.”

After first posting the tape in 2006, Shimkovitz tried for years to find Ata Kak, who was living between Canada and Ghana, working a variety of jobs other than music. When Shimkovitz finally connected with him in 2015, it was through Ata Kak’s son in Toronto, who had finally noticed the popularity of his dad’s old tape.

When Shimkovitz played for Ata Kak the Obaa Sima tape that was posted online, they realized that the music on it was significantly faster than what Ata Kak had originally recorded in the early ‘90s. It was and still is unclear how the tape ended up being so fast, but this was how it circulated both on the Internet and in cassette form in Ghana. The jacked-up aesthetics appeal to a world increasingly soundtracked by DJs and hyper-fast electronic dance music with retro inclinations. It’s captivating to hear in this layered artifact how Ata Kak’s work frames the effects of global circulation. If we listen closely through the skips, statics, and chipmunk voices, we hear Ata Kak’s compositions illuminating the nuanced channels, tempos, and accidents that propel music through borders and bodies today. - WG

DJ Mujava - Township Funk

Back in 2007, anyone who looked online for the South African dance music called “kwaito” was inevitably served a YouTube clip titled “Township Funk,” credited to DJ Mujava. Those with working ears were then promptly hypnotized by the slinky, serpentine synth hook of the track, something like the Ohio Players’ “Funky Worm” performing an invertebrate martial drill to a 122 BPM military-drum tattoo. Yet if you happened to throw Mujava’s name around the Johannesburg-based South African music industry, nobody seemed to know anything about it.

Mujava, it turned out, was based in nearby Pretoria, and the track had risen to popularity almost entirely on the strength of currency with the area’s taxi drivers and their passengers. When Warp Records licensed it for global release in 2008 from Sheer Music, a SA dance imprint known for distributing local hits and Masters At Work records, the track found a whole new listenership. Mujava, however, remained something of a mystery.

Eventually it became apparent that a key part of the “Township Funk” story was made with the help of a ghost producer, DJ Spoko (Spoko actually means "ghost" in the Northern Sotho language). Wills Glasspiegel helped fill in the missing links: “I was managing Nozinja [of Shangaan Electro] and mentioned to him that I was interested in house music from South Africa. I sent him ‘Township Funk.’ He told me he thought he knew the artist who made it, and that he’d actually taught him how to produce. That artist was DJ Spoko. When I found out Spoko had gone uncredited on ‘Township Funk’ and that another song credited to Mujava was largely produced by him, I did everything in my power to get him paid and credited. When I asked him how he felt about Mujava getting big off his work, Spoko said to me, ‘I saw Mujava was getting famous, but then I saw he was even more broke than me, and he was my friend, so I couldn’t be pissed at him.’”

By 2009, Warp’s 12-inch of “Township Funk” found a niche with the DJs in NYC and across Europe who’d cut their teeth on “Pon De Floor” and Brazilian favela funk. Although far too greasy to represent South Africa’s idea of itself on the international stage, it nevertheless became the unofficial theme of the FIFA 2010 World Cup outside SA, signifying the sound of young South Africa to the rest of the world and injecting the “viral” tune into World Cup fever. Fever may be the best word, in fact, to describe the “Township Funk” phenomenon. Spoko, who is now gaining well-earned attention for his peculiar brand of Pitori (Pretoria) house known as Bacardi House, told Afropop Worldwide of his circuitous, anonymous path to global spins: “At that time, I wasn’t DJing, I was just producing music. [Mujava] was the DJ to push the thing – to spread the disease, you know what I’m saying?” - EH