Effortless Music from Cameroon
Chasing the long shadow of James Brown to a church in Yaounde in the 1970s....
When Paul Simon sang about “effortless music from the Cameroon” on The Rhythm of the Saints track “Further To Fly,” he was likely thinking about the liquidic grooves of makossa. The style, which blends elements of Afrobeat, funk and modal improvisation, was first widely popularized by saxophonist Manu Dibango. It spread not just through his many recordings but via intrepid DJs – who used his steadfast rhythm beds to anchor all sorts of intercontinental collage creations.
The new Analog Africa anthology Cameroon Garage Funk widens the lens on Cameroon an essential bit – to focus on musicians based in the city of Yaounde who were active in nightclubs and government-run orchestras and wedding bands. These skilled players – many of them worshippers of James Brown-style American funk – maintained busy live performance schedules. But they didn’t always have access to recording studios or the equipment for mobile recording.
It’s likely that some of these artists would never have been documented were it not for a sound engineer named Monsieur Awono, who organized a series of clandestine sessions in the Adventist church where he worked. When the priests were away, Awono had the musicians set up around a single microphone; he became skilled at positioning rhythm section players for maximum impact, and took advantage of the natural reverb patterns of the church to “sweeten” the vocals.
The recordings have an appealing visceral rawness – on tracks like Tsanga Dieudonne’s“Les Souffrances,” which features a horn section and a marathon organ solo, there’s distortion breaking out all over the place. It hardly matters. The music just percolates along, in that effortless way, surging with intensity as instruments (listen for the conga!) enter to kick the groove up a notch, and then gently recede.
There are more than a few extended one-chord vamps patterned after those on enduring James Brown records, which means there are glimpses of several Godfather of Soul wannabe singers doing their best crowd-galvanizing impressions. Those quickly grow tedious: It’s well established that Brown was a towering influence on African music, and in terms of vocal exhortations, these disciples don’t contribute much new to that legacy.
But: What goes on in the background, what the musicians do measure-by-measure to support the singers and the soloists is a whole different story. It’s a lesson in vibe and intention, a time-capsule slice of pre-digital groovetending that shows how powerful a shared rhythmic consensus can be. The instrumentalists here begin by emulating Brown’s distinctive backbeats, then add a nimble, stretchy African flexibility, often through implied polyrhythm. Everything is loose and at the same time fully locked, with participants agreeing on every last partial of the beat: Check the rolling triple-meter pulse of “Ngamba,” by Ndenga Andre Destin et Les Golden Sounds (one of the state-supported bands), to hear how one rhythm section attains a soaring on-the-fly cohesion.
Some of this material has been available before – on private-label 45s and others pressed by Sonafric, and in a few cases on compilation CDs. What makes this set so valuable is its focus: Analog Africa curator Samy Ben Redjeb sorted through singles both popular and obscure from all over Cameroon, culling those with pronounced funk attributes while adding the occasional cross-culture experiment, like the Afro-Cuban pulse of “Quiero Wapathca”. The result is a flourishing conversation that starts with the lean/mean pulse of classic James Brown and goes through all sorts of cyclic gyrations until it winds up in a church, with disciples of the funk exploring deep, quintessentially African derivations.
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