Footnotes from Peak Moments in African Disco

The short and frequently brilliant recording career of Pasteur Lappé

Jacob Desvarieux was a busy man in Paris in 1979.

Originally from Guadeloupe, the guitarist and arranger was working primarily as a studio musician at the time. This meant that on any given day, he might be mixing it up with African music A-listers (Cameroon’s Manu Dibango), or French pop stars (Chantal Curtis), or American musicians who specialized in funk, R&B and disco (Becky Bell).

The international musicians in Paris – and by extension, in cosmopolitan African cities like Lagos and Douala – must have had a thriving freaky subculture going in those days before the Internet. There were lots of records being made. Stylistic smashups were common. Bands from the Caribbean would jet in to record, become enchanted with the nightlife and stay awhile. Musicians from across Africa would be hired for one project and wind up contributing to three or four others, each somehow connected to a specific rhythm tradition, each shaped by the fluid, pleasure-seeking ethos of Paris.

Where, even as late as 1979, disco was not a bad word.

Of course Africa was a direct catalyst of disco – see Manu Dibango’s 1972 “Soul Makossa,” which became a favorite of dancers at downtown New York loft parties when a DJ, David Mancuso, began spinning it.

Shortly after the first wave of disco landed in Europe and elsewhere, it blossomed as a common ingredient in African dance music and many Paris-crafted offshoots. Across West Africa, musicians picked up disco’s fizzy synth-bass lines and lavish string parts like those on “The Hustle,” integrating them into tracks that blended snappy drum machine percussion with elements of traditional rhythms. Some of this material sounds like opportunistic hit-chasing today; some of it, like Fela’s “Shakara” and Osibisa’s “Music for Gong Gong,” feels positively classic. Many (many!) days of listening await those who take the deep dive into African Disco compilations that labels like Analog Africa and Africa Seven have brought out in recent years. The below one, from 2017, contains some propulsive and positively euphoric sounds from Cameroon.

Desvarieux was immersed in this realm as a musician and arranger for hire, and as disco surged in the mid 70s, he and the brothers Pierre-Edouard and Georges Décimus began exploring it as a creative outlet. Their idea: A radical modernization of Guadeloupean carnival music incorporating the trappings of disco. They landed on a shimmering, radiant sound with traces of Haitian compas, brisk disco tempos, calypso and regional styles from the French Antilles. That group, which first recorded for the French label Sonodisc in 1980, became Kassav, one of the most creative and enduring bands in Caribbean music history. The style they developed is now known as zouk.

Around the time Desvarieux was recording the first Kassav record, he met a poet and journalism student from Cameroon named Pasteur Lappé. The guitarist encouraged Lappé to explore songwriting, and right away they began collaborating on what became Lappe’s debut, We, The People. It’s a blaster:

Lasting nearly 8 bliss-seeking minutes, “Dora” plays like a catalog of dance elements, expertly deployed: There’s kick drum doing four-on-the-floor, electric bass popping crisply on the offbeats of a four-measure vamp, a latticework of several clavinet parts chattering in sync, some nice horn stabs, and so on, all of it moving as though on cruise control. Stick around for the guitar solo that launches just after the 5 minute mark – it’s a bold attempt at answering the long-simmering question “What might disco sound like with Dickie Betts from the Allman Brothers playing lead?”

Between 1979 and 1981, Lappé and Desvarieux made three records; none connected with the intended international audience. Each contains some utterly forgettable pop balladry, some blazingly smart hookcraft and elaborate conjoinings of funk with slippery perpetual-motion African grooves. The 2016 compilation African Funk Experimentals gathers some of the deepest tracks, including the shape-shifting “Sanaga Calypso,” which builds from an agitated reggae pulse. This synth-decorated piece displays Desvarieux’ mastery of spider-webbed rhythm guitar and Lappé’s restrained, slackerlike approach to singing.

I’ve been immersed in Lappé land (sorry!) for the last week, and have spent a bit of time searching for information and criticism on the works he and Desvarieux created. There’s not too much – Carrie Brownstein of Sleater Kinney mentioned “Sanaga Calypso” in a Pitchfork roundup in 2018 and one for Bandcamp in 2024, both times suggesting that she’s certain that Joe Strummer of the Clash heard the song. Pasteur Lappe turns up in Desvarieux’ discographies and vice-versa; though there’s extensive press coverage of Kassav, this collaboration only gets namechecked a couple of times, and usually in connection with the band’s beginnings.

My initial response to this was to lament another unusual talent not being recognized. But as I spent time listening to the incredible tracks by lesser-known (and deeply rousing) talents Bill Loko (linked above) and Eko Roosevelt alongside Lappé on the 2017 compilation Pop Makossa: The Invasive Dance Beat of Cameroon 1976-1984, it began to make a kind of sense: This was a moment of abundant riches, an unlikely confluence of talents in an unexpected place. Some landed in Paris and had hits straight away; some made left-field experiments that faded shortly after they were released. These less-commercial efforts are the ones that don’t always get preserved; bravo to labels like Analog Africa and Africa Seven for documenting the whole scope of creativity, not just the hits.