Archive for the ‘Manu Dibango’ Category

Wally Badarou

Sunday, October 14th, 2012

Listen: Theme From Countryman / Wally Badarou
Theme

This single sits front of the 7″ soundtrack section in a wall shelf that I pass everyday of my life, when I’m in town that is. Suddenly it occurred to me, I had no idea what it sounded like. Well that’s all changed. If ‘Theme From Countryman’ had lyrics, I could sing you every last one at this point, that’s how many times it’s been on repeat. One of many lessons learned: never dump a record, you just can not predict know when it may become a cornerstone in your collection.

As an unofficial member of Level 42, Wally Badarou held little interest to me, and his endless studio involvements somehow the same. Boy, was I stupid.

Firstly, his accomplishments are an eye opener: a member of The Compass Point All Stars with Sly & Robbie, Barry Reynolds, Mikey Chung and Sticky Thompson, the in-house recording team of Compass Point Studios responsible for a long series of albums by Grace Jones, Joe Cocker, Black Uhuru, Gwen Guthrie, Jimmy Cliff, Gregory Isaacs, Robert Palmer, Marianne Faithfull, Herbie Hancock, M, Talking Heads, Melissa Etheridge, Manu Dibango and Miriam Makeba. Yeah, gasp.

Secondly, a gifted composer of incidental film music, possibly even harder to do well than calculating a Top 40 hit.

The single lead me to pull out the full length COUNTRYMAN double album soundtrack, thereby discovering, upon a typical credit scour, that Kwaku Baah played a big part in the musician lineup. Currently obsessed with his annoyingly under appreciated and extremely scarce TRANCE album from ’77, credited to Kwaku Baah & Ganoua, I rabidly advise finding a copy. And while you’re at it, both the COUNTRYMAN soundtrack and it’s accompanying 7″.

Manu Dibango

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

Soul Makossa / Manu Dibango

Listen: Soul Makossa / Manu Dibango ManuSoulMakossa.mp3

Reggae Makossa / Manu Dibango

Listen: Reggae Makossa / Manu Dibango ManuReggae.mp3

There was some song, a current hit, I caught this morning when taking the kids to school. They either torture me with Z100 – or I torture them with the Bloomberg channel. Today was my turn to suffer. Said hit was a total lift of ‘Soul Makossa’. I wonder if anyone else noticed.

Ah for a time when this could actually get radio play. Interestingly, there’s hardly a hip hop track nowadays that doesn’t pummel rock music when it comes to pushing the envelope musically. So maybe this could work in the year 2009. It certainly didn’t in 1980 when the so-so reggae version was issued.