Sunday, 27 September witnessed an enthralling performance by Orchestre TP Poly Rythmo de Cotonou at London’s Barbican Centre. Anyone who has heard one of the band’s compilation CDs on Soundway or Analog Africa will understand why it was so special.
What’s not to love about a group that appears to be soundtracking a 1970s voodoo detective television series? Complex ever-shifting rhythms? Check. Blaring horns? Check. Atmospheric organ fills? Check. Taught and snappy guitar riffs? Check. In concert, the band aren’t flash – if anything they are almost too self-effacing – but they mesmerised the London audience.
The wonder of it is, though, is that it was the last date on the 11-piece band from Benin’s first European tour of its 40-year existence.
How can such an accomplished set of performers be so little known outside West Africa for so long? Quite easily as it happens. The history of African popular music is only sporadically documented. When Samy Ben Redjeb of Analog Africa went to Benin to try to make contact with TP Poly Rhythmo and to explore licensing their music for reissue he was astonished to discover more than 500 recordings by the band.
In some ways Samy was lucky, in that key members of the group such as saxophonist Clement Melome are still alive and still eager to get their music to a wider audience. In many instances, however, the bands are long disbanded, their key members are dead and nobody knows who owns the rights to their music. That’s because the African record industry largely worked on the Jamaican model, where the producer paid the musicians a flat fee for their work and assumed all title over it.
Factor in the widespread bootlegging of music via cassette and CD and the dismantling of state-run broadcasting institutions, which provided the only recording facilities in some African states, and it is easy to see how information is lost and rights to anthologise music become buried in a tangle.
Kenyan music, my special interest, is particularly ill-served by this legacy. In Nairobi, East Africa’s sole pressing plant produced up to one million singles a year in its late 1970s heyday. EMI, CBS and Polydor had a presence in the country yet I have searched in vain for catalogues of records released by these companies.
To try and preserve some of this legacy, I have built up a database of Kenyan and Tanzanian 45s over the past 18 months with help from collectors around the world. Viewable at www.kentanzavinyl.com, it lists more than 2,000 singles from the region. The sad fact is, though, it is only scratching the surface in terms of recording information and the next step, obtaining rights to re-release some of this music, is still a distant dream.
The spirits do lift on occasion, however. Earlier this year, I was in Melodica, a Nairobi record store and a major independent producer in the 1970s, enquiring about their back catalogue. “These are the records we produced,” I was told by the manager as he handed me a thick printout – of pages from my own website.