King Sunny Ade - 'Brilliant Paradise-Garage-if-it-had-a-Nigerian-branch funkiness'

Via Awesome Tapes from Africa... a cool YouTube playlist of an album by the King... "While I did not purchase this tape in Africa, it is certainly one of the most awesome tapes from Africa. King Sunny Adé, along with Fela Kuti, was a central player in bringing African pop music to the world. 

Is a major international release a strange choice for my usual showcase of rarities/oddities? This record combines the new and novel studio technologies (for 1983-84), like drum machines and synths, with traditional talking drums and good ol’ electric guitars, resulting in brilliant Paradise-Garage-if-it-had-a-Nigerian-branch funkiness. 

So many styles of African music have been enhanced by electronic instruments over the years, but few have risen to such sublime heights. I mean, juju music (of which Adé is considered one of the key pillars) gets pretty repetitive. 

I say if you’ve heard six juju records, you’ve heard them all. Aura, then, distinctly stands out. Fans of electro, techno and the like will find this cassette particuarly fascinating. While not a commercial smash, Aura is one of my all time favorite recordings from Nigeria. Buy this record somewhere. I found a clean copy on vinyl in Denver the other day for $3."

Here's King Sunny Ade live in 1983, what a great band...

plus here's an amazing dub version of that song, remixed by Paul Groucho Smykle, who worked with Sly and Robbie, Black Uhuru, Ini Kamoze amongst others...  Smykle was interviewed by David Katz in 2013, here's what he had to say about this remix...

Your King Sunny Ade remix is probably the first instance of African music being given the dub treatment.

I did a dub of “Ja Funmi” that everybody really liked, and I have some other dubs at home somewhere that I did for myself. With “Ja Funmi,” I listened to the tune and liked the tune, and just tried to get a different vibe on it.

You remixed records by other African artists in the 1980s, including Wally Badarou from the Compass Point All Stars.

"Oh yeah, “Chief Inspector.” I did that like a go-go tune, cause I was in Washington DC for a while, working with Trouble Funk. I liked DC at that time, even though it was the murder capital of the world, because in the clubs, it’s all live bands and no DJs: E.U., Trouble Funk, Chuck Brown, everybody’s playing live music and there’s people dancing to that. 

"So I came back, heard Wally Badarou’s tune, and they wanted a remix on it; a guy in New York said, “Groucho, do what you feel to do,” so when I said I was going to do a go-go tune, the English people said, “No, we just want it straight, as it is, a nice mix.” So I gave them their version, and then I did a go-go version, added percussions and everything, and when I sent it to New York, everybody knew: “This is the lick.”

Did you ever work at Compass Point?

"Yeah. I did some stuff with Larry Levan and Francois K in the ’80s. Very nice studio."