Global Notes: Now-Again Records
Tags: Nigeria, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Music

McDonnell: This music sounds so fresh today, whereas a lot of music from the seventies or eighties or nineties, does not sound fresh. Why is that?

Alapatt: I hear you man, and I think that, when you hear, like on that Apostle’s track, you hear that drum break that starts the beginning of the song, and it’s obvious that it’s a funk-rock drum pattern, but it’s just played in a totally different way, it’s not like any of the classic breaks and beats that kind of inform the hip-hop generation, it’s a different thing, and it’s also not the kind of Afrobeat groove that Fela was doing; this is a very unique sound, and I think that you can transpose that to all of the music that we’re listening to. The Chrissy Zebby Tembo, that’s kind of hard rock, proto-punk, but it has this really driving interesting beat that you can’t really describe and you can’t put in the context of the era in which it was recorded. Or, Ayalew Mesfin with that fuzz guitar leading off that “Hasabe” track, that was supposed to be a saxophone, and in most of Ethiopian music at the time it would have been, but there was Ayalew Mesfin deciding that he would transpose the saxophone to a fuzz guitar because he and his guitarist were into Jimi Hendrix, you know what I mean?

McDonnell: Yeah and I think there’s something about the rhythm being human, it sounds like somebody playing the drums, it does not sound like a drum machine or something, and the guitarists sound like it was a real improvisational moment, it doesn’t sound like a practiced moment.

Alapatt: Oh absolutely, I think that the majority of this music was made by the seat of your pants; fly into the studio, fly out. I mean, in Ethiopia, they were recording at the radio stations. In Zambia, they were recording wherever they could; they were recording at the mine studios that were used to produce television advertisements, you know what I mean? These were folks that got it together and recorded a tremendous amount of music in a very short amount of time, took advantage of the window of opportunities that were open and afforded to them, and created these moments that seemed very human, because they were, and, I mean, they’re very emotional. That’s the one thing that I want to say, all this music that we’re listening to is super emotional, you hear it in the way Chrissy Zebby Tembo sings that song, and most people in America are going to understand everything he’s saying. The heartbreak is very real and he might have only gotten one take to do it.

Zimbabwean rock: Watch Out!

McDonnell: Let’s swing over to Zimbabwe for a second. There was a group called Wells Fargo. I was trying to figure out the name of the band, to name itself after a kind of well known company, who were they?

Alapatt: Wells Fargo was a band that actually named themselves after a comic book that the band leader and drummer, Ebba Chitambo, had found, and he thought that it made sense because the comic book was all about the Wild West in America, and he kind of saw his band as a bunch of renegade outlaw types. And, although it isn’t able to be easily discerned by first listening to their music, it was quite revolutionary. This was music that was used as the theme for the guerrilla insurgency that was being led by Black Zimbabweans against a minority led Rhodesian government, and their title song “Watch Out” was literally what many people would sing as they were going into fight in these skirmishes and all-out battles. But, Wells Fargo also packed out agricultural fairs and they played clubs and they played for white Rhodesians and Black Rhodesians and brown Rhodesians, and they just believed in unity through music. And, Matthew Shechmeister, who is the partner that I did all the research into Zimbabwe with, and who catalyzed the whole thing by coming to me one day and saying “I know you know Zambian rock but do you know Zimbabwean rock?”, and I didn’t; he made a tremendous attempt to explain Wells Fargo’s significance in a Zimbabwean sense, and I think he did a great job in the book that we put out.