News in from Soundway: Ghanaian highlife,rock, and soul collide in Soundway’s most ambitious project to date,Ghana Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds and Ghanaian Blue 1968-1981
Painstakingly compiled and researched by label boss Miles Cleret, Ghana Special represents nearly ten years of on-going research: driving around the cities of Accra, Tema, Cape Coast, Takoradi and Kumasi, knocking on musician’s doors and visiting ex-distributors, Djs, collectors, manufacturers and shop owners, that helped piece the story together.
Ghana Special comes as a double CD hardback case-bound book and 5LP vinyl box set. The CD features 44 pages of history, photographs and original record scans
A turbulent decade.
Ghana in the 1970s: highlife, rock, and soul collide and merge with tradition and culture. New styles meet old styles. A new generation renews old musical customs. New fashions meet old fashions, creating new fusions. A new generation renews old musical customs.
As with this album’s sister release Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds Nigerian Blues 1970—76, this collection hopes to do nothing more than capture a snapshot of what was arguably the most colourful and interesting period in the nation’s musical history. This was a time of shifting styles and a re-organisation of not only the music industry but also, in many ways, society itself. Music often mirrors these changes: although, until this time, many of the big dance bands of the 1950’s and 60’s had dominated the smaller, mostly foreign-run recording industries, it became a sign of how society was shifting ard reorganising itself, when, in the place of the highlife big bands, many of the highlife guitar-bands (that had until now been seen as music of the poorer sections oF society) were starting to sell far more records.
Highlife & the rise of the new ‘afro’centric groups.
Many of the themes that these two camps of highlife music dealt with express this well. Typical big band numbers were songs of love and life with an emphasis on upbeat, happy lyrics; whereas common themes in much of the guitar-band repertoire at this time were class issues, death, poetic laments, social commentary and religious odes. To this situation came a new generation of young musicians that were trying to forge a new style - a modernised ‘stew’ of musical ingredients that included elements of folklore, along side slices of highlife (a ‘bastardised’ music fused from the meeting of colonial and local musical traditions) jazz and rock from overseas interpreted in an ‘afrocentric’ way that was typical of the times. This was a time of boundaries being broken and was to be the last and strongest wave of recordings made before financial crisis and revolution hit Ghana hard in the 1980s reducing the recording industry to a shadow of it’s former self, when many musicians found themselves permanently out of work.
The selection
Fans of the previous Ghana Soundz albums will be pleased to hear further tracks From The Uhuru Dance Band, Honey and the Bees, Sweet Talks & Ebo Taylor plus Oscar Sulley whose track Bukom Mashie was featured on the original Ghana Soundz album and led to his inclusion on the soundtrack for the classic film, The Last King of Scotland. Hedzolleh Soundz make a Soundway debut — a band that would go on to record with Hugh Masekela on some of his finest records and a band whose ‘lost’ debut album will be reissued later in the year on Soundway. Over the course of the two CDs there are thirty-three original and previously un-reissued tracks from the time: obscure A-sides, B-sides and album cuts that have resisted a second look until now.
Buy a copy of Ghana Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds and Ghanaian Blue 1968-1981
The album is released in the UK on 9th November.
