Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds & Nigerian Blues 1970-6

Lacking an extensive knowledge of Nigerian music, we always defaulted to the bandleaders who got the most Western exposure in the 1970s and ’80s: Fela Kuti and King Sunny Ade, two very different personalities whose music propelled Afrobeat and juju into college-radio vocabulary, and showed arty American acts like Talking Heads how to free their inner geek from stiff-hipped bondage.

Of course, those guys were the tip of the iceberg. British label Soundway Records, which specializes in compilations of vintage African music, illustrates this effusively in a new two-disc set, the result of five years of research by DJ Miles Cleret. As the title infers, the styles cut across various genres. The selections skip from the hauntingly beautiful, bent-note highlife melodies of Celestine Ukwu (“Okwukwe Na Nchekwube”) to the organ-driven soul of the Funkees (“Akula Owu Onyeara”) to the mostly instrumental guitar-and-percussion workouts of Opotopo (“Belema”)—whose members sound like they’ve been listening to Ritchie Valens’s “La Bamba” and a little Dick Dale on the side. (As does the band Semicolon, with its choral vocals and chatty, extended guitar solos.)

Global-music fans who snapped up all two dozen volumes of Buda Musique’s Ethiopiques series won’t find a world as strange and intoxicating as that line’s microtonal East African jazz. Most of these Nigerian party bands don’t sound particularly visionary, but their close proximity to American blues and even garage rock ensures vigorous guitar and a touch of psychedelia (check out the Hykkers’ “I Want a Break Thru”). Add incisive, nonstop grooves, and there’s plenty here to keepyour inner geek dancing well into the new year.