Barney Wilen's African Adventure

With the wedding just a couple weeks out I've been narrowing down and perfecting the various wedding playlists. Being a collector and DJ I'm naturally pretty particular about the music that will accompany possibly the most significant ceremony of my life. There will be no ABBA (sorry) and likely nothing else that has ever been featured in a TV commercial or any wedding movies. Jamie pretty much knows what she's getting herself into and for the most part enjoys my musical contributions to our shared life, but I've been intentionally playing her songs that I'm planning on putting on the wedding playlists. These Barney Wilen tunes are some that got strong support from the soon-to-be wife. I love the carefree vibe of these two tunes. They're really unlike anything else I can think of and I wish there was more out there that sounded like this, so if anyone has suggestions, leave em in the comments.

I don't know much about Barney Wilen, other than he's a French saxaphone player who graced many an American jazz leaders' group in the 50s and 60s when American expats were setting up shop in Paris. He then became pretty engrossed with the hippy scene, as evidenced by his "Dear Prof. Leary" album from the late 60s. The album from which these two tunes were pulled was released in 1971 on the French label Saravah, discussed here. The back story goes that Barney and friends spent two years travelling from Tangiers to Dakar and documented their trip musically and with film. The resulting album is a double LP that fetches a pretty penny when it comes up for auction in the original pressing (the image featured below) or the simpler, and less appealing reissue cover. Orgy in Rhythm has the album for download here.

Barney Wilen - Gardenia Devil
Both songs are making the wedding mix, despite the barely noticeable "f" word usage in this one. If it weren't for that I would think it would make a great kid's song. Maybe it still can? I mean I plan on being an open-minded parent and have every intention of raising my child(ren) on african jazz freakouts. You with me Jamie?

Barney Wilen - Zombizar
This one is the stomper. Man, I love this stuff.

New Member of the Soul Spectrum Team!

Hey faithful readers, my good friend Josh will be occasionally posting to Soul Spectrum much like Morgan has been doing in my absence. Josh is the same guy who I talked about in one of my very first posts on this blog. Yes, I am still holding on to Josh's African record stash, but he's managed to track down some great MP3s while living in Liberia, Thailand, and now Kenya!

The "Funky . . . Freetown?" post is also his, he just used my account to post it. Welcome, Josh!

Funky...Freetown?

Tip: to find the most obscure grooves that nobody else is playing, try browsing your favorite genre of records on eBay, and then sorting the results by "completed auctions" and "highest price first". What you end up with are the records that people are paying the most for, AKA some of the hottest sh*t in the world! Most of the time, the sellers of such gems will post soundclips or even whole tracks in mp3 form, which you can conveniently download without dropping $800 on what is, after all, just a piece of vinyl.

Using this method the other day, I happened upon a painfully short little piece of obscure West African soul, a clip from a band called Geraldo Pino and the Heartbeats. Apparently this band is not obscure at all if you're 60 years old and from Sierra Leone, in which case you see these dudes as the local version of the Beatles.

While you'll find plenty of commentators calling this music afrobeat, I'd much sooner call it funky soul: way more Philadelphia than Lagos. Somebody made a comp a couple of years back.

Five minutes of web research into these dudes had me stumbling upon what turns out to be an amazing African vinyl blog curated by--get this--the Voice of America! Turns out that the VOA has a gigantic trove of African vinyl and tapes from its many decades of making radio in Africa, and props to them for mining it. (Now only if they could make a decent news show. Sheesh.)

Soul Spectrum trivia nugget: Allen worked at VOA in DC during college.
Geraldo Pino & the Heartbeats - Heavy, Heavy, Heavy [snippet]