THE GHANA CONNECTION

Guy Warren. I knew that name from somewhere. That's what I thought when I first shuffled through the used LPs that my younger brother gave me for Christmas. He knows the evolution of my taste and can pretty much guess where it's headed since the last time we saw each other. We still compare notes. So only one selection was familiar to me, a Cal Tjader, mid-sixties vintage. The Guy Warren LP stuck out to me though. Not only was the name familiar, but the album cover was striking. In particular, the juxtaposition of the cheesy "Living Stereo" banner up top, seen on the top of all manners of vinyl cheese of that era, and the photo of a shirtless man, mouth wide open, beating on an African drum with a big ol' savage fire raging behind him. It looked like any number of savage looking LP covers of that time (1959). Les Baxter comes to mind, but there were others, many others.

My brother shot an email to me yesterday asking if I'd listened to any of the albums yet, and I was kind of embarrassed to have to cop to having only listened to the Tjader LP. (I was on a Cal Tjader kick.) So last night I picked up the others and was trying to decide what to listen to next. Let's listen to this Guy Warren, what the hell. I flip the cover over to check the liner notes to see if the guy had any cred. There it was, "Blood Brothers". Ho-ly shit. That's where I'd heard the name before! He was the guy that did "Blood Brothers" with Ginger Baker on Baker's Strativarious LP. The one on this LP was every bit as wild as the one on the Baker LP, but with African drums. I've posted the Baker version many times, but I'd never even looked into the Guy Warren name, so I didn't know his version existed. This answered one question. Which is, how did someone named Guy Warren end up on Baker's LP for the one song, when the rest of the album was done with a bunch of Fela's mob (including drummer Tony Allen if I remember correctly)? Now I kinda see what happened.

So this is all one big fat ass bonus night. I realize the Warren/Baker connection. I dig on the Warren LP. I get to research Warren. And there appears to be a lot written about him. This is just sort of a "Hey, check this!" and now you're on your own.

~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~

Listen:
Guy Warren - Blood Brothers mp3 at Beware of the Blog
Ginger Baker with Guy Warren - Blood Brothers mp3 at Likembe
Guy Warren - Love, The Mystery of mp3 at Beware of the Blog
Art Blakey - Love, The Mystery of (streaming) at YouTube Cover of Warren's original
The full LP:
The Guy Warren Sounds - Themes For African Drums at Beware of the Blog All eight songs in individual mp3s
Visit:
Guy Warren - Themes for African Drums at Night of the Living Vinyl Excellent review and profile.

YO SAINT PETER, BEWARE!

Here's a quick evolution of a young man's musical taste: The radio brought Cream. Cream brought Ginger Baker. Ginger Baker brought Africa. Young man is duly mindfucked and has to re-access what he knows as music. True story, happened to me. Baker was my first link to non-Western music. Up to that point it was pop, blues and rock 'n' roll. After Cream split up, Baker high-tailed it to Africa to go to the source. Back then, to most people the mission must have seemed quixotic. The result was an LP by Fela Live with Ginger Baker and Baker's own, Stratavarious (which has Fela on keyboards). So, there's a high school aged me, who picked up the latter expecting a bombastic Cream-like LP that just featured more drums. When I put it on, I thought "What the hell is this?" It took years for me to really appreciate what had been done. During the interim, it was a weird album with one eight minute drum orgy on side two.

You've probably heard that Ginger Baker died this morning. That is a huge loss. He was one of the all-time greats, not just among his peers in rock 'n' roll, but among all drummers. Afro beat, jazz, blues, you name it. Because most would know his work with Cream, here's some lesser known stuff. The first one, "Wade in the Water" is early, mid-sixties, when he was with the Graham Bond Organization. The chops are already there, very there. The second is from the Fela LP, the third is the eight minute drum orgy mentioned above, "Blood Brothers" which is basically two drummers, Baker and Ghanaian drummer Guy Warren, playing an eight minute solo in sync. You'll see why that was a draw for a kid that knew nothing about the Afro-beat which permeates the rest of the album. (There's a link to a site with the whole LP in individual mp3s down there as well). The last is from Why, his last LP from 2014, with just him, a bassist and a sax player. For a trio, while sparse, there's a whole lotta shit going on. Considering it's his last LP, it's interesting to note that the sax player includes licks from "Wade in the Water", a song on the first LP Baker played on.

The first video linked below is Baker jamming in Africa, roughly 1971. The second video is him playing along side Tony Allen at a tribute concert for Fela, in 2013. It's cool to see the two masters, who had known each other for close to forty years, checking each other out while they're playing. The last video is the complete documentary Beware of Mr Baker, which you should check out right away because it's always getting yanked from YouTube.

~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~

Listen:
Graham Bond Organization - Wade in the Water mp3 at The Rising Storm
Ginger Baker with Fela - Tiwa mp3 at Likembe
Ginger Baker and Guy Warren - Blood Brothers mp3 at Likembe
Ginger Baker - Why? (streaming) at YouTube
The Full LP: 
Ginger Baker - Strativarious LP at Likembe Eleven cuts, individual mp3s or a single zip
Video:
Ginger Baker jams with Afro-Rock artistes (& Joni Haastrup) at YouTube
Ginger Baker and Tony Allen - Egbe Mi O at YouTube With Dele Sosimi's Afrobeat Orchestra, London 2013
Beware of Mr. Baker (entire film) at YouTube HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Visit:
Ginger Baker at Drummer World Good profile, lots of Cream stuff
Ginger Baker Official site

HOT SHIT. CAN BE HORNERY.

Oh yeahhh. I love the double whammy. Tonight I ran into two things I'd been hoping to find online for quite a while, plus I just had my mind sufficiently blown by a new song. Browsing through old posts at Likembe (a really great African music blog), I ran into one with Ginger Baker's Strativarious LP, the album with Fela on it. I mentioned it in a post about six years ago and have been on the lookout ever since. Check it out, consider that it was only a couple years after Cream disbanded. I remember when I first heard it in my teens, wondering how went from Cream to "...this?!" That was until I heard "Blood Brothers", and was sucked in. It's the least African cut on the album, an eight minute drum solo, so to speak. It's actually Baker and Ghanaian drummer Guy Warren just completely going off. My young rock brain could comprehend that.

Finding that LP would have been enough, but I also ran into Beware Mr. Baker, the documentary about Ginger Baker, in its entirety. To top it off, a new song released just a few months ago, "Why"; a jazz number that is both complex and stark. I totally dig it. It's almost like stoner no wave.

~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~

Listen:
Ginger Baker with Fela - Tiwa mp3 at Likembe
Ginger Baker and Guy Warren - Blood Brothers mp3 at Likembe
Ginger Baker - Why (streaming) at Rolling Stone
The Full LP: 
Ginger Baker - Strativarious LP at Likembe Eleven cuts, individual mp3s or a single zip
Video:
Beware of Mr. Baker (entire film) at YouTube HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

IT'S OKAY, MY BROTHER FOUND ME ANOTHER COPY.

I know, I know. A lot of these posts end up being more about my musical experiences than the nuts-and-bolts artist profile type post. A big reason for that is that when I think of music I know, it invariably takes me back to different significant moments when the music in question was either the soundtrack of, or related to, a particular event or discussion. In this case, the memory machine stopped on the day David Fwelling dropped my copy of Ginger Baker's Stratavarious in 12th grade. I was bummed, really bummed.

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Ginger Baker was the former drummer of Blind Faith and Cream, and was the Gene Krupa of that era. While Keith Moon, John Bonham and other drummers were better known, Baker was a drummer's drummer. That's why I'd loaned the album to Fwelling. He was a drummer, and Baker was one of his idols.

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As luck would have it, when Fwelling was returning the LP, in the last seconds of his possesion, the record slipped out and fell to the ground, breaking out a big hunk. Had this been just an ordinary Ginger Baker solo album, it would have been no big deal. But it wasn't. Ginger Baker recorded Stratavarious with Fela Ransome-Kuti, who was, unbeknownst to me at the time, somewhat of a deity in Nigeria, far and away the most popular afrobeat musician of his time (and an enemy of the government). At the time Stratavarious represented my only link to the exotic ethnic sounds of other lands, period.

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My brothers and I had already gone back as far as Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran, Muddy Waters, and Howling Wolf in our exploration of American roots, so we were already on our way to geekdom. But Fela's music was the tip of a different iceberg, this one fucking huge. It was our first glimpse into music that wasn't directly related to rock and roll. And the album wasn't easily replaced. I'd bought it a couple years earlier and it had long since disappeared from record stores. (This was before record stores had "International Music" sections.) So I did what any budding music geek would do. I lugged my broken record back home where the three cuts still playable were preserved, sandwiched between sentries Bad Company and the Beach Boys in my third of the collective record collection. (Ten years later my brother found another copy and gave it to me as an present, unconnected to any holiday or event.)

So what about Fela? He spent some time in the US in the late 60's, where he was inspired by the Black Panthers and the Black Power movement. Soon after, he was deported and returned to Nigeria, bringing with him a new direction. He created his own compound that included a commune, a disco and a recording studio, took 27 wives and proclaimed his independence from the Nigerian state, which ultimately landed him on the government's shit list. A flagrant pothead, in 1974 Nigerian police planted a joint in his home to have an excuse to drag his ass in for a time-out. He ate the joint, thereby destroying the evidence. As if a scene from a Pink Panther movie, they brought him in anyway, to wait for the joint to pass. In the interim, he acquired a stool from another inmate, presented the joint-free duty, and was later released. Thumbing his nose at the authorities, he wrote a song about the incident, naming it, poignantly, "Expensive Shit."

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Dig it: Six cuts of Fela at Passion of the Weiss. Considering that his songs typically hover in the ten minute range, that's a load of excellent music. You might also want to check out the article from the NY Times (linked below) by John Barton, a former Times Lagos correspondent and friend of Fela's. Amongst other revelations is that Idi Amin was one of his early idols.

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Fela Kuti - Expensive Shit mp3 and other delights at Passion of the Weiss

How Fela Landed Me In Jail by John Barton at the New York Times