It was 2007 and I was co-producing my first public radio show for the series Afropop Worldwide, focused on the music of Sierra Leone. A BBC reporter had loaned us a plastic bag full of tapes and CDs recently purchased on the street in Freetown. It was my job to listen through the music as research for the program we were to produce.

That was the first time I heard the music of Ahmed Janka Nabay, from a CD he released in the early 2000s in Sierra Leone called Eh Congo. I don’t recall the song that I heard, only the feeling of first hearing his music — like electricity. It wasn’t an introduction to a new song, but a new sound, and I was… perplexed.

Part of what stood out was how relevant his music seemed to the artistic currents flowing around me in New York City; the sub-bass and cheap keyboards fit right in to the indie music landscape of Brooklyn at the time, making it eerily, excitingly contemporary.

On “Good Governance Remix,” Janka sang of women’s rights and good governance, a political message that resonated in part because of the peculiar instrumentation around it – a bass line warbling like detuned keyboard flutes, catchy synthesizer melodies recalling an evening news soundtrack, drum machines that sounded like African techno. His music was off-kilter and on-beat at the same time, his singing sounded more like intonation, like chanting the Koran. Some songs sounded like they were in two different keys at once, weaving this beautiful dissonance. His tempos were bracing with a sense of constant acceleration.

Fascinated, I dug in and discovered that Janka, whom I assumed would be home in Sierra Leone, was actually living not far away, in Philadelphia. I called him, and we decided to meet in the Bronx, where there’s a significant Sierra Leonean immigrant community. It was a rainy evening when we first met. I was standing in front of a shoe store waiting for him to pull up, which he and his friend did, opening car doors that were blaring Janka’s music. I recognized the music and his face from the cover of Eh Congo. I got in, beginning a ride that changed my life and his.

Janka passed away this week in Sierra Leone — the result of a sudden, undiagnosed stomach illness. He had received poor medical care after living a life in poverty, and lacked access to proper medical services. He died much too young.

There was an instantaneous sense of shared joy between us, like long-lost friends brought together from half a world away by sound. Janka radiated a gleefulness, a joy that had propelled him through a life of immense struggle and poverty, right up to the moment he passed away this week at the age of 53. He never really seemed to age.

Janka was having difficulties, he explained, selling his music in the U.S. — he feared no one would believe his incredible, improbable life story: He was a musical star in his home country during the mid-’90s heights of the Sierra Leone Civil War, captured by rebels, his music appropriated as their killing anthem.

Janka told me he released six albums in Sierra Leone. He said his music was called “bubu,” and that the sound was based on an ancient style played on bamboo pipes by rice farmers in the hinterlands of Sierra Leone.

I believed him, and his story became more complicated.

His music, he said, originated from his partial Temne heritage, that he spread a Temne music to all the tribes of Sierra Leone and that America was next on his list. I intuitively trusted him, and had to learn more. Not long after, I became Janka’s manager and dear friend, inspired to help him spread his sounds.

I shared Janka’s album with a friend of a friend, Dean Bein, the co-founder and manager of True Panther Records. Dean loved it, and agreed to re-release Janka’s music on vinyl and digital, offering Janka his first foothold in the New York music scene. Not long after, the tastemaking magazine The Fader came to my apartment for an interview with Janka, who insisted on wearing his “cultural attire” – a raffia skirt and a headband with cowrie shells embroidered into it – for a rooftop photo shoot. There he was, dancing and singing songs from a history forgotten.

The second volume of Janka’s story was beginning then, the story of an emergent icon in the vibrant New York scene. His sounds bristled with political lyrics, electric instrumentation and an aura of mystery, a vision for African music in Brooklyn that was resolutely futuristic and edgy. As he continued, Janka was able to continue healing from the trauma of the civil war he fled, finding community and communion among artists across cultural boundaries.

He later signed to the New York record label, Luaka Bop, and released two new records that re-imagined bubu music for the world. Alongside his band – known as The Bubu Gang – Janka played the Getty Museum and major festivals across the U.S., and toured Europe. He collaborated with dozens of artists outside his band, as well, from Theophilus London to Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars.

Whereas the global market for African music tends to lean towards “adult contemporary,” Janka screamed on stage like he was in a punk band, writing songs that were critical of power, suffused with energy and immediacy.

After being denied citizenship in the U.S., after living here for over 10 years (obviously, a great disappointment for him) he was forced to return home to Freetown. There are tributes to Janka being recorded on Sierra Leonean radio and television, while a bubu band played his funeral, held today in Freetown.

His music survives.

An introduction to Janka Nabay’s work

The final project Janka and I worked on was a short film for his song “Sabanoh,” which features the famous debil masquerades of Sierra Leone, which inspired Janka as a child.

This website, hosted by a former Peace Corps worker, includes the only recordings of bubu I was able to find online when I first met Janka. It’s not exactly bubu, but it’s an associated style called “tegbe,” which is also a Temne style played on bamboo pipes. Search for tegbe recordings on this page and you’ll hear some of the sounds that first had me believing Janka’s story about an ancient African music that had never been historicized or recorded on albums.

One example of Nabay’s early 2000s sound that knocked me off my feet was “Eh Congo.” Like other Sierra Leonean pop songs dedicated to Queen Elizabeth in earlier epochs, Janka chose to praise another global political icon in this song, while urging the need for international aid during wartime in Sierra Leone. Hearing the name John Kennedy is also a point of curiosity and entry for someone in the U.S. listening to the song for the first time, finding the familiar in the unfamiliar.

“Eh Mane Ah” was a song from Janka’s first album with Luaka Bop. You can hear how his sound continued to develop while he was in America, with more robust instrumentation and production. The video features Janka dancing and joking around outside the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. We often thought of Janka’s music as contemporary art.

“Bubu Dub” is an example of Janka’s process of continually building on old songs from his Sierra Leonean repertoire. In the case of “Bubu Dub,” this beat was originally recorded in the ’90s in Freetown. For the release of his newest album on Luaka Bop, Janka recorded on top of that old beat with a new melody, demonstrating how the process of creating a song can stretch decades, if not life times.

“Combination” is a wonderful song capturing Janka Nabay’s spirit. I love the chorus, especially when Janka sings the word “high” in the chorus, which he sings with a paradoxically “low” bass intonation, reminiscent of the bubu flutes that inspired him. “Combination” was a song I used to hear Janka sing in my living room or in jam sessions with friends.

It expressed, lovingly, Janka’s experience and vision, forged from the struggle of a civil war, and then persisting to live a positive life: “We’ve got to jump, jump, jump high. We’ve got to live in combination.”

Wills Glasspiegel is a journalist, filmmaker, artist and scholar from Chicago and New York. He is currently writing about the cultural history of Chicago footwork for a PhD dissertation in African-American Studies and American Studies at Yale. He recently directed the short film I Am the Queen.

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I am not ashamed to admit it: I was overcome with emotion a few moments after entering Areito Estudio Ciento Uno (Areito Studio 101) inside the EGREM recording complex in the center of Havana, Cuba.

It is Ground Zero of Cuban music. Built in the early 1940’s to exact audio specifications by a recording engineer, it has played host to virtually every single Cuban musician of note for almost 75 years. Nowhere else in the world is one studio responsible for a country’s musical identity and if you’re hip to all that, the spirits welcome you when you walk in.

In 1996, the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon put the studio on the map again and since then many Cubans, and non- Cubans, have recorded inside the legendary wood paneled room.

The latest, and most intriguing, such project comes via Daptone Records.

Orquesta Akokán is the name of the band and the album — Akokán is a Yoruban word meaning “from the heart” — and of course the Daptone masterminds would choose the iconic studio to record their first Spanish language album. Meticulous attention to analog sound is the foundation on which albums by Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and Charles Bradley have sprung forth to worldwide acclaim.

The album is the brainchild of Cuban vocalist Jose “Pepito” Gomez, producer Jacob Plasse and arranger Mike Eckroth. It is a loving tribute to the sax and brass-driven orchestras of the past that operated like one giant rhythm machine.

On “La Cosa,” the saxophone section introduces a melodic theme while the trumpets offer counterpoint. But if you listen closely, you’ll hear the trumpets are actually echoing the distinct drum part called cascara, which is played by drum sticks on the side of the timbales to keep time (think hi-hat cymbals from a drum set). When the trumpets take over the melody during the instrumental break toward the end of the tune, the saxes then play cat and mouse with the conga/timbal/bongo/cowbell rhythm section with a part that shadows the patterns of each drum.

It’s the kind of deceptively simple complexity that made listening to classic orchestras of Tito Puente, Machito and Perez Prado such a joy. These guys execute it perfectly.

I’ve heard Cuban musicians and sound techs speak effusively about how the natural reverb in Areito Studio 101 is particularly nice to the combination of wood and animal skin that make up the components of conga and bongo drums. Every track on Orquesta Akokán benefits from that studio magic.

“Cuidado Con El Tumbador” is a humorous dance floor warning to men to watch out for the tumbador, the conga player, because he will steal your girl. But the arrangement is a sparse piano/conga driven groove that in fact features the love the room has for tumbadores.

Gomez shines on this project. The arrangements and production envelop him so distinctly that his voice sounds as if he could have been fronting a Cuban band at the fabulous Tropicana Nightclub on the outskirts of Havana in the 1950s.

Orquesta Akokán is a joy. Listeners who are not ware of the history behind the album will enjoy it simply because it is a damn good record. Cuban music geeks will enjoy soaking up the same sonic space that brought us pre-revolution Celia Cruz and Benny Moré.

This album is also another creative notch in the belt for Daptone Records, proving once again that paying homage to history is a specialty that they do with love and great skill.

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The National Library of Congress has shared its latest batch of musical inductees to the National Recording Registry. The 25 works — a mix of singles, field recordings, albums and soundtracks — represent myriad genres and time periods, and bring the Registry’s overall catalog up to 500 entries.

From pop, the class includes The Temptations‘ 1965 hit single “My Girl”; Tony Bennett‘s 1962 love song “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”; the soundtrack to The Sound of Music; Harry Belafonte‘s 1965 album Calypso; Arlo Guthrie’s 1967 anti-war monologue “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree”; the 1967 compilation New Sounds in Electronic Music, which included separate works from Steve Reich, Richard Maxfield and Pauline Oliveros; Chic’s indelible disco hit “Le Freak” from 1978; and Run-D.M.C.‘s 1986 album Raising Hell.

Other timeless inductions run the gamut from Arthur Schnabel’s The Complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas (1932-1935), the works’ first recordings, to historical field recordings of songs, preserved on wax cylinders by George Herzog in 1928, from the Sioux’s Yanktonai-Dakota band. The cylinders captured songs of the band following its relocation to Standing Rock Reservation (near the site of the protracted Dakota Access Pipeline protests) and songs recalled from times prior to establishment of the reservation. The 1930 bolero folk song “Lamento Borincano” gave a voice to the plight of Puerto Rico’s farming community during the Great Depression. NBC’s two-month radio series covering the United Nations Conference on International Organization, which took place in San Francisco between April and June, 1945, gives a fly-on-the-wall account of how the United Nations’ charter was created.

The 2017 inductees are listed chronologically below.

“Dream Melody Intermezzo: Naughty Marietta” (single), Victor Herbert and his Orchestra (1911)

Standing Rock Preservation Recordings, George Herzog and Members of the Yanktoni Tribe (1928)

“Lamento Borincano” (single), Canario y Su Grupo (1930)

“Sitting on Top of the World” (single), Mississippi Sheiks (1930)

The Complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas (album), Artur Schnabel (1932-1935)

“If I Didn’t Care” (single), The Ink Spots (1939)

Proceedings of the United Nations Conference on International Organization (4/25/45-6/26/45)

Folk Songs of the Hills (album), Merle Travis (1946)

“How I Got Over” (single), Clara Ward and the Ward Singers (1950)

“(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” (single), Bill Haley and His Comets (1954)

Calypso (album), Harry Belafonte (1956) album

“I Left My Heart in San Francisco” (single), Tony Bennett (1962)

“King Biscuit Time” (radio), Sonny Boy Williamson II and others (1965)

“My Girl” (single), The Temptations (1964)

The Sound of Music (soundtrack), Various (1965)

“Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” (single), Arlo Guthrie (1967)

New Sounds in Electronic Music (album), Steve Reich, Richard Maxfield, Pauline Oliveros (1967)

An Evening with Groucho (album), Groucho Marx (1972)

Rumours, (album), Fleetwood Mac (1977)

“The Gambler” (single), Kenny Rogers (1978)

“Le Freak” (single), Chic (1978)

“Footloose” (single), Kenny Loggins (1984) remake released in 2011.

Raising Hell (album), Run-DMC (1986)

“Rhythm Is Gonna Get You” (single), Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine (1987)

Yo-Yo Ma Premieres: Concertos for Violoncello and Orchestra (album), Various (1996)

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The 2018 South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas has come to an end. But before the week-long fest finished, Alt.Latinohost Felix Contreras and NPR Music hip-hop correspondent Rodney Carmichael met up at a barbecue joint in Austin to dish about their favorite performances from the week.

Tierra Whack

“This is, like, my new favorite hip-hop artist right now,” Carmichael says. “She has this song called ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ … that she laid down rough vocals for and she never went back and cleaned them up. It sounds so good, and her energy on stage was so incredible.”

La Cuneta Son Machin

“They do a combination of Nicaraguan folk music mixed with jazz, mixed with ska, mixed with a bit of rock,” Contreras says. “They blew the roof of this place.”

Sudan Archives

“She’s up on the stage; this tall, thin, regal-looking black woman with an afro that adds another five feet to her stature,” Carmichael says. “It’s just a mix of soul and funk and classical thrown in.”

Hear the full conversation at the audio link.

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We mark the 10th anniversary of the Swannanoa Gathering’s Traditional Song Week with more music and interview highlights from Julee Glaub Weems, David Holt, and Jean Ritchie.

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Seun Kuti was just 14 when he became the lead singer of Egypt 80 — the Nigerian band that had carried the infectious groove of Afrobeat worldwide under the direction of Seun’s father, Fela Anikulapo Kuti. The musician says keeping the band together after Fela’s death in 1997 was a way of sustaining his message — which often included railing against government corruption and social injustice.

“The way motherland people all over the world are viewed, the way we are led, is based on an elitist, anti-black narrative,” Kuti says. “So the message of Afrobeat music is the counter of that narrative: the pro-black, pro-people, pro-motherland narrative from our own perspective.”

Black Times, Seun Kuti’s latest album with Egypt 80, continues in that vein, examining Africa’s relationship with imperialism and nation-building — and features a legend from his father’s generation, Carlos Santana, on the title track. Kuti spoke with NPR’s Renee Montagne about the making of Black Times; hear more of their conversation at the audio link.

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