“Mousso Koroba Tike” starts with funky fuzz guitar that invokes a kind of electric, garage-band soukous. The guitar figures of their rumba-flavored tracks anticipate the rapid-fire guitar work that would define soukous, and the bass-heavy “Mama Soukous” is one of the most infectious of their sides. The Volta Jazz repertoire included R&B and rock numbers as well as traditional folk songs, French-language material and Latin music, and different members of the versatile group would take on vocal duties for specific genres. Its music came from Senufo and Mandingo traditions as well as Congolese and Cuban influences. The group was formed in 1964, several years after Upper Volta gained its independence from the French who colonized it. The first disc is devoted to Volta Jazz, who launch the set with the anthemic “Air Volta,” which starts with a concise primer of the group’s diverse strengths: a swooping bass line, a soulful horn chart, a crisp guitar riff and a burst of percussion.
BELLE EPOQUE IN UPPER VOLTA SERIES
Another series of photos show young Voltaic music fans holding up vinyl records, most of which are from regional musicians, but you can see a few records by American groups, like a Rare Earth album. Many chose the airport, imagining they would someday escape to a better place, a dream most would never fulfill. The photographer set up different backgrounds for his subjects to choose from, either a town scene or an airport. In an essay, Sanlé explains that previous generations would simply throw away photographs after a person died, which makes his work all the more important for documenting a generation. Sanlé’s black and white photos, which make up the bulk of the book, are a blend of portraits, nightclub photos of musicians and candids. The quote is from Thomas Sankara, the Marxist revolutionary who after a coup in 1983, took charge of the country, changing its name to Burkina Faso and instilling restrictive policies that effectively brought the music scene to an end. The set’s coffee-table-worthy book has a deliberately ironic epigraph: “You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness.” On its merits, that doesn’t sound particularly controversial, yet it’s results were devastating. There is, in fact, an organic connection between the photos and songs: photographer Sory Sanlé is a cousin of guitarist Idrissa Koné, whose group Volta Jazz was the region’s prime musical mover. But the photographs elevate the set into an overview that immerses you in the sights and sounds of a lost era. As can seem the case with the label’s typically meticulous work, this may be too much of a good thing, as a more selective edit might have made the music more powerful. Numero Group tackles this topic with a three-disc set accompanied by a 144-page book. This infrastructure, which began construction in 1904, brought a world of new influences to a region that had its own musical traditions and numbered over 60 different languages. The name blends the pop music of French colonizers with the city of Bobo-Dioulasso, which the set’s generous liner notes explain was the terminus for the Abidjan-Niger Railway.
Bobo Yéyé, the title of a sprawling new anthology from Numero Group, is a subgenre of pop music from Upper Volta made during a golden era when the landlocked West African nation fostered a vibrant scene.
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