Aly Kourouma, aka DJ Ndebele, has been a great supporter of Akwaaba’s music and work. He designed the poster for the Liberation Beat event we did together back in the fall in Santa Barbara. He’s also been designing some beautiful screen prints and creating his own art, all of which will be available for your viewing pleasure at his upcoming show Saturday February 28 at the Agape Center in Culver City.
Move it Chaleh! Words you might hear at an outdoor chop bar in Accra, Ghana, a calling for you to get up and shake it. A hint to the pungent grooves blasting out of subwoofers and beat up sound systems throughout West Africa today.
Smaller, cheaper studios are sprouting all over big African cities, allowing a new generation of artists to create and push the envelope of urban and dance music. In particular, Move It Chaleh! focuses on two underrated African trends:
Coupé décalé is the upbeat sound of Côte d’Ivoire today, a dance craze which can be heard throughout francophone Africa. It has roots in both Congolese soukous and Ivorian zouglou. It emerged at the height of the Ivorian crisis around 2002-2003, first in Paris, but it quickly spread to Ivory Coast, to Africa and now to the world.
Hiplife is a Ghanaian mish mash of hip hop, dancehall, calypso and other Caribbean styles, with highlife, itself a mix of soul and funk with more traditional Ghanaian rhythms. It has taken Ghana by storm, and it is well known to Ghanaian abroad, particularly in the US and UK, yet it is still off the radar for most.
Time to change that. Move it chaleh!
Bintou Simporé, renowned host of Néo Géo on Paris France’s Radio Nova, is interviewing Akwaaba founder Benjamin Lebrave on her show. Bintou spearheads Nova’s Sono Mondiale, and has long been the purveyor of fine yet underrated sounds from across the globe.
With Benjamin, she will focus not only on Peul and Manding sounds from Senegal and Mali, which are somewhat recognized in France, but also on highlife and hiplife from Ghana, which are gaining momentum in other European nations, but remain underrepresented in France. Enjoy!
Update: you can listen to the show as part of the Néo Géo podcast on Radio Nova’s website.
Nnamdi Moweta invited Akwaaba founder Benjamin Lebrave to his show, Afrodicia, Saturday December 13 from 2 to 4pm. Nnamdi plays a lot of party music from all over the gulf of Guinea, soukous, highlife, afrobeat, hiplife, coupé décalé… Akwaaba fits right in, check it out!
Yatrika Shah-Rais, host of Global Village every Wednesday on KPFK, hosts a wonderful show, and also runs a great music program at the Skirball Cultural Center. She has invited Benjamin Lebrave to her show on Dec 10 to explain Akwaaba’s concept and mission, and share some of the sounds from our catalog.
Tune into 90.7FM in the Los Angeles area, listen on KPFK’s site or here: