Music today has been Osibisa, the first album (1971), classic Ghanaian/British Afro-Rock with classic Roger Dean cover art and produced by Tony Visconti. This is the kind of record The Archive loves. Interestingly, the engineers on the album all went on to become successful in their own right, John Punter, Roy Baker (later known as Roy Thomas Baker), and Martin Rushent. I’ll let you press their Wikipedia links to see their impressive work.

The Osibisa debut went to no.11 in the UK charts in 1971 and was followed up with the critically acclaimed Woyaya, released in the same year and also reaching No.11. It had another Roger Dean cover with the classic flying dragonfly elephant. The third album Heads (1972) had more classic artwork by Mati Klarwein, famous for Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew (1970) and Live-Evil (1971) as well as the classic Santana album art for Abraxas (1970).

This from Wikipedia:

Osibisa were the most successful and longest-lived of the African-heritage bands in London, alongside such contemporaries as Assagai, Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath, Demon Fuzz, Black Velvet and Noir, and were largely responsible for the establishment of world music and Afro-Rock as a marketable genre.

The original band which featured on the first three studio albums were universally known as the Beautiful Seven.

I also have albums by Assagai, Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath and Demon Fuzz, and can highly recommend the genre.

What happened to Osibisa? Well, the original line-up existed for those first three albums. Teddy Osei, sax player/singer, is still making records with the band. I’m not sure what happened to respected guitar player/singer Wendell Richardson and of course, some band members have passed away. Teddy Osei is 85 years old.

Music Of The Daze

The musical musings in this post are an excerpt from my daily blog, TO WHERE I AM NOW, featured on my main website. Read the full blog post here.