African Beats
Charlie Dark’s culture clash of African rhythms and digital beats featuring Chief Udoh Essiet tours the UK, 7 – 14 March 2008.
In his first live music project since Attica Blues , DJ, producer and poet Charlie Dark reconnects the dance rhythms of West coast Africa with the digital beats of his East London home.
African Beats is the product of Charlie’s life-long love of - and a career in - the communicative nature of rhythm, of its role at the root of all music and its evolution through the history of dance music. African Beats explores the subtleties and complexities of dance rhythms generated from the analogue side by talking drum and from the electronic side by digital beats.
To help him on his journey Charlie has joined forces with the Paris-based Nigerian Chief Udoh Essiet , broken beats champion Mark de Clive-Lowe , one of the leading figures of the British jazz scene Dave Okumu and one of the country’s most in-demand Bata drummers Crispin Robinson .
Drawing on their broad backgrounds in African, electronic, jazz, soul and hip-hop music, the four corners of this group set out to create a revelatory musical experience which takes audiences on a journey from the deep roots of traditional African dance music to the clubs of London town. Joining them is VJ Nathaan Jones illustrating the audio with an album of images from Africa and close ups of the inner workings of the technology behind the digital sounds.
Charlie Dark’s work brings together his love of the spoken word and original music. He has been a key figure on the London scene for almost two decades; working his eclectic dance and African inspired sets in clubs, running visionary spoken word projects like Alphabet Soup and as the founder of Blacktronica , a loose collective which brings together artists, musicians, poets and film makers to generate a thriving scene for electronic music.
Chief Udoh Essiet’s career has tracked the evolution of Nigerian music and its growth from local to global fan base. Born in Ikot Ekpene, a village in the south east of Nigeria, Chief Udoh Essiet’s first instruments were gathered from his mother’s kitchen utensils. Graduating to the traditional log drum – abodom – he quickly became involved with local traditional musicians whose rhythms were integral to inspiring the movements of the village dancers.
Split from his family during the Biafra-Nigerian civil war in the late 60s, Chief Udoh found himself in the vibrant city of Lagos where he was soon exposed to contemporary developments in music. Whilst selling tooth picks on the streets, Chief Udoh met the Highlife band leader Dr Victor Olaiya and was brought in to play maracas in the band. An opportune moment came when he filled in for the sick conga player and Chief Udoh became indispensable. Dr Victor Olaiya’s band – which saw many of the stars of Nigerian music pass through its ranks - can still be heard performing in his Stadium Hotel in Lagos. The band’s primary speciality was West African Highlife, a style born out of the palm-wine guitar picking style and traditional songs, urbanised by the influence of the big band sound seeping into Africa on 78rpm records. Highlife was a vital precursor to Juju and Afrobeat, its combination of Latin big band line-up and unique African rhythms inspiring and influencing the development of contemporary Nigerian music.
Chief Udoh went on to play with some of the brightest West African stars including King Sunny Ade and other Juju musicians before becoming part of the Afrobeat scene as conga soloist with Fela Kuti . Moving to Paris in the 80s, Chief Udoh Essiet became enmeshed in the Parisian world music scene, working with artists including Mory Kante , Salif Keita and Kasse Mady .
London-based New Zealander Mark de Clive-Lowe has been at the centre of the global beats/ jazz and soul scene. As a producer he has worked with labels like Masters at Work, Verve and Impluse. His live performances are born out of a West London scene that has born 4Hero, Bugz in the Attic and IGCulture.
As part of the continuously creative F-IRE collective , Dave Okumu has been a distinctive voice on the contemporary British jazz scene. His new band The Invisible Three brings together distorted guitar, ghostly vocals and dark harmonies with a line-up that reads like a who’s who of the burgeoning London jazz scene.
Bata drum specialist Crispin Robinson , is one of the world’s leading players of this Cuban style percussion. With a CV including Galliano , Brian Eno and Gilles Peterson , Robinson is the perfect jazz funk foil to Chief Udoh’s traditional beats.
Charlie Dark's African Beats brings together this line-up’s wealth of experiences; connecting jazz and dance music back to their African roots, re-interpreting traditional music with modern technologies, contrasting human against machine, analogue against digital.
African Beats with:
Charlie Dark (turntables, samplers, electronics), Chief Udoh Essiet (talking drums), Mark de Clive-Lowe (keyboards), Dave Okumu (guitars), Crispin Robinson (drums - London only) and Nathaan Jones (VJ)
Friday, 7 March 2008, Southampton, Turner Sims Concert Hall
Saturday, 8 March 2008, North Yorkshire, The Shed
Sunday, 9 March 2008, Manchester Contact Theatre
Tuesday, 11 March 2008, Birmingham, Jam House
Wednesday, 12 March 2008, Leeds, The Wardrobe
Thursday, 13 March 2008, London, Cargo
Friday, 14 March 2008, Oxford, The Zodiac
See events for full info.