Global Notes: Now-Again Records
Started in 2002, Now-Again Records has issued music anthologies that cover everything from funk and rock to jazz, and beyond. The featured musicians come from around the world including Zambia, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe. Most recently, the label partnered with Vinyl Me, Please to issue an anthology album with Ethiopian funk legend, Ayalew Mesfin.
Worldview’s Jerome McDonnell spoke with Now-Again Records founder Eothen Alapatt about the record releases and how funk legend James Brown impacted these artists.
On Ethiopian funk legend Ayalew Mesfin
Jerome McDonnell: I really got lost playing around on your website. You’ve got a fantastic array of music and we’re going to dabble in it. First I wanted to ask you about Ayalew Mesfin. His story is a really interesting one; he lives in the United States now and he only recorded for a short amount of time.
Eothen Alapatt: His “golden age”, as it were, was in Ethiopia approximately between 1974 and 1978. After that point he did record some, but most of it was unreleased and housed on reel-to-reels, some of it was on cassette. He had the foresight, however, of maintaining all of his reel-to-reels, and when he was forced to leave Ethiopia, he brought all his reel-to-reels with him to America. And, when he finally settled in Denver, he had this amazing treasure trove of music that was just waiting for the right person to discover.
McDonnell: And then that was you? How did you come to be that person?
Alapatt: Well, you know, it was one of those foreordained moments that I realized when I was standing with him in his home in Denver with his family, and he remarked that I looked like his late son, who had passed away. I heard his music because I was buying Ethiopian 45s, and I was intrigued because I was buying the 45s at random, and every time I came across one by him, it had a very unique sound, which bridged Ethiopian folkloric music, psychedelic rock, funk, soul, a bit of jazz, and he had a very unique voice, and it was obvious that there was more to his catalog that needed to be discovered. But it wasn’t until the hip-hop producer that I worked at Stones Throw Records with, Oh No, sampled a series of Ethiopian records that I had for a beat CD, which we turned into an album that he called Ethiopium.
Now, a friend of mine heard one of the tracks that he made and said “this would be perfect in this Mountain Dew commercial that I’m making for this ad agency that I’m the music director of, do you think you could clear this for me?” And I said, “well, you know, it’s this Ethiopian sample, but so far as I can tell, rights management wise, if I find the artist, I can clear it directly through him, so let me see if I can find him”. And a friend of mine, Danny Mekonnen, who leads the Debo Band, a great modern Ethio-groove ensemble based on the East Coast, happened to be friends with Ayalew through his father, and he introduced me. And, I literally cold-called, got his wife on the phone, and made my pitch, and I started there. About 8 years later, he finally invited me into his home in Denver, and I went there with Cameron Schaefer from Vinyl Me, Please, the subscription services based in Denver, with open ears and an open mind, and we sat down and met with Ayalew and listened to all of his music, and by the end of that meeting, it was obvious that Ayalew was ready to trust me with his recorded life’s work.
On the process that took 10 years
Alapatt: I would go to Denver with Oh No’s brother Madlib, he’s a hip-hop producer that I’m partners with, and I would go to Denver to do shows and I’d call Ayalew’s wife, Helen, and I said:
“Hey! You know we’re doing a show this Saturday, let’s come…” She was like “Oh yeah, of course, but we have church, so you’ll have to come very early in the morning”.
Meanwhile, we’re leaving the club at 4:00am, you know, and so I was like, that’s not going to work, but…oh yeah, just stay up, and then show up smelling like wine or something, that was not going to be a good look, I could already tell.
Ayalew’s a teetotaler, it turns out, so I was wise to not just show up disheveled after running an event with Madlib. But, when we did show up, it was very meaningful, and it was very, how do I put this…it was obvious that Ayalew hadn’t thought about this music in the same way that we’d thought about it, because the first questions we were asking him was about James Brown and Jimi Hendrix and Mulatu Astatke, and meanwhile he was talking about the entire lineage of his recorded career, much of which was done in secret, you know, up until the point he had to leave Ethiopia, and some of which has been lost to time.
McDonnell: So, one of the interesting things here is that Ayalew has done a few gigs, he’s gone out and played a couple times now, he’s an older guy, but it sounds like he’s still got a little urge to perform out there.
Alapatt: Oh absolutely, when we sat down, Cameron Schaefer and I, at his house, and he had this very rare 7", the 7" that Oh No had sampled for that one track that we put in the Mountain Dew commercial, which started the whole ball rolling; when he played that, he started singing along with it, and it was one of those moments that I was happy to have an iPhone, normally I like to keep it in my pocket, but it was so special, I had to record it because he was singing along with the record and he sounded like the record.
He’s a little bit younger than his peers, like Alemayehu Eshete, Mahmoud Ahmed, Tilahun Gessesse; Ayalew must be about 60-something now, and he’s very sprite. So, he’s been performing, but he’s not performed this music, and with the re-release that we did with Vinyl Me, Please, and, by the way, the only way that you can get this music is on vinyl, if you’re not streaming it…
On the vinyl revival
McDonnell: I’m all about the vinyl revival.
Alapatt: Yeah, me too, and Vinyl Me, Please is amazing because they have a subscription service and they deliver it to subscribers, so with this Ayalew Mesfin record, they made it their record of the month, and they’re delivering it to thousands of people that would never even know of seventies Ethiopian music, let alone Ayalew Mesfin. And, they helped get these shows together; we’re doing 3 shows with Ayalew and the Debo Band, and the first one’s kicking-off in Denver with Madlib.
McDonnell: That’s super cool. Now, how do you fit him into the rest of your catalog? You’ve got so many different kinds of music, but lots of it is seventies funk that people never heard, from Africa…
Alapatt: Well, I look at it this way, I came into all this stuff through hip-hop, so at first I was looking at music from this era you know the late sixties, early seventies, up until the early eighties, as source material for hip-hop producers, hip-hop DJs, and then I started realizing that what I really loved was the rhythmic revolution that people like James Brown and Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix all honed in the nineteen sixties. So, once I started realizing where that went all around the world, I started realizing that there were tremendous similarities with all of these musicians, because that music exploded outwards at the same time that the influence was coming inwards from all of these different places. So, James Brown, for instance, he toured all over Africa, and I don’t think he toured Ethiopia, but it’s obvious that Ayalew Mesfin was listening to James Brown. So, if I started my reissue career with the Kashmere Stage Band and Carleen and The Groovers, two independent funk ensembles from America that were influenced by James Brown, and now I’m issuing Ayalew Mesfin’s music and it too was influenced by James Brown, well that’s already a starting point that a person who’s been listening to my reissues for the past 16 years can sink their teeth into, and, you know, of course, open their ears to.
On James Brown’s global influence
McDonnell: It’s funny, James Brown: his impact was so much more than we ever heard back for so many years, but now we get to hear his true impact out there in the world.
Alapatt: Oh, I mean, and it’s not the caricature that began with The Blues Brothers and, you know, reached its lowest point sometime in the late nineties. This is James Brown at his most fiery, when truly the world over had to react to him in the same way that they had to react to The Beatles, and all different types of ethnicities and ages all had to acknowledge the power of James Brown and his bands. I mean, his bands are very important, because his bands were as important as he was.
Zambian rock: Welcome to Zamrock!
Alapatt: The Zambian compilations were all centered around this style of music that contemporaneously by Zambians was termed “Zamrock”, and this was music that was made after Zambia threw off the British colonial yoke under its first president, Kenneth Kaunda, and really reached its peak in the early to late seventies. It was a tremendous moment for Zambian musicians who took to rock music, and a bit of funk, but mostly rock, more than any other African country that I can think of at the time, with the exception of maybe Nigeria, and they took this rock music, largely influenced by American and European bands, and they made it uniquely Zambian. So, you hear Chrissy Zebby Tembo, in this instance, although he’s singing in English, he’s singing a song called “Born Black”, and he’s asking some very pertinent questions for a recently liberated country that was experiencing tremendous inflation and myriad problems, from child starvation to the devaluation of its currency; it’s telling, to me. And, when you listen to the other music he made with his Ngozi Family Band and Paul Ngozi, the leader, you hear them singing in the native languages of Zambia, and using native Zambian rhythms, and mixing it with rock music, and it became this really thrilling unique thing. I really wanted to tell the story of the entire scene, and that’s what those two books and albums that accompany them hope to do.
McDonnell: Why do you think, through the oddities of distribution, we all got to hear a lot of Fela in the seventies or eighties, but we never got to hear Zamrock?
Alapatt: Well, you know, I actually thought about that because Fela, of course, was a big deal on the African continent, as well as outside in the African Diaspora, and then, of course, from there, beyond. I started looking into the population numbers in a country like Zambia and a country like Nigeria, and at Zamrock’s height, which would probably be Fela’s height too, just Lagos alone had a larger population than the entirety of Zambia. So, the idea of a Zambian record industry existing for Zambian musicians that were pressing and releasing music for Zambians in Zambia, the chances of that spreading a little further than, let’s just say Rhodesia or Botswana or Malawi, are very slim. But, the chances of a musician from Lagos, an oil rich part of Nigeria, being able to spread his music further, well, that was a little bit more obvious.
Nigerian rock: Wake Up You!
Alapatt: And, it’s funny that you were talking about Fela in the context of the Zamrock scene, because he was an influence there, and of course in Ethiopia too. But, in Nigeria, Fela’s music, and we make the argument in the Wake Up You! books, came to prominence largely in part of the Nigerian rock movement that happened after the end of the Biafran Civil War, and then his music eclipsed it, and led to that music’s demise.
McDonnell: This music sounds so fresh today, whereas a lot of music from the seventies or eighties or nineties, does not sound fresh. Why is that?
Alapatt: I hear you man, and I think that, when you hear, like on that Apostle’s track, you hear that drum break that starts the beginning of the song, and it’s obvious that it’s a funk-rock drum pattern, but it’s just played in a totally different way, it’s not like any of the classic breaks and beats that kind of inform the hip-hop generation, it’s a different thing, and it’s also not the kind of Afrobeat groove that Fela was doing; this is a very unique sound, and I think that you can transpose that to all of the music that we’re listening to. The Chrissy Zebby Tembo, that’s kind of hard rock, proto-punk, but it has this really driving interesting beat that you can’t really describe and you can’t put in the context of the era in which it was recorded. Or, Ayalew Mesfin with that fuzz guitar leading off that “Hasabe” track, that was supposed to be a saxophone, and in most of Ethiopian music at the time it would have been, but there was Ayalew Mesfin deciding that he would transpose the saxophone to a fuzz guitar because he and his guitarist were into Jimi Hendrix, you know what I mean?
McDonnell: Yeah and I think there’s something about the rhythm being human, it sounds like somebody playing the drums, it does not sound like a drum machine or something, and the guitarists sound like it was a real improvisational moment, it doesn’t sound like a practiced moment.
Alapatt: Oh absolutely, I think that the majority of this music was made by the seat of your pants; fly into the studio, fly out. I mean, in Ethiopia, they were recording at the radio stations. In Zambia, they were recording wherever they could; they were recording at the mine studios that were used to produce television advertisements, you know what I mean? These were folks that got it together and recorded a tremendous amount of music in a very short amount of time, took advantage of the window of opportunities that were open and afforded to them, and created these moments that seemed very human, because they were, and, I mean, they’re very emotional. That’s the one thing that I want to say, all this music that we’re listening to is super emotional, you hear it in the way Chrissy Zebby Tembo sings that song, and most people in America are going to understand everything he’s saying. The heartbreak is very real and he might have only gotten one take to do it.
Zimbabwean rock: Watch Out!
McDonnell: Let’s swing over to Zimbabwe for a second. There was a group called Wells Fargo. I was trying to figure out the name of the band, to name itself after a kind of well known company, who were they?
Alapatt: Wells Fargo was a band that actually named themselves after a comic book that the band leader and drummer, Ebba Chitambo, had found, and he thought that it made sense because the comic book was all about the Wild West in America, and he kind of saw his band as a bunch of renegade outlaw types. And, although it isn’t able to be easily discerned by first listening to their music, it was quite revolutionary. This was music that was used as the theme for the guerrilla insurgency that was being led by Black Zimbabweans against a minority led Rhodesian government, and their title song “Watch Out” was literally what many people would sing as they were going into fight in these skirmishes and all-out battles. But, Wells Fargo also packed out agricultural fairs and they played clubs and they played for white Rhodesians and Black Rhodesians and brown Rhodesians, and they just believed in unity through music. And, Matthew Shechmeister, who is the partner that I did all the research into Zimbabwe with, and who catalyzed the whole thing by coming to me one day and saying “I know you know Zambian rock but do you know Zimbabwean rock?”, and I didn’t; he made a tremendous attempt to explain Wells Fargo’s significance in a Zimbabwean sense, and I think he did a great job in the book that we put out.
McDonnell: What do you consider yourself? I’m saying you’re Now-Again Records, and you’re referring to the research, and the books, and the everything. You’re kind of a musical anthropologist or something?
Alapatt: You know, part of me wishes that I was, and part of me believes that I am. I mean, ultimately I look at myself as just a record guy. I make records, I make new records, and I got into the music industry because I wanted to put out new records. I put out a lot of records with people that I believe are some of the greatest living, or recently deceased, members of the hip-hop generation: Madlib, who, of course, is still my partner, J Dilla, who is no longer with us, MF DOOM, one of the greatest vocalists. And, I love doing that, and I still do that. But, a big part of my passion for that music, and the reason I was able to even meet those people, is because I try my best to sincerely understand music from the past, and how it informs the music that we’re making right now. And so, when I can find a human thread that takes one story from one side of the world and brings it to another, and it can lead to an emotional moment with either one person or a bunch, well that’s what I’m trying to find. That’s what I’m honing in on, and that’s what all this music represents to me. It’s just one more conversation in a much bigger discussion.
