Livy Ekemezie Friday Night 2017 LP COLOR VINYL NEW SEALED

$

25

Livy Ekemezie

Friday Night

Odion Livingstone ODILIV001  LP 33RPM 12" 2017 (UK)

Nigeria’s largest city had been a breeding ground for afro-rock and afrobeat music in the 1970s. By the turn of the decade, the sounds had changed but the city was still buzzing. Businessmen with little passion for music took money from other ventures and put it toward the music industry in the hope of producing hit records and reaping the financial reward.

“You had a lot of people from other countries that came to Lagos because there was the studios, the labels, the pressing plants—there was everything in Lagos,” says Temitope Kogbe, co-founder of the Odion Livingstone label. “You had a lot of transborder inflows from Cameroon and Ghana—people coming in to work in Lagos. It made the music so much more interesting.”

A dedicated crate digger, Kogbe has long helped European labels license old African music as reissues of classic tracks started streaming out of the region at the turn of the 20th century. It was only recently, though, that a friend of Kogbe suggested that instead of helping foreign companies, he should funnel his knowledge and connections into his own enterprise. Working with famed producer Odion Iruoje, the pair’s Lagos-based Odion Livingstone label is believed to be one of the only Nigerian imprints to specialize in new and back catalogue African music. Its debut release is Friday Night, a full-length that sounds distinctly like the nation and era from which it sprouted, with a swagger that would’ve made Dick Griffey, founder of the influential California funk label SOLAR Records, weak at the knees.

“There was a disco-funk scene that was happening, but it was very collaborative. It was small labels, all trying to put out bigger funk hits,” Kogbe says of Nigeria in the early ’80s. “The sound was boogie-funk. A more direct, more funky variety of funk. It didn’t sound like American funk. It was a bit of a heavier experience than American funk. [Nigerian artists] went heavy on the synths, they went heavy on bass lines, the vocals were wacky, but everything was so funky.”

Hoping to break his way into the scene was Livy Ekemezie, a kid from the southern Nigeria port town of Port Harcourt, who grew up listening to Kool & the Gang and The Whispers. Released in 1983, his one and only album Friday Night—recently reissued on new label Odion Livingstone—distills the era’s electro odyssey. It’s seven uptown disco grooves, complete with funky guitar licks, shake-your-ass drum beats, catchy melodies, cute lyricism and basslines that slap really, really hard.

“We were all trying to make something good,” Ekemezie tells me over the phone during his first ever interview, I’m told, with a publication outside of Nigeria. “Trying to make good lyrics, to make the music acceptable, both commercially and otherwise. I was a very young man then. I think I made the right journey for that time. I was out to come up with something good, which I feel I did as much as I could.”

Ekemezie was fresh out of high school with only a tape recorder to his name when the urge to make an album began to tug at him. Melodies would come to him in his sleep, which he’d later preserve on the analogue device. Ekemezie’s father, a singer, encouraged him to pursue music as a hobby, not a career, but the message wouldn’t stick. Instead, Livy traveled to Lagos dressed as a hippy and with a demo tape in his pocket. Forget funding the recording of an album, the young guitarist didn’t have enough cash on his hip to get around. To save money, he started sleeping under a bridge.

But at its core, Friday Night is a bold concoction that connects the New York disco scene of the 1970s to the melodic chords and bass-heavy arrangements of post-disco boogie, and even the daring future sounds of EDM. “It sounded like disco, but almost like a house record,” says Kogbe. “For somebody to be coming up with that kind of sound, which for ‘82 was very early and very strange.”

Friday Night was pressed onto glorious blue vinyl at the pressing planet of recently-departed Nigerian music pioneer William Onyeabor. But without the financial firepower for a large roll out, the record didn’t find a wide-scale audience. After just a handful of gigs and one album, Ekemezie left the music industry.

“There wasn’t a compelling reason to continue,” explains Kogbe. “If there was a big hit it would have justified [Ekemezie getting] back onto a scheduled with his education. If he had a hit he’d of been able to say, ‘Look guys, there’s all this money over here,’ but that didn’t happen.”

Kogbe continues, “He just closed it down, which I think is a very Nigerian thing. One door closes and another door opens. People don’t spend too much time worrying why or questioning why, they move on. I think that’s a very [common] characteristic of the Nigerian. We’re not very sentimental about the life of an artist. You find a lot of people who moved on from creating art to just doing something totally different.”

Ekemezie instead went to school to improve his academics before pursuing more common career paths. He says the loss of his parents also deeply affected him and the way things have shaken out in his life. “I was trying to survive, but I had a lot of songs unrecorded.”

With the reissue of Friday Night comes an opportunity for it to find a new audience. Kogbe suspects presales alone outstripped the reach of the original release. For Ekemezie, delving back into his musical past has been a gift. “I love all of them,” he says of his fans, new and veteran. “I appreciate all of them. Especially people who took time to look for me and were able to find me. All the listeners of these songs, I owe them a lot. The kind of music we’ve got now, people don’t sit down and think about the lyrics and what they are writing about. We have to concentrate on things that have meaning, that can attract and bring us together.”

The reissue of Friday Night sees Livy Ekemezie’s legacy belatedly crystalized. Drop the needle and from the depths of its grooves you can hear the healing process. A once divided nation glued together by bass. This is music that encapsulates Nigeria’s new-age bluster. Livy, though, just wanted to you dance.

Tracklist
A1 Get It Down 
A2 Holiday Action 
A3 I Wan' My Bab' Back 
B1 Friday Night 
B2 Classic Lover 
B3 Night Party 
B4 Delectation. 

Recorded At – Godiac Studio, Enugu
Mastered At – Godiac Studio, Enugu

Arranged By, Producer, Written-By, Backing Vocals, Bass Guitar, Guitar, Lead Vocals, Percussion – Livinus Ekemezie
Backing Vocals – Frank Izuora, Panam, Pater, Tessy Lizzy
Bass Guitar – Fred Pants, John Norway, King Gusher
Clavinet – Kenneth Bucknor
Design – Charlie Anyakora, Cy Obieze
Drums – Feddy Ohams, Kif Goods
Engineer – Dominic Eloke, Ndubuisi Nnaji
Guitar – Frank Izuora (tracks: A1, A2), Tony Guitor
Keyboards – Herbert Brown
Keyboards, Clavinet, Backing Vocals – Julius Elonga
Lead Vocals – Frank Izuora, Panam (4) (tracks: B1), Pascal Anike (tracks: A3), Pet Erili (tracks: A3)
Percussion, Backing Vocals – Smart Lee
Photography By – Semion Ohagwu
Saxophone – Richard Peather
Strings – Charles Tana, MacHawkins

12" color vinyl in a picture sleeve is NEW and SEALED.

A Note About Shipping To The U.S.
We are located in Canada, but have registered ourselves on eBay.com instead of eBay.ca because it gives us significantly better global exposure.  The problem with this is that eBay wants us to charge shipping appropriate to US, where media mail and other options make for fairly reasonable delivery costs. We tried it for a while but ended up losing money on shipping or having to cancel the orders because we couldn't afford to ship for those rates. To manage this we have set the US shipping to run a calculator based on an American location (we chose Plattsburgh as fairly close) and charging according to UPS pricing.  This avoids the cancellation issue, but appears to the buyer to be a prohibitive shipping cost and misrepresents the shipping as being only expedited. If you give us your postal code we will see if we can offer a more reasonable option, but generally we can get a single LP by air to most places in the continental US for $11, a few bucks less for ground.
Thanks for shopping Sir Helmitt,
Jeff Green, e-sales