"It was the mid-1980s in Mogadishu, Somalia, and the city’s cultural scene was thriving. The National Theatre offered nightly plays, rekindling centuries of Somali poetry and storytelling tradition. Hotels like Jubba and Al-Uruba each had their own in-house bands who played into the early hours of the morning, attracting a young and cosmopolitan crowd with their fiery mix of funk, disco and reggae.
Among it all, Dur Dur Band’s music stood out. From the very beginning their vision had been to fuse traditional Somali music with the sounds that were making people dance at the time: new wave, disco, afro beat and funk were played with Banaadiri beats, spiritual Saar music and Dhaanto, a Somali style of music which resembles reggae (and many Somalis proudly believe it to be its precursor). It didn’t take long for Dur Dur to become one of the most popular bands in Somalia.

Yet, like most protagonists of Somalia’s Golden Era – those exuberant years between the 1970s and late 1980s – Dur Dur Band almost slipped through the cracks. An economic downturn plunged Somalia into crisis, and by the time the Civil War started in 1991 most artists had fled, settling in places like Sweden, the UAE, Canada and the UK. Since then, in part due to the media’s myopic focus on war and destruction, Somalia has become synonymous with violence, and its rich cultural identity and musical legacy have all but been erased in the eyes of the world.
Dur Dur’s music survived on a few old cassette tapes and in the memories of those who’d loved them, but their name was barely known outside of the Somali community. That was until 2007, when a Milwaukee-based musicologist named John Beadle uploaded a cassette he had been handed twenty years earlier by a Somali student.

The blog post, titled ‘Mystery Somali Funk’, mistakenly credited the music to another great Golden Era Somali band called Iftin. “It was the deepest funk ever recorded” says Samy Ben Redjeb, founder of the Analog Africa label. His online discovery set off a chain of events which led him to Ohio, Mogadishu and London, and eventually resulted in the release of Dur Dur Vol 1 and 2, a reissue of the band’s first two albums, recorded in 1986 and 1987 respectively, with the addition of two previously unreleased tracks..."

From the Vinyl factory blog [ Ссылка ]

свернуть