![Jo Tongo]()
“Are you ready? Say yes. Are you ready, my friends? You are not ready? And what about the other guy? Okay. We start the count.” In this way does Joseph Ekambi Tongo Mpondo, otherwise known as Jo Tongo, begin his 1968 single, “Dig It Babe” not once but twice. In such tight, funky, James Brown redolent grooves, the count is everything, and the count is off, the first time. The second time, though, it is dead on, a strutting break beat of snare and kick drum, a searing vamp in brass and reeds, a tangle of stinging, syncopating guitars, a butt-shifting bass line, and Jo Tongo yelping and crooning and, in general, living up to his nom de guerre Jojo L’Explosif. It’s like Booker T & the MGs left to sizzle on a hot grill, all the fat bubbled out and turned to smoke.
149 MB 320 ** FLAC
“Dig It Babe,” here in two parts, was Jo Tongo’s very first single, released shortly after the Cameroonian singer and band leader moved to Paris. He was meant to study to become a pharmacist; instead he hooked up with fellow musical diasporans — notably Manu Dibango — to pursue the funk. African Funk Experimentals traces that journey from 1968 right up to the present, with three tracks recorded just this year tucked in at the end of the record.
Jo Tongo’s “Jangolo,” perhaps his best known composition from the 1976 self-titled album, starts the disc, a twitch of wah wah, a patter of hand drums, nattering in the background, all nervous energy, Jo Tongo’s warm, sure voice engaged in a heated call and response with a brace of female back-up singers. There are horns here, too, and a shimmery, plasticine synthesizer, but the cut feels bare and sharp and imperative. It makes you want to move.
You can hear on this disc traces of the classical training Jo Tongo brought to the party, his familiarity with stringed instruments (and not just guitar and piano), his working knowledge of music theory. These cuts are complexly, tightly plotted, with multiple moving parts and not, one would guess, a whole lot of improvising outside of the solos. There is nothing primitive about the arrangement of “Funky Feeling” for instance; it has the intricacy of a Rubik’s cube. A few of the tracks dip a little too far into style-over-substance disco. “Those Flowers” flounders, to my ears, in too ingratiating girl group vocals and string arrangements. Even the fantastically tense bass line can’t rescue it from sickly sweetness. “American Lady” is similarly flavored with swooping string glissandos and massed female vocals. Its lavish-ness undercuts the power.
The three new cuts quite good, their twitchy rhythms, bright slashes of brass and simmering bass and drums very much of a piece with Jo Tongo’s 1970s material. “Mystical Power” is especially striking, with its trance-y, insistent keyboard line, its sudden blares of trumpet. Jo Tongo sounds as relaxed and powerful as ever, vocally, and the pieces fit together just as well.
The one shame is that there’s so little information about the people who played on this record, other than Jo Tongo himself. The playing is uniformly excellent and worth recognizing, but there doesn’t seem to be any information about who did what. Asked about credits, the label responded that different musicians played on different tracks, and it didn’t seem fair to list some but not all of them. Jo Tongo surely did most of the work of imagining this music, writing it down and cracking the whip (per “Dig It Babe”) to make sure his musicians performed it properly (he also played the bass, which is excellent throughout). But damn, how do you lay a keyboard line like the one in “Mystic Power” to tape and not tell the world who played it? — dusted
320 kbps | 101 MB | 
320 kbps | 149 MB | 
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