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GUY WARREN
The Divine Drummer RetroAfric RETRO 16CD
A strange, idiosyncratic and thoroughly wonderful album from one of the great pioneers of African and American music. Guy Warren, later to rename himself KoŽ Ghanaba, began as a founder of the Tempos highlife band. He took a complete armoury of African drums to Chicago in the mid-50s, played with Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk and John Coltrane, bewildering all as he strove to inject African idioms into jazz, his fusionistic ideas foreshadowing much of what was to follow. Erroll Garner asked him to join his band, but Warren instead released several highly successful albums of his own, including Africa Speaks, America Answers, which sold over a million.
The tracks here, recorded in London in 69/70, have not previously been released and show a brave man moving from the wild exuberance of African drumming, chanting and žutes to odd, highly intimate and personal music that owes little to any obvious antecedents. He uses solo piano, bullroarer, mouth organ, marimba, vocals and a great variety of percussion played with deep conviction and equally deep whimsy. Ordinary categories don't begin to cover his adventurous explorations. He even uses clearing his throat as punctuation between free-form lines of simultaneous žute and voice. Did Roland Kirk ever manage that?
Simply as a drummer, Warren / Ghanaba makes ordinary jazzmen sound pretty wispy. His are fertile rhythms in themselves. They are music, not backing, not rhythm track, but the starting point for a spiritual and musical feast, from a man not afraid to be himself. Freedom-lovers, step this way. Rick Sanders
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Article is copright 2002 Southern Rag/fROOTS, and is used by permission
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