The Syliphone Years: Hits and Rare Recordings

CD Details

Product Description

Syliphone was the national record company established in 1959 by the government of the newly independent West African nation, Guinea. Its purpose was twofold: the preserve the country’s wealth of traditional music and to promote musical creativity in a modern yet distinctively Guinean milieu. By the time the record company closed in the 1980s, it had built a treasure trove of great recordings. Today Guinea’s golden age of music is remembered as ”the Syliphone years.”
Formed in 1961 in the small town of Beyla, Bembeya Jazz relocated to Conakry, the capital of Guinea, in 1970 and earned its ”National” designation by the sheer strength of its talent and the extent of its musical innovations. Still going strong today, Bembeya’s peak period was the late 60s and early 70s, when the phenomenal guitarist Sekou ”Diamond Fingers” Diabate led the band and the great Aboubacar Demba Camara was the lead singer.
For this album Guinean music experts Paul Hayward and Graeme Counsel have collected 27 tracks recorded during the remarkably fecund ten years from 1967 and 1977, when Bembeya Jazz National was the top band in Guinea. In addition to the two CDs, the boxed set includes a 44-page full-color booklet replete with period photos and record cover reproductions along with Counsel’s authoritative notes in English and French.

Review

It is hard to fault this superlative and long-overdue re-issue, which commemorates a truly golden era in African music. –BBC