In 2011, Osibisa vocalist Teddy Osei – who died in January 2025, aged 88 – advised Prog how the band got here to make their self-titled debut album, which pioneered world music in 1971.
Earlier than the time period ‘world music’ grew to become stylish, Osibisa had been pioneering precisely that fashion of labor – and taking prog rock into recent new waters within the course of.
“It began once I moved from Ghana to London in 1962,” says saxophonist Teddy Osei. “Two years later I shaped a band known as Cat’s Paw, and we grew to become Osibisa in 1969.”
A cope with MCA was struck after one of many label’s US executives noticed them enjoying in London. Osei, guitarist Wendell Richardson, keyboardist Robert Bailey, trumpeter Mac Tontoh, bassist Spartacus R, percussionist/tenor saxophonist Lasisi Amao and drummer Sol Amarfio teamed up with producer Tony Visconti for his or her self-titled debut album, launched in 1971.
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“We had been very fortunate as a result of we already had all of the music ready for the primary album,” Osei recollects. “So we had been in a position to report it in a short time. We arrange within the studio was as if it was a stay present. Each observe you hear is an entire efficiency – not a set of bits from completely different takes. So if we made any mistake in a music, we’d simply go and do the entire thing once more.”
Osei provides Visconti credit score for serving to to mould the sound within the studio, though his musical enter was minimal. “He noticed his job as capturing our creativity and power, and he did assist rather a lot in that method. As a result of he was already skilled within the studio, he knew how to verify we obtained the utmost out of the three weeks it took to report.”
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Forward of forging his artistic partnership with Sure , artist Roger Dean not solely designed the quilt, however got here up with the band’s memorable emblem as properly. “I met Roger after our label instructed him for the art work,” Osei explains. “What we wished was one thing to symbolize Africa, and I got here up with the concept for an elephant. Roger went away and labored this picture right into a extra futuristic setting. It’s a really hanging sleeve.”
The album obtained to Quantity 11 on the UK chart and made it to Quantity 55 within the US – Osibisa’s best-ever chart place on each side of the Atlantic. And Osei is happy with what they achieved.
“We didn’t know that we had been creating a brand new fashion. However I believe what’s on there may be very African in affect. We took sounds from anyplace and in all places – jazz, rock, blues, Caribbean music – and fused them into one thing new, thrilling and recent.”
