Gnonnas Pedro & His Dadjes Band - The Band Of Africa Vol. 3 (get it)

Sixteen LPs, ten 45s, five CDs, all titles are as much loved as hummed throughout Africa. The rich musical heritage from Gnonnas Pedro contiues to live 6 years after his disappearance. Hometown Lokossa in the department of Mono, Gnonnas Pedro comes from a musical family with a father responsible for choir and two brothers, one bassist and one saxophonist. This family environment an the training he received from Do Rego Theophilius aka El Rego open him very quickly the way of great musical career.

With a captivating voice, talented guitarist, will lead Gnonnas Pedro's orchestra "Los Panchos", later renamed the "Dadje Band". Found off traditional Agbadja rhythm , he will make his music stand while providing modern touches. Early on, his repertoire is enriched with new sounds, local and Afro Caribbean, quickly adopted by the public.

"Dedje Vignin", "La musique en verité", or "Dagamassi", "Combinacion", have make dance all over Africa. It also retains the title "Von Von O No" which will adopted as theanthem of the national football team of Togo. He began a second career in 1996 when he joined Africando formation. With this band, Gnonnas Pedro will record a total of four albums crowned by a global success.

Always with Africando, Gnonnas reveal the magnitude of his talent in the world that adopts it. Polyglot into his songs, his covers topics are, women, love, slave trade. Most importantly, Gnonnas Pedro is a humble artist with enormous talent. He is an artist who will be performing a few weeks before his death. "Dadji" national, hello! Successes of the past and always!

Arnaud Adikpeto

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Anonymous said...

Nicknamed the "Baobab Beninese music" Gnonnas Pedro started his career by being out in the Night Clubs Cotonou for his dancing skills. Spotted by a pattern of establishment which offers tools to take advantage of his group, he began exploring music with some of his friends deserted permanently to school.

Inspired by El Rego and Ignacio Do Souza , he made ​​his debut in the Los Panchos Cotonou , overlooking his immense talent the scene Afro-Latin Benin until his death in 2004. He was accompanied during the 1970s by the Dadji Band with whom he recorded one of his most famous tracks, " Von O Von Non Dadji "(The first version of the classic music of Benin was published on the label Riviera of Gilles Sala 1965). Gnonnas Perdo Agbadja popularized the style, named after a famous drum he associates with his Afro-Cuban influences, which will become the basic rhythm of his music, called Agbadja beat.

In 1972, the officer Kerekou took power: in 1974 he adopted scientific socialism guided by Marxism-Leninism as the official ideology of Dahomey, and in 1975, renamed the country the People's Republic of Benin. Gnonnas Pedro like other artists Benin must support the movement and began the production of patriotic songs, " Yesterday Dahomey, Benin today, I am proud of you, that's why I stayed ". One of his pieces, Sodabi (meaning alcohol in the Fon language), however, was prohibited by the president as praising the benefits of beer drinking as the best in the country.

The 70s were extremely productive Gnonnas Pedro becomes an accomplished composer and connects a series of hits, some of which are printed on the label Nigerian African Song (known to have released some of the best records of King Sunny Ade). It runs in the entire region and his passion for salsa was rewarded in 1995 when he became one of the singers of Africando , the Afro-Cuban big project of the producer Ibrahim Sylla .

Gnonnas Pedro was diagnosed with cancer in 2003. But because of the high cost of treatment, he decided to ignore the disease and continue to tour with Africando. Her treatment will begin a year later in May 2004. In August Gnonnas asked to return home to end his days. The plane landed at Cotonou on August 11 at 9:30, and Pedro Gnonnas off the next morning at the age of 61.





Tracklist

01. Dadje von von von
02. Ngbahanov O.
03. Ennemi toton
04. Agbadja moderne no.2
05. Hommage aux dovaniers
06. Adigbedoto
07. Fini les pave's

Gnonnas Pedro & His Dadjes Band - The Band Of Africa Vol. 1 (download)

Introducing you ... --> Gnonnas Pedro & His Dadjes Band

by combandrazor.blogspot.com:

For some reason, when I was younger, every time I saw a "Gnonnas Pedro & his Dadjes" on a record sleeve, I read it as "Gnonnas Pedro & his Dandies." Looking back on it now, it seems somewhat appropriate. Dig: Yesterday I was reading The Painter of Modern Life, Charles Baudelaire's collection of essays explicating, among other things, the worldview of the dandy. This passage leapt out at me:

In this context, pray interpret the word 'artist' in a very narrow sense, and the expression 'man of the world' in a very broad one. By 'man of the world', I mean a man of the whole world, a man who understands the world and the mysterious and legitimate reasons behind all its customs; by 'artist', I mean a specialist, a man tied to his palette like a serf to the soil. M. G. does not like being called an artist. Is he not justified to a small extent? He takes an interest in everything the world over, he wants to know, understand, assess everything that happens on the surface of our globe.

Well, damn, I thought. That kinda describes Gnonnas Pedro, doesn't it?

Beninois singer, dancer, bandleader, guitarist, trumpeter and saxophionist Gnonnas Pedro was not an "artist" in the sense of being a specialist in one any one discipline, and if he was anything, it was certainly a man of the world. A dazzling showman who hewed to the old school entertainment ethos of giving the people want they want. You wanted to hear a bolero in Spanish? Gnonnas Pedro would sing it for you. French chanson? He was up to the task. American soul? Congolese rumba? Nigerian-style highlife? Your favorite country ballad? No matter the song or the style, you could count on Gnonnas Pedro to give it the old college try. At the peak of his popularity, Pedro's Dadjes were known as "the African band that speaks every language." His forte, however, remained crackling Afro-Cuban grooves as well as agbadja, a modernized form of Fon folkloric music.

The Republic of Benin never made a major impact on African or world music (or World Music™) culture. Perhaps due to being a tiny Francophone state wedged between the two Anglophone giants, Nigeria and Ghana, the nation was never able to produce and forcefully project anything like juju, soukous, benga or mbalax--a unique, homegrown style that changed the way the world listened to music and put its country of origin on the musical map.* What Benin did have in spades, though, was a slew of industrious, fanatically committed orchestras that mined borrowed styles like highlife, funk, jerk, jive and jazz for every drop of sweat, swing and soul they could wring out of them. Thanks to the tireless archaeological efforts of Soundway and Frank (not to mention Samy at Analog Africa), Cotonou is becoming a musical mecca for groove cognoscenti and the numerous works of Beninois bands like TP Orchestre Poly-Rythmo and Rego et Ses Commandos are now not only well known, but also keenly coveted.

It wasn't always like that, though. But while most of the Beninois bands toiled in obscurity, Gnonnas Pedro's stylistic versatility and affable stage presence earned him popularity across West Africa. His Yoruba highlife tune "Feso Jaiye" even became a standard among Nigerian musicians.

Gnonnas Pedro finally got to shine on a larger stage in the mid-90s, when he was recruited to replace recently-deceased singer Pape Seck in the Afro-Nuyorican salsa supergroup Africando, recording and touring with the band until he succumbed to colon cancer in 2004 at the age of 61.

This album here is a collection of covers that offers a sampling of his musical polymathy, with Pedro taking on everything from Merle Travis's "Dark as a Dungeon" to the cabaret of Charles Aznavour. Pedro was a great admirer of the French crooner (which whom he was privileged to record a single with in 1964) and there is a certain poignancy to his renditions of "À ma fille" and especially "Les comédiens" (here listed as "Les Commedies").

The lyrics of the latter song seem to describe Pedro's own metier to a degree: "Come see the actors, the musicians, the magicians..." On stage, Gnonnas Pedro was a musician and a magician, but perhaps beyond all that, an actor. His style-switching constituted more than just the essay of genres, but a deliberate reinvention of the self. When Pedro declares "Ladies and gentlemen... Now Gnonnas Pedro is gonna be James Brown!" before launching into a charmingly awkward phonetic reading of "I Got You," he dresses himself up in a constructed identity through music much as the dandy does through sartorial artifice.

And so, walking or quickening his pace, he goes his way, for ever in search. In search of what? We may rest assured that this man, such as I have described him, this solitary mortal endowed with an active imagination, always roaming the great desert of men, has a nobler aim than that of the pure idler, a more general aim, other than the fleeting pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that indefinable something we may be allowed to call modernity...


Check out and read the full article at combandrazor.blogspot.com!!! Thanx ...







Tracklist

01. Kou Akon 'Ka
02. Azo N'Kplon Doun Nde
03. Mo Ngbadun Re
04. Feso Jaiye
05. Ati Mawuin Dagamasi
06. J'ai Aime