Various Artists - Bobo Yéyé: Belle Époque in Upper Volta

Pitchfork 84

They may appear to be hardy and resilient, but music cultures are fragile things, threatened by drastic shifts in society and political climates. Tropicalia, for one, lasted less than a year in Brazil due to punitive measures like AI-5 instilled by the junta. Club culture in New York City was starved to near extinction in the 1990s by then-mayor Rudy Giuliani’s reinstatement of a severe and obscure cabaret law. And when a coup brought Thomas Sankara into power in Africa’s Upper Volta in 1983, he changed the country’s name to Burkina Faso and installed drastic changes, including a city curfew and a law preventing musicians from charging money for concerts. Almost overnight, the vibrant music scene in Bobo Dioulasso evaporated.

Were it not for the vinyl records pressed (and photographs snapped) during the short-lived existence of post-colonial Upper Volta, there would be almost no trace of the rough-hewed yet honeyed music made by the Voltaic musicians of the 1960s and ’70s. After centuries of colonial, tribal, and political clashes, these decades saw a country only recently freed of French colonial oppression, struggling to find footing with their own slippery national identity (the region is home to over 60 ethnic groups). When Upper Volta achieved full independence by 1960, it marked the beginning of a rather peaceful time in the country, which allowed the cosmopolitan music scene a chance to take root and flourish. While Numero Group has a knack for unearthing micro soul scenes in U.S. cities and weird private press albums from dollar bins, the deluxe audio and visual packaging of Bobo Yéyé: Belle Époque in Upper Volta marks their first foray into the motherland. It also makes for a worthwhile exploration of the landlocked African country, oft-times overshadowed by neighbors like Mali, Ghana, and Niger.

The influence of French colonialism is evident from the start. Upper Volta’s earliest orchestras took cues from a band comprised of French colonial businessmen and Western instruments like the guitar, trumpet, and saxophone. American R&B, rhumba from the Congo, and (as the title suggests) the yé-yé of French ’60s pop—the bands of Upper Volta drew on all of it. No doubt, the titan of African pop, Franco Luambo’s O.K. Jazz—from the Republic of the Congo and the biggest African star on the continent—had a considerable influence on one of the earliest and most prolific bands to arise in the new country, Volta Jazz.

Founded by bandleader Idrissa Koné, Volta Jazz is one of the savannah’s greatest musical exports, releasing a full-length album and some 20 singles during their lifespan. Their output is collected on the first disc of this set and is boisterous and simmering in equal measure, drawing on their native Bobo heritage and mixing in the many rhythms from outside their borders—most crucially, the Cuban music that found its way into the country on 78s. The upbeat rumba “Air Volta” displays an exuberance that threatens to outstrip the fast pace, the horns and electric guitar racing around the hand percussion breakdown at the center of the song. “Mousso Koroba Tike” displays the stinging guitar tone of late ’50s American R&B transposed to a rollicking African polyrhythmic backdrop. Meanwhile, the gentle ballad “Djougou Toro” shimmers like a desert mirage, with Dieudonné Koudougou’s steel guitar rippling in ever widening circles.

As the ’70s wore on, Volta Jazz member-turned-bandleader Tidiani Coulibaly groused that the ensemble had not evolved beyond their supper club tuxedos and repertoire to keep up with the changing times. And so, he broke off and formed his own group with five other Volta Jazz members called L’Authentique Dafra Star de Bobo-Dioulasso, who comprise the second album on this set. Dafra Star was a more nimble ensemble and ranged widely (even touring in Mali and Canada), utilizing the traditional timbres of the ballaphon and mixing it with Cuban tumba drums, the double-picked guitars of Zoumana Diarra and Soma Bakary, and electric organ. The tricky interplay of ballaphon, horns, and percussion on “Dounian” anticipates the kind of post-rock tropes that Tortoise would deploy decades and continents later, while “Si Tu Maime” is a slow-burner of a ballad with dramatic organ accents.

Okay, heretofore unknown music—from a country we might not be able to easily pinpoint on a map of Africa—dusted off and compiled for consumption is no novel thing. And as much as I enjoy the groups here, I might sooner reach for sets from Franco, Balla et ses Balladins, Rail Band, Star Band de Dakar, or Golden Afrique for future listening pleasure. But where Bobo Yéyé excels beyond those is in how it widens our gaze, showing us not just the music of Upper Volta, but the people who got gussied up on a Saturday night to sweat and dance to it. In this way, it makes for one of the most personable African reissues of the past decade.

Parallel to the establishment of Koné’s Volta Jazz group, his cousin Sory Sanlé got his hands on a camera and set up a makeshift studio, documenting the bands and their fans. Along with the 3xLP/CDs, Numero included an 144-page hardbound book of Sanlé’s black and white portraiture, which makes it an indispensable document. In the introduction, Sanlé writes that the Voltaic used to throw photographs of people away once they had died, thinking they were pointless if the person wasn’t present. But then there was a shift: “People began to understand that by looking at old photos, the person was recreated... without photos, it’s like nothing happened.” Sanlé’s intimate photos show his friends and neighbors as fierce and innocent, defiant and bizarrely posed, cool and ridiculous. They catch his subjects in the act of becoming. The participants of Upper Volta’s music scene dress up as soldiers, as distant cousins of the Jackson 5, as tribespeople, as gangsters and b-boys, as musicians trying on different identities, making their presence known, if only for the blink of a shutter. Were these their actual roles in society? Or were they just trying on costumes for play? In looking upon these stunning photos, it’s more fun to just enjoy the enigma of these individuals.

Writing about the Mali photographers Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé last year in The New York Times, Teju Cole noted that such African portraits offered “a vivid record of individual people, largely shorn of their names and stories but irrepressibly alive… ripostes to the anthropological images of ‘natives’ made by Europeans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.” Cole added, “Something changed when Africans began to take photographs of one another.” That statement extends to Sanlé’s own eye, and the Bobo Yéyé collection as a whole. While their country’s golden age lasted less than 20 years, the look, attitude, and sound of the Voltaic remains, even if the culture that originally nurtured it is no longer.