Friday

01.07.2016

22:00

JazzLent - Zavarovalnica Maribor Stage

Concert

ORLANDO JULIUS & THE HELIOCENTRICS (NIG, GBR)

Orlando Julius (vocals, saxophones)
Latoya Ekemode (dance, vocals)
Matt Roberts (trumpet)
Ray Carless (saxophones)
Adrian Owusu (guitars)
Jake Ferguson (bass)
Jack Yglesias (percussion, vocals)
Malcolm Catto (drums)

After the performances of Ebo Taylor, Tony Allen and Hugh Masekela in the past years, there will be another veteran of African music joining us for this year's festival edition: Orlando Julius, who, with his more than fifty-year-long career, is one of the most important living monuments of African popular music. He was already ruling the Nigerian music scene in the early sixties, which he, under the influence of American soul, infected with his version of highlife or African soul, and with this influenced the career of one of the biggest ambassadors of African music Fele Kuti, and shaped this thing we nowadays call afrobeat. Today this music genre is flourishing all around the world, it fuels on local scenes and is reborn on sound carriers and concert venues.

Label Strut Records has been reshaping the history of (African) pop music for quite a few times and the same can be said about the brilliant psychedelic jazz ensemble The Heliocentrics from London that has recorded Julius' new album Jaiyede Afro with him. On the album there's Julius' most known hit "Jagua Nana", which made him famous in Nigeria in 1966, and also the song "Ijo soul," that sounds strangely similar to the hit of James Brown's "I Got You (I Feel Good)" - maybe you're wondering where the similarity comes from, which song was recorded earlier, and who stole from whom? Let this be your task to find out until the concert of one of the greatest living legends of African music.

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