Super Afro Soul

One of the most innovative and pioneering musicians of his time, Orlando Julius has made an amazing difference to the Nigerian music between the '60s and '70s. Our double CD pack includes "Super Afro Soul" with Orlando Julius & his Modern Aces, and "Orlando's Afro Ideas 1969-72" by Orlando Julius & his Afro Sounders. A mind blowing mix of Nigerian highlife style with jazz, soul, and funk. Super Afro Soul was Orlando's first album, released in 1966, a head on collision between HighLife (the music of West African political/social aspiration at tha time) and '60s Soul from the USA (the soundtrack of Afro-America's struggle for civil rights and equality). Before that Orlando, born 1943, had been playing with Highlife stars Flamingo Dandies, with Juju music star I. K. Dairo's Dance Band, and with Eddy Okunta's Top Aces in Lagos, all of them important groups in Nigeria. But around this time, with his own band the Modern Aces, his two musical obsesions, Jazz (Parker, Coltrane) and Highlife, were joined by a third, as the airwaves filled wit the sounds of 60's Soul. Orkando's Ideas, the CD2 in our pack, is a compilation of the other two albums Orlando Julius recorded for Polygram. Here you can hear the evolution of his sound along with the changes that were happening on the Lagos scene. Orlando formed a larger band, the Afro Sounders in the late '60s and began to explore and altogether deeper, funkier highlife fusion, responding to psychedelia (Psychedelic Afro Shop), the deeper funk grooves that were coming from the USA (James Brown Ride On) and also to Fela Kuti's new Afrobeat (Alo Mi Alo). The tracks are longer, the sound mellower, the rootsier grooves profoundly hip shaking. As the '70s rolled on OJ decided to leave Lagos and went to the USA where he worked with the cream of '70's US soul (Isaac Hayes, Bark Kays, O'Jays, Chaka Khan, Curtis Mayfield) and later with many jazz stars like Miles Davis, Chick Corea, Sarah Vaughn, and Art Blakey, before returning to Nigeria in 1999 and forming the Nigerian All Stars with whom he has recently celebrated his fourtieth anniversary as one of Nigeria's funkier ever musical pioneers.