Ghetto Blasters are on My Space !
www.myspace.com/ghettoblasterafrobeat

Concerts
> Afropfingsten festival, 24th may 2007 at Winterthur (Switzerland) http://www.afropfingsten.ch/deutsch/afro_pfingsten/konzerte/
http://www.afropfingsten.ch

Projects in progress
Ghetto Blaster are working on a new album !


Miscellanous
A new site on Fela ! http://www.felaspirit.com


Press
Article by Fara C. for the magazine of Jazz In Marciac :

GHETTO BLASTER Jazz in Marciac
Settled in France since 1983, Ghetto Blaster have played a decisive role in the arrival in the West of new African music. While Touré Kounda used songs to convert the world to a subtle weaving of African melodies and pulsations, the groups Xalam (Senegal) and Ghetto Blaster (Nigeria), although also using words, concentrated more on instrumental experimentation. They explored for example the links between the rhythms of their continent and those of great black American music. Among the founders of Ghetto Blaster, we have in Lagos : two musicians who played with Fela Anikulapo Kuti. First the guitarist Kiala Nzavotunga, still with Ghetto, and then the percussionist Udoh Essiet. The Frenchman Stéphane Blaes, Frankie Ntoh Song from Cameroon, still at the keyboards today, and Willy N'For, who unfortunately died of cancer in 1997. From the beginning, Ghetto Blaster, whose name evokes the portable radios carried on the shoulders of young people in Harlem, has been about people getting together.

Following in the tradition that Fela initiated, Ghetto cultivates an afrobeat with a rebel's message, often sung in pidgin, or broken English, language of the people of Nigeria, also spoken with some variations in other old English colonies. Its spellbinding afrobeat includes various styles, like jazz, funk, juju -- which came out of yoruba -- and highlife. This style, which appeared in Ghana in the 1920s under the influence of jazz, spread to West Africa, in particular to Nigeria. In 1985 Steve Potts, the American saxophonist, a regular partner of Steve Lacy, participated on the first record of the group, " People ", and performed with them in concert. He declared at the time : African music may seem simple, but it is complex, not only rhythmically, but also in the musical positioning that it requires. In his turn, the inspired Jean-Jacques Elange, born in Clamart of parents from Cameroon, contributed his life and breath to Ghetto Blaster. In 2003 the CD " River Niger ", with Cyril Atef on drums, marked the 20th anniversary of Ghetto Blaster, whose contagious energy doesn't yet show any signs of aging.

Fara C.