35 f Rescuing The Reels
If you treasured those golden era re-issues of Guinea’s legendary Syliphone label, prepare to salivate over Graeme Counsel’s tale of digitising the 9,500 songs in the Radio Télévision Guinée archive…
T
he West African nation of Guinea is home to some of the biggest names in African music. Bembeya Jazz, Sékou ‘Diamond Fingers’ Diabaté, Les Ama-
zones, and Kouyaté Sory Kandia all hail from Guinea, and Miriam Makeba spent eighteen years there under the wing of the nation’s first president, Sékou Touré. Guinea’s first leader was actively involved in promoting Guinean music and culture. He introduced a radical cultural policy which resulted in the nationalisation of all the private orchestras and the banning of foreign music from the airwaves. He also created a recording label, Syliphone, which was the first government-funded label in West Africa and which featured the nation’s best musicians.
Syliphone released 750 songs on vinyl, some of which were re-released by Stern’s on their recent The Syliphone Years compi- lations. One might expect that the Syli- phone catalogue of recordings would con- stitute the bulk of Guinean music recorded during Touré’s government (1958-1984), but such an expectation does not take into account the zeal of the President and his commitment to advancing Guinean culture.
In 2005 the British Library created the
Endangered Archives Programme (EAP), which provides funds to researchers and their archival projects. In 2008 I received EAP
Syli Orchestre
funding to recreate the Syliphone catalogue and digitise all 750 songs from its 160 vinyl discs. The Guinean government’s own archival collection had been damaged in an attempted coup in 1985, when the Radio Télévision Guinée (RTG) headquarters, which house the audio-visual archives, were bombed by air force jets. The Guinean gov- ernment was very pleased to have the Syli- phone catalogue revived, and the project’s success led me to the RTG sound archives where I was granted rare access. Previously I had seen a hand-written catalogue of some 50 audio reels of material, but when I entered the archive for the first time I was stunned to see more than 1,000 reels of recordings of Guinean music. With insuffi- cient time to archive it all I returned with a second EAP grant in 2009 to complete the project. Guinea, however, was so unstable that year that I had to abandon my work, shortly before Guinea’s president was shot by his own Presidential Guard. 2010 brought democracy to Guinea for the first time since independence, and in 2012 I returned with EAP funding to complete the project.
From the 2008 and 2009 projects I
archived and digitised approximately 4,000 Guinean songs. The archival process was rel- atively straightforward and involved trans- ferring the music from the original quarter- inch magnetic tape to digital audio files via a sound card and a laptop. From August
2012 to January 2013 I archived all of the remaining reels of music, and 5,500 songs from over 1,000 reels of magnetic tape were digitised, resulting in an overall project total of 9,500 songs being archived. All of the songs were performed by Guinean artists, and although termites and damp had done their best to destroy the music, the audio reels were generally in good con- dition and had not lost that great Syliphone sound. Most of the reels were recorded in the Voix de la Révolution studios by the leg- endary Moussa Konaté, the man responsible for recording Bembeya Jazz’s Regard Sur Le Passé LP and hundreds of other classics, and were potential Syliphone vinyl releases.
The 9,500 songs from the RTG archive represent the musical history of a nation and focus on the remarkable efforts to revolutionise music and culture during the Sékou Touré years. Most of the songs were recorded between 1967 and 1980, with the earliest dating to 1960. Shortly after independence and the banning of all pri- vate musical groups, Guinea’s President created state-funded orchestras through- out the nation. These grew to over 60 orchestras, each with a brass section, three or four guitars, keyboards, congas, tim- bales and drum kit, two or three singers, and dancers. It was big band music, Guinean style, with influences ranging from jazz to the rumba.
Each reel had to be identified
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