K. Frimpong: The Black Album (Vinyl LP) | Freebird Records Clearance

The Black Album (1977) broadens the palette. Opening with the urgent, call-and-response drive of “Hwehwe Mu Na Yi Wo Mpena” and closing with the 15-minute odyssey of “Adam Nana,” the record stretches highlife’s rhythmic and structural possibilities. Its sinuous guitar lines, clavinet vamps, layered vocal phrases and hypnotic percussion evolve with a looseness and freedom that echo the experimental spirit found in 1970s jazz and funk — a Ghanaian counterpart to many of the African-influenced sounds being shaped across the Atlantic.

This is music that stands tall within the global canon of 1970s soul and jazz — rooted in highlife, but reaching far beyond it. It is music that holds its own alongside both the symphonic soul of American contemporaries like The Dramatics, and the afrocentric jazz fusions of Cymande and the Headhunters. The rhythmic engine is highlife; the emotional register is soul; the ambition is unmistakably Frimpong’s.

Black vinyl version.

1. Hwehwe Mu Na Yi Wo Mpena
2. Asaase Yi So
3. Awisa
4. Adam Nana (Medley)