Alfa rides wind of change on debut solo album

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This article was published 15/11/2014 (3994 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Harmattan is a hot, dusty trade wind that whips up the sand of the Sahara and envelops West Africa in the so-called Harmattan haze, a burning red fog.

For a young Ismaila Alfa in Nigeria, it was a magical time, signifying the start of winter. Beautiful and harsh, the Harmattan is a wind of change.

Harmattan is also the title of Alfa’s solo debut, which will be feted with a CD release party at the West End Cultural Centre tonight. The album was born of a period of change in the Magnum K.I. member/CBC Radio One personality’s life — a now-or-never time to finally make the record he’s been dreaming of making since he was 15: a live-band hip-hop album with no samples.

“I love hip-hop music, and when I realized you could build it with a live band, it was a revelation,” he says. “I wanted to make a record that took those elements and the Afrobeat/reggae influences I had grown up with and mash it all up. I said, before I die, I want to make a record like that. It took me 23 years to have it come to fruition.”

Alfa is backed by some of the best and brightest in the Winnipeg music scene on Harmattan. Anchored by a rhythm section composed of jazz scene luminaries Curtis Nowosad (drums) and Julian Bradford (bass), the band included the likes of Royal Canoe’s Matt Peters (synth), Will Bonness (organ), the Dirty Catfish Brass Band (horns) and vocalists Alexa Dirks, Andrina Turenne, Joanna Majoko and Rhonda Thompson.

At the heart of the project was Les Jupes frontman/award-winning producer Michael P Falk, who not only produced the record and released it via his Head in the Sand imprint, but co-wrote many of Harmattan’s songs. (He also supplies some angular guitar riffage.)

Alfa became friends with Falk in 2008 via the Record of the Week Club, Falk’s 16-week recording-cum-social experiment in which local musicians who had never collaborated (or, in many cases, met) before got together to write, record, mix and upload a song in a single evening. In the intervening years, the pair talked about making a record together. Alfa knew Falk would be just the man to push him out of his comfort zone.

“I’d never recorded with a live band before,” Alfa says. “I didn’t understand the planning involved. I didn’t know that I had to sing each line exactly the same each time because they would edit it; I can rap a line 50 times in the studio and it’ll sound different every time. But I had a great guide. Mike and I — this is our album. He made me do things I never tried before. He made me do falsetto. He made me do whisper tracks.”

The resulting Harmattan is fearless in its sonic exploration. Drawing from everything from old-school hip hop to Afrobeat to jazz to reggae to pop, the live soundscapes serve as the perfect backdrop to both Alfa’s velvety vocals, whether he’s singing or spitting rhymes. Lyrically, it’s both a personal and political album, with Alfa writing about everything from power and privilege to the “big talkers who live small lives.”

“I deal with some current events. There are some songs that deal specifically with issues that immigrants face, for example, but a lot of it is motivational. Skinny Liz is about feeling the weight of the world on your shoulders and feeling like you’re in a deep, dark hole, but knowing that if you keep climbing and hit the right angle, you’ll see the sunlight. That’s a song of my own that I’ll listen to,” he says of the album’s first single.

So is Harmattan the album Alfa envisioned when it was still just a dream?

“Not at all,” he says with a laugh. But that’s actually a good thing.

“I pictured it being more rap-sounding than what it is. I didn’t think we’d have a horn section. I expected to be rapping more on it. I left a lot in Mike’s hands. He sees things differently than I do. It took us outside my ability, which is actually exactly what I wanted.”

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca