Ariwo Ya. Bob Ohiri and His Uhuru Sounds. 1977. Ashiko.

 From Nigeria, the Yoruban electric guitarist Bob Ohiri takes a simple, funk-inflected guitar motif and layers it with additional guitar and sax solos, along with rhythm section and vocals, and broadens the central riff’s dimensions, upending a typical in-studio polyrhythmic jam into something extraordinary, the formalization into music of kinesis and the sensory world. Though clearly danceable, Ariwo Ya is so finely textured and densely packed with rhythm that it also keeps the listener at a distance from its mysterious commentary on human nature. The cadenced vocals, especially, atop the repetitious and sinuous guitar, bass, and sax lines, emphasize the song’s gripping estrangement from normality. Sublime rhythms then, like both jazz and classical music, transcend routine human experience and informs the narrative of our sentient life in the same fashion that the tree informs the narrative of the seasons, or the internal organ the narrative of our health. But it’s so much more; inextricably bound to our ideas of life and death, rhythm is the pace at which we breathe, copulate, read and write, speak, dream. Cradled between two commercial revolutions, the industrial and the technological, rock and roll, and its auxiliary genres, drew much of its inspired raucousness from the roar of the factory, and was itself a model example of the twentieth century’s struggle between man and machine. Here in the States, we live in an age nestled somewhere between the precariously imbalanced rhythms of a preternaturally quiet nanotechnological hum and the above ground war cries of active shooters and emergency sirens, blithely awaiting—medicated and overwrought—the era’s new music. From the 2010 Soundway collection Nigeria Afrobeat Special: The New Explosive Sound in 1970s Nigeria

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