Ferry Djimmy – Rhythm Revolution – Acid Jazz UK CD

Acid Jazz presents one of Afrobeat’s most mysterious and rare records by a former schoolteacher, boxer, Jacques Chirac’s bodyguard, and Beninese musical visionary: Ferry Djimmy – Rhythm Revolution.

The album was originally recorded in the mid-1970s in support of Benin’s revolutionary leader Mathieu Kérékou. Rumour has it that less than two hundred copies survived a late-’70s fire.

Ferry Djimmy’s life story is one of the most extraordinary you’re ever likely to hear. Born in 1939, Jean Maurille Ogoudjobi (the nickname Ferry comes from ‘ferry djimmy’ being short for ‘please forgive me’ in Yoruba as he was a very smart but unruly kid), Ferry had 43 siblings. By the late 1950s, he started a career as a schoolteacher. As a tall and imposing young man, Ferry also started a parallel career as a boxer. When he wasn’t teaching or fighting, he also caught up with the emerging night scene in the city of Cotonou, where local folklore, Congolese rumba, highlife and Cuban adaptations were favoured by local audiences as well as some blues, jazz and rhythm’n’blues.

By the late 1960s, Ferry had relocated to Paris where he became a policeman, often asked to assist Jacques Chirac on various missions before the future President of France became mayor of Paris in 1977. It was here in the early ’70s he recorded his first two singles, ‘A Were Were We Coco’ and ‘Aluma Loranmi Nichai’. These songs met little interest and by 1974 Ferry was back in Cotonou.

His return to Benin coincided with 1972s revolution’s journey toward Marxist-Leninism. The country’s leader Mathieu Kerekou was impressed by Ferry’s charisma and striking look and became fast friends with him. He saw in him a personality that could seduce the younger generation in a funkier way than straight Socialist speeches. He allowed Ferry a certain budget to start his own record company called Revolution Records.
Inspired by Afrobeat, Nigeria’s Fela Kuti and his musical journey over the past decade, Ferry recorded Rhythm Revolution in Cotonou at the Satel studio. Wanting his musical vision to stay as intact and raw as possible, Ferry played most of the instruments himself – guitar, saxophone, drums/percussion and keyboards.

The resulting album is one of the toughest and deepest slices of African funk ever cut, combining raw African rhythms with distortion, energy and wit. In spite of obvious nods to James Brown, Fela Kuti, George Clinton and Jimi Hendrix, Ferry managed to create something very unique. Eight slices of raw garage-funk from Benin as evidenced by the raw ‘Carry Me Black’, a definitive ode to blackness sung in the West African language Yoruba. A dozen years past Benin’s independence from France, ‘Be Free’ tells the never-ending story about a country’s disillusions and the importance of keeping some African roots, no matter how westernized it could be.