Lafayette Afro Rock Band and Their Influence Over Contemporary Hip-Hop

 

The mystique and sensuality of Leroy Gomez’s iconic saxophone riff that opens 1975’s Darkest Light has paved the way for some of the biggest hip-hop artists of the modern day – but little recognition is given to the band who are responsible.

Forming in Roosevelt, a suburb of Long Island, NYC in 1971, The Bobby Boyd Congress borrowed from the break-beat ridden, groove-laden ‘funk’ that was quickly consuming the black American music scene in the late sixties, thanks to the likes of pioneers James Brown and the psychedelic-come-RnB of Sly and the Family Stone. The Bobby Boyd Congress’s response to the expansion of funk throughout the US was to relocate to Paris, where they would gain recognition within their circle and change their name to the Lafayette Afro Rock Band - their gigging haunt Barbès, a Parisian district with a large population of North African immigrants, inspired them to incorporate typically African instrumentation and beat tendencies into their songs, fusing the sleazy, Marshall-stack grit of Eddie Hazel-esque guitar with experimental world music influences.


While not regarded with the credibility they deserved while active, Lafayette were busy producing tracks that decades later would contribute toward some of the biggest rap chart hits throughout the nineties and early two-thousands. Their 1974 debut LP (under their new alias) Soul Makossa features Hihache, its infectious horn section and swirling, dirty guitar solo appearing on Janet Jackson’s If and Wu-Tang Clan’s Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing Ta F’ Wit through sampling.

Darkest Light, however, is by far the most sampled track of theirs, and potentially one of the most sampled funk songs in hip-hop history. Recognisable even to the musical novice, the opening bars of raspy, haunting sax played by Santa Esmerelda’s Leroy Gomez only consist of five separate notes, yet is successful in granting Darkest Light its deep, soulful quintessence. It serves as no wonder that a plethora of rap groups, from Jay Z to Public Enemy, took the opening riff to sample in their own songs, recycling its rich melody into a different musical format.

Still to this day, there is little known about the incredibly influential Lafayette Afro Rock Band – their eclectic concoction of freak-out psych rock with balls-to-the-wall funk, jazz and indigenous instrumentalism is somewhat overlooked compared to their funky seventies counterparts in Parliament-Funkadelic, Sly Stone or Cool and The Gang – yet their unique jam-oriented songwriting is just as influential to the evolution of modern music, shaping some of the biggest hip-hop creations to ever grace the airwaves and continuing to spread the essence of funk to the new generation.

 

 


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