Fela Kuti – Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense

The best of all the “outside” productions of Fela’s albums (see the notes for 1984’s Live In Amsterdam, above) was keyboardist Wally Badarou’s Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense. The album was recorded shortly after Fela had been released from jail, where he’d served 18 months of a five year sentence on trumped up currency smuggling charges (during his incarceration Amnesty International declared him a prisoner of conscience). Badarou’s neo-orchestral production is richer and more burnished than was the norm for Fela. The sound is smoother, the beat less edgy and the arrangement richer, with layered keyboards, a serpentine horn chart, finger-picked acoustic guitar played in palm-wine highlife style, and the backup choir placed well forward in the mix. The kind of production that gives “sweetening” a good name. Originally released by Polygram.