In Benin City, in the heart of Nigeria, a new blend of heady highlife music was born that became known as Edo Funk. It emerged in the late 1970s when a group of musicians began experimenting with different ways to incorporate elements from their native Edo culture and fuse them with new sound effects from West African nightclubs.

Unlike the more polished Nigerian disco productions of the 1980s that came out of the international metropolis of Lagos, Edo funk was raw and stripped down to the bare essentials. That's the sound you'll discover in the first installment of the Edo Funk Explosion series, which focuses on the genre's greatest founders: Osayomore Joseph, Akaba Man and Sir Victor Uwaifo.