When An Artist Has A Huge Discography

Life is short and the artist you just discovered has dozens of albums.

I've been listening to a lot of King Sunny Ade lately. His Aura (1984) album was one of the first African music albums I listened to. I liked it, but I didn't dwell on it. At the time, I was more interested in metal and punk and whatever else. African music tickled my ear, but was kind of a sideline to my regular listening.

Fast forward a bunch of years, during which I listened to more African music, and even more years until I finally started a web site to give me an excuse to listen to even more African music.

Something I've noticed is that many artists have discographies that are quite large, to put it mildly. They're often older artists or ones who have already passed. Which makes sense.

This is not something that's unique to African artists, of course. With Bob Dylan, for example, just the studio, live, and Bootleg Series releases number about 80 albums. Speaking of prolific, here's a 2015 article that lists other artists with lots of albums.

One of the problems when confronting a large amount of music from any artist is the obvious one. Where to start? In the case of Oliver Mtukudzi, for example, his earliest albums tended to be quite different from the later ones, as his style gradually morphed into a category all its own - Tuku Music.

I don't have a very methodical approach when it comes to exploring these large masses of music. My somewhat slipshod method is to consider what's most readily available and what seems interesting and dive in.

Here are a few artists with large discographies. I'm sure there are lots more. Add a note in the comments section if you know of others.

• Thomas Mapfumo (Zimbabwe) was the first African artist who really grabbed me. According to the discography listed at Wikipedia, he's released two dozen albums as a solo artist. But Discogs says 35 albums. Mapfumo himself once mentioned in an interview that he's lost track of how many albums he'd released.

• If I had to choose a desert island artist, Oliver Mtukudzi (Zimbabwe) would probably be the one. There seems to be some agreement that his discography numbers about 60-65 albums.

• Fela Kuti (Nigeria) is an artist I'm catching up on. The size of his discography is unclear (at least to me). But at the Fela Kuti Bandcamp site - which I wrote about recently - there are about five dozen albums.

• As noted, King Sunny Ade (Nigeria) was one of the first African artists I listened to. I've tried to make sense of his discography on my own and threw up my hands. It's substantial, to say the least, and confusing. Apparently, there are albums released only in Nigeria and nearby, as well as a bunch released to an international audience. If Wikipedia is to be trusted, then his 123 albums puts him well ahead of anyone in this small group.