🎸🎶🔥🌌💿 After the phenomenal success of Map MandĂ© Courage the previous year, Robert Martino’s Scorpio Universel needed a strong new album. The guitarist-leader has left Les Gypsies de PĂ©tion-Ville, and it’s all the better for shining with his new band and thumbing his nose at the competition. He brings his electric tones and effects pedals and modernises the sound of the compas. The result is a new album, soberly entitled 1980, with an unmistakably futuristic illustration. M’Pap CrazĂ© opens with almost intergalactic flange effects and a fiery compass that will win over the public. But the whole album is well worth the trip, and certainly remains one of the most emblematic of Scorpio Universel’s albums, before the inevitable split a few years later, a recurrent feature of most of the great Haitian compas groups over the years. Martino returned to the United States, settled in Miami, where he toured various versions of Scorpio, as did his former colleagues who had stayed in Haiti…
1980 – Scorpio Universel, 1980
