Highlife and beyond

In his interview with Osaze Iyamu, Ambrose Campbell identified the instrumentation of early juju music as “tambourine, a guitar and small sekere (gourd rattle),” and the location of the music as “palm wine (tombo) bars.” The style of guitar playing in these bars in Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone and Liberia was naturally called palm-wine guitar music and it was out of this genre that highlife variations developed in these West African countries.

That highlife had become the overwhelming contemporary popular music of Nigeria by the 1950s is a fact. I.K. Dairo’s Blue Spots’ electrified juju music was very popular in the ‘50s, yet juju music was never as popular as highlife, which had saturated the capital, Lagos. The Civil War made the top highlife bands, led by Easterners, relocate from Lagos or disband, and in the interim there was a rebirth in the popularity, spread and sound of juju music.

Guitar-driven highlife

It is instructive that the guitar became a very prominent voice in the hybrid genres of popular music that evolved out of highlife music, which took a dive in popularity and live performance. These are nkwokrikwo, in the east, and juju. in the west. Then, of course, there were the genres of AfroSoul as pioneered by Orlando Julius, Afrobeat as structured by Fela, and AfroJazz as fashioned by Peter King, which also had deep roots in highlife, though none of the three are guitar-driven. Fela led a highlife band in his school days in London, had a stint playing with Ambrose Campbell, and his first band in Nigeria, Koola Lobitos, fused highlife with jazz. Peter King’s long stay in Europe as a professional music was well-documented on recordings that featured a lot of jazz-highlife hits like “Iya Lajole”, “Jojolo”, “Omo Lewa” and more recently “Higher-life”, on his ‘Palmwine Vendor’ CD released in Nigeria.

However, highlife at its peak and on its way to decline wasn’t just about the major stars like Olaiya, Arinze, Lawson, Ukwu and Uwaifo. Like Steve Rhodes had incisively observed, “When you heard a highlife song you could tell where it came from. Olaiya’s sound was different from Arinze’s strong rhythms. Henshaw-Efik, Uwaifo-Edo, Roy Chicago, Olaiya-Yoruba, Rex Lawson-Rivers pots, all drew from the wellsprings of their own areas. They created Nigerian music with character!”

It was only natural then for these major highlife musicians to inspire other musicians from their similar cultural backgrounds to search for other peculiar rhythms from the same cultural and ethnic sources, to brand their own versions of highlife and its hybrids. Two good examples of this trend are the pre- and post-Uwaifo flavours of highlife that employ Bini/Edo/Esan rhythms as in the music of Osayomore Joseph, Chief Osula, General Boliva, Actor Alili, Akaza and many others. Out of Rex Lawson’s successful experiments in incorporating Ijaw masquerade rhythms into his highlife came further variations on the same theme in the total-rhythm-galore approach of Owigiri music as fashioned by Belemo and a new generation of core-Ijaw musicians from the ‘new’ Bayelsa State.

Highlife, as it undertook a journey of musical transformation towards AfroSoul and Afrobeat, had remarkable input from Chris Ajilo and, after Orlando Julius and Fela, Segun Bucknor, Demos Deniran and his Lukurigi, Blackman Akeeb Kareem and Joni Haastrup and Monomono (“Give the Beggar a Chance”); who, as from the Clusters, were reaching out towards the AfroPop genre of the ‘70s. Sonny Okosun, who played with Uwaifo as a guitarist, is a lifeline in his incorporation of Ijaw Ozzidi rhythms into his unique brand of internationally popular Nigerian music that later veered towards pop-highlife-reggae with monster hits like “Papa’s Land”.

Great Highlife Party

There were laudable and culturally nostalgic projects to rejuvenate highlife. One such important project spearheaded by the then-director of the Goethe Institut, Renate Albertsen-Marton, and ably assisted by Benson Idonije and Jahman Anikulapo, was the 2000 Great Highlife Party. It brought E.C. Arinze back to Lagos as well as Owerri-based Ralph Amarabem of Rex Lawson and the Peacocks fame. Out of this eventually came the monthly Great Highlife Party sessions organised by Benson Idonije and the Committee for Relevant Art, hosted at Ojez Nightclub. In spite of incorporating an Elders’ Forum and the celebration of landmark birthdays of distinguished Nigerian writers, artists and actors, the Great Highlife Party project was not able to reestablish highlife as Nigeria’s premier contemporary sound.

While the post-Civil War years witnessed the gestation and strengthening of new guitar-driven popular music forms like nkwokrikwo and juju music, the influences of American soul music and the British Beatles’ pop music domination of global popular music had a profound impact on the younger generation of Nigerian musicians. They, to their professional credit, went on to create the golden age of Nigeria’s AfroPop genre of contemporary popular music.

Steve Rhodes, naturally, is not too kind to this generation of young Nigerian musicians. “Then came the era of copycats,” Rhodes says. “Nigerians wanted to be Wilson Pickett or James Brown. All of a sudden the level of creativity dropped. This period went on for too long, including the reggae influence. It was very sad as if all the musical creativity in Nigeria had dried up and our musicians became lazy.”

Juju and Nkwokrikwo

The two genres that strove to rekindle the energy and original creativity of highlife came to the fore before, during and after this western pop influence on Nigeria’s contemporary popular music. They both have clear similarities. Juju music dominated the Lagos-Western Region axis as from the mid ‘60s and, unlike the earlier electrified accordion-led version of I.K. Dairo, the superstars of the new juju boom were guitarists Ebenezer Obey and Sunny Ade. Juju bands were essentially a throwback to guitar bands with indigenous percussion. Interestingly, the juju pioneers of the ‘30s and ‘40s were string-instrument players; mandolin player Tunde King; banjoist Ojoge Daniels and guitarist Ayinde Bakare.

Before he formed his own band in 1964, Ebenezer Obey had played with guitarist Fatai Rolling Dollar’s band. At the height of the Civil War in 1970, his band was renamed Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey and the Interreformers Band and by now, with Sunny Ade, his younger rival, juju music became the social music of ostentation/owambe parties. Sunny Ade’s African beats, in addition to guitars and traditional percussion, introduced the vibraphone, Hawaiian guitar and the Moog synthesizer to juju music. Ade flirted with Afrobeat and even reggae and his Syncro-system sound was juju at its most modern. At the peak of the boom there must have been about 100 juju bands, including Oladunni Oduguwa alias Mummy Juju and her Decency and Unity Orchestra.

Juju, a social music characterised by praise singing and lessons in moral righteousness sometimes seemed oblivious of copyright implications as juju musicians incorporated liberal snatches of popular global hits and even nursery rhymes into their recordings and stage performances.

As from the ‘50s, it was a daily recreational pastime in Eastern Nigeria to listen to Congo/Brazzaville radio stations in the early hours even though listeners did not understand the French and Lingala of the DJs and musicians. The music of O.K. Jazz and others were the rave. Naturally, this multiple guitar-driven Congolese popular music formed a counterpart to the Camerounian border to Igbo heartland. Generally referred to as nkwokrikwo, it’s about twanging, virtuoso guitar playing and boisterous rhythms. Paulson Kalu’s Africana from Aba; ace guitarist Dan Satch Opara and vocalist Warrior of the Owerri-based Oriental Brothers; and Osita Osadebe’s The Sound Makers from which emerged The Ikengas, were the stars of this genre.

The superstar remains Nicholas Mbarga aka Prince Nico, a half Nigerian and Camerounian whose blend of the Congo beat and highlife created the world super hit ‘Sweet Mother’, and his Rokafil Jazz. Yet perhaps the most accomplished guitarist in this genre has been Oliver de Coque and his Ogene Sound.

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