Highlife
Anybody know anybody that would give me a grant to study West African Highlife music? I know very little about the genre and trying to do research on the Net has proved to be fairly fruitless. I’m not even sure whether it’s Highlife, High-Life, HiLife, or High Life. That said, in my web-stumbling i uncovered Matt Yanchyshyn’s great blog Benn Luxo Du Taccu, which focuses on African music in general and has me on a mission to track down some of Celestine Ukwu‘s stuff, and to track down a record I’d lost years ago, by Dr. Sir Warrior. I’ll also point you to the Afropop Worldwide store who offer mp3s of hard to find international music and are committed to an Equal Exchange/Fair Trade model in which independent artists get at least 50% of all retail sales, which is so awesome.
While i often have no problem prattling on about things i don’t know anything about instead i think i’ll let the music speak for itself. We got like a foot of snow in Chicago last night so today i’m loving and spreading the highlife!
When my friend J. was traveling in Ghana she mailed me a tape, i’ve sadly since lost, on that tape was Uwamwesi Special [4MB] [mp3] by Dr. Sir Warrior and the Oriental Brothers International. Check third post on this page for a bit more background.
The one thing i do know about the genre is that it begin as an attempt to translate rhythms traditionally played on hand drums to other instruments. The highlife i love is mostly from the ‘70s and the instrument that takes on those rhythms is a jangly electric guitar. Christiana [7.5MB] [mp3] by Price Nico Mbarga is a brilliant and joyful example.
UPDATE: time’s up on these mp3s
Mark
Hi Josh,
Check out Dr. John Collins—he’s a great scholar and conduit into all West African popular music (which is surely one of the finest examples of a true popular music, as opposed to commercial music), including highlife and all of its antecedents and musicological cousins. I studied with him in Accra; he’s an amazing person.
http://www.scientific-af….org/scholars/jcollins/
http://afropop.org/community/contributors.php?ID=5
Dr. Collins and Dr. Nketia are a huge presence in Ghanaian ethnomusicology. Collins has ties to one of the SUNY schools, I think, and both Collins and Nketia should have literature somehow related to UCLA, which still profits from the broad vision of Charles Seeger. I know that Dr. Collins used to have at least a dozen manuscripts that he refused to publish unless he could find a publisher from Ghana—which might seem strangely obstinate unless viewed in the light of his theory about music and culture being renewable resources for developing nations that are in danger of being warped by the wide gravitational field of post-colonial history.
The guitar style you’re hearing might be something called the palmwine style:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mus…arartists_vintage.shtml
Hope you’re well,
Mark
josh
thanks Mark, I’d actually forgotten that my first introduction to highlife was through you!
I love the idea of music as a renewable resource and Dr. Collins’ recordings of Local Dimension, found here, are great. I particularly dug Sogtar [2.6mb] [mp3], the nylon stringed guitars and how the harmonica takes the intricate lead.
I hope you are also well my friend.