Peter Somuah | Highlife | November 1, 2024

The story of Peter Somuah is a story about travelling. Firstly in the literal sense that his festival appearances have taken him to places as far-flung as Stockholm and Beijing. But there is more: the Ghanaian trumpeter’s music has been forged by his unique journey, encompassing both his origins in Accra in Ghana and his adopted home of Rotterdam. This means the story that Somuah tells through his music is his and his alone. And whereas it brings together disparate role models from jazz such as Miles Davis, Freddy Hubbard and Roy Hargrove, he is also deeply embedded in the Ghanaian ‘highlife’ rhythms of the 1960s. Somuah took that broad canvas and gave us an ambitious biographical mosaic in his memorable ACT debut album ‘Letter to the Universe’, a cosmopolitan fusion of his many influences, which led the respected German broadsheet the Süddeutsche Zeitung to note that the disc ‘gave proof of the complexity of jazz as a world language.’

With his follow-up album, ‘Highlife’, Peter Somuah, this young man with the world at his feet, has returned to his origins and to his first musical love. He has been playing ‘highlife’, the iconic music from his homeland – which is strongly rumoured to be joining UNESCO’s worldwide Intangible Cultural Heritage register in 2025 – ever since childhood. In his youth he regularly performed four nights a week in the highlife bands. The audience would dance away as he plied and developed his craft. ‘Highlife has fundamentally influenced the way I play the trumpet, the way I listen to music and compose,’ says Somuah. It is also reflected in his very own trumpet sound: the sometimes radiant, sometimes nuanced and brittle tone that he heard as a young man on the records of highlife icons such as ‘ET Mensah’ or ‘The Ramblers’. Now he sees himself as a connector between two worlds which are clearly related: he has one foot in modern jazz, the other in a traditional highlife bar. His band consists of Dutch musicians alongside a Dutch-Surinamese percussionist. ‘My fellow players didn’t grow up in Ghana,’ says Somuah. ‘But that doesn’t matter at all. Their deep passion for highlife and afrobeat and the feeling they have developed for this music are the most important things.’

The album was recorded in a small backyard studio in Berlin-Neukölln using vintage analogue equipment, which brings the listener directly in touch with the kind of earthy sound typical for the historic highlife recordings of the 50s and 60s. ‘I wanted to bring this very special sound back to life. Its warmth, its grit, its exuberant joy’. Peter then flew to Ghana with the instrumental tracks and visited some of the heroes of the old highlife genre such as Pat Thomas and Gyedu Blay-Ambolley. ‘During my childhood, I used to hear their songs on the radio all the time. Back then, I would never have dreamed that I would one day be sitting in their living rooms to record them for my album.’

The album ‘Highlife” begins with a history lesson. For ‘The Rhythm’, Peter Somuah visited highlife legend Koo-Nimo in Kumasi and encouraged the veteran to talk about the origins of the music. Back when the British colonial rulers employed bands of Ghanaian musicians, and asked them to perform waltz, samba and Western popular music, it was played exclusively in British clubs and casinos for the pleasure of the upper classes – hence the name ‘highlife’. Most locals, on the other hand, were only allowed to admire the music from the outside: ‘Later,’ says Somuah, ‘the musicians brewed their own mix- ture. They combined Western instruments with older Ghanaian styles such as palm wine music.’ They brought dancing highlife guitar riffs into play, and other offbeat rhythmic patterns too, notably the ubiquitous clave.

Peter Somuah is now taking the journey and the alchemical progress of ‘highlife’ further – as he leads the music to completely new shores more than half a century after its golden age. ‘In the meantime, the original highlife had lost it’s popularity, especially with a new generation,’ says Somuah. ‘Many of the young people no longer know it.’ President Kwame Nkrumah had declared highlife the national dance after Ghana’s independence, and bands like that of ET Mensah, the ‘King of Highlife’, toured throughout Africa. But in the 1980s, a military coup destroyed Accra’s vibrant music scene. The months-long evening curfew led to the closure of all clubs. Most of the musicians went into exile. ‘From here, the music took on completely new influences,’ explains Somuah. ‘Rock, funk and, above all, disco influences were incorporated, studio-produced tracks and keyboards replaced the big orchestras’. Among the Ghanaian exile community in Hamburg arose a new style, which was known as ‘burger high- life’.

Somuah himself became involved with this popular highlife style as part of various bands, before following his passion for jazz. The spark came from Miles Davis whom Somuah discovered through a friend. He fell in love with the language of the African-American jazz revolutionary straight away: ‘I jammed in Accra’s only jazz club, imitating Miles and later also Freddie Hubbard –but at the same time tried to bring my own style into it.’ The way Somuah brought jazz awakening and tradition together was unheard of. The move to Rotterdam opened many doors for him and his Dutch quintet worldwide. On the other hand, the distance from his home soil now gives Somuah a new perspective on highlife.

It’s not only the sounds but also the narrative tradition of this music that interests Peter Somuah: ‘Typically, it deals with everyday stories, it tells of love, friendship and family, combined with a certain morality’ The bandleader himself also sings on “Mental Slavery” – following in the footsteps of Fela Kuti, another of Somuah’s long-standing idols and sources of ideas. ‘I’m talking about the enduring legacy of the colonial era: many Ghanaians are still mentally enslaved, see them- selves as inferior. They don’t dare to proudly present themselves and to contribute their skills’. Somuah’s ‘Highlife’ album seems like an antidote to this. The new album is a powerful combination of musical freedom and taking the courage to stand up for yourself. For the trumpeter, the two belong to- gether: dancing to the rhythms of his grandparents, while at the same time looking to and being part of – the future of jazz.

Line up

Peter Somuah | trumpet, vocals, cowbell
Jesse Schilderink | tenor saxophone
Anton de Bruin | keyboard, rhodes, synth
Jens Meijer | drums
Danny Rombout | congas, shekere
Marijn van de Ven | double & electric bass
Lamisi Akuka | vocals
Thomas Botchway | talking drum & shekere on #09
Pat Thomas | vocals
Gyedu-Blay Ambolley | vocals
Bright Osei Baffour | guitar on #02, #05 and #09

Track Listing

The Rhythm feat. Koo Nimo
We Give Thanks feat. Pat Thomas
Bruce Road
Drumbeat
Chop Chop feat. Gyedu-Blay Ambolley
Conqueror
Mental Slavery
Re-imagined
African Continent feat. Lamisi Akuka
Jamestown

Cuttings