Highlife Music Guide: A Brief History of Highlife Music

Highlife is a West African music genre played on instruments from Europe and the United States. It borrows from the Akan and Kpanlogo musical traditions of Ghana and Nigeria, but it intersects with many popular music genres including jazz, rock, hip-hop, and Afrobeat.

The majority of West Africa's highlife bands fall into one of two categories: dance bands and guitar bands.

• Highlife dance bands: Dance bands—which are popular in urban areas of Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Gambia, and Nigeria—feature orchestras reminiscent of American brass bands. They combine West African traditional music with calypso, swing, and Afro-Cuban dance music imported from North America and the Caribbean.
• Highlife guitar bands: Guitar bands, which are more popular in the rural parts of West African countries, emphasize guitar and other string instruments. Guitar-based highlife songs borrow from Black American blues traditions.

From its roots in colonial Ghana during the 1920s to its present-day fusion with other genres, highlife music has taken many forms.

• Music for the elites: African highlife music began in the 1920s in the music clubs of Ghana's capital, Accra, along with other coastal cities. Artists like the Accra Orchestra, Cape Coast Sugar Babies, and the Jazz Kings were among the early stars of Ghanaian highlife music. They combined traditional African rhythms like osibisaba, an energetic beat and the Fante word for highlife, with popular Western dance styles like calypso and foxtrot. The actual name "highlife" comes from the notion that the music was only available to the elites who frequented these urban coastal clubs.
• Spreading throughout West Africa: Highlife music began in cities, but around the time of World War II, it started to spread to rural areas as well. These rural groups played a subgenre called guitar-band highlife. The most famous of these guitar bands was E.K. Nyame and his Akan Trio. Both with his band and as a solo artist, Nyame would make over 400 highlife recordings.
• Dance bands in the cities: Highlife remained popular in cities where artists like E.T. Mensah and the Tempos created a style called dance-band highlife. These were brass bands that played the swing and Afro-Cuban music favored by American jazz musicians. Mensah would be dubbed "King of Highlife" and would play dates with Louis Armstrong.
• Crossover genres: Highlife music has remained relevant by incorporating other musical traditions. Burger-highlife music, pioneered by George Darko and others, features elements of 1970s German techno music. Hiplife features many aspects of American hip-hop and has helped make British-Ghanaian rapper Reggie Rockstone a star in West Africa.

The highlife music genre has produced many notable artists.

1. 1. E.T. Mensah (1919–1996): Widely regarded as the "King of Highlife,” E.T. Mensah was the biggest star of the dance-band highlife scene that dominated West African cities in the mid-twentieth century. He famously dueted with Louis Armstrong and introduced West African audiences to American jazz traditions.
2. 2. E.K. Nyame (1927–1977): E.K. Nyame was to rural guitar-band highlife what E.T. Mensah was to urban dance-band highlife. Along with his Akan Trio, Mensah tapped into longstanding string music traditions in rural West Africa and went on to cut over 400 highlife recordings.
3. 3. Bobby Benson (1922–1983): A talented saxophonist, pianist, and guitarist, Benson was born in Nigeria but spent several years in Europe during World War II. There he learned various types of Western jazz music, which he brought back to Nigeria and incorporated into highlife. Benson's "Niger Mambo" caught the ear of New York-based jazz pianist Randy Weston, who included it on his 1963 record appropriately titled Highlife.
4. 4. Fela Kuti (1938–1997): Fela Kuti was a Nigerian highlife artist who helped create the Afrobeat genre by combining highlife with jazz, funk, and Nigerian jùjú music.

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