Highlife

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 mixture. 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 highlife’. 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 themselves 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 together: dancing to the rhythms of his grandparents, while at the same time looking to and being part of – the future of jazz.

Peter Somuah - Letter to the UniverseCD / Vinyl / digital Peter Somuah trumpet, vocals (Soft Touch, Odo), guitar (Odo) Jesse Schilderink tenor saxophone Anton de Bruin keyboards & rhodes Marijn van de Ven double bass & electric bass Jens Meijer drums Danny Rombout conga, bells, shakers & djembe Thomas Nii Lantey Botchway dundun, banana bell, talking drum Lisette Ma Neza spoken words (The Universe) Latanya Alberto vocals (Moonlight) Gyedu Blay Ambolley rap vocals (Reincarnation) Stevo Atambire vocals (The Sky) Lydia Stavraki & Inda Duran vocals (The Universe) Strings on Mission on Earth, Soft Touch & Moonlight: Celeste Engel & Luna Hallenga violin Daniela Rivera viola Jasper den Hond cello Ghana has an ancient tradition of story-telling, so the continuance of this great heritage can take many forms... and not just ones that involve the voice or words. Peter Somuah spins tales which come from his instrument: as a young trumpet-player, he embarked on a fascinating search for his identity between the Highlife music of his native country, Miles Davis – his idol – and the cosmopolitan musical language of Holland, the country which is now his home. He tells that story in "Letter to the Universe".When Somuah and his band ended their set and departed the stage at the 2022 North Sea Jazz Festival in Rotterdam, it was clear to everyone in the hall that they had witnessed something very special, the arrival of an extraordinary new artist. It was his first big festival appearance; up to then he had only played in clubs. So the question on everyone’s mind was: who is this Ghanaian twenty-something who has just totally amazed and dumbfounded an entire audience? In Accra, Ghana's capital city, Peter Somuah grew up with Highlife music, that swinging combination of big band influences from the colonial era and the sweetness of palm wine. "I took up the trumpet when I was 14," he recalls. "I played Highlife and Afrobeat in a marching band, I listened to the records of musicians like E.T.Mensah and transcribed their solos." But there was another key experience which turned Somuah to a different era of jazz: when the name Miles Davis is mentioned, a warm radiance suddenly flashes across his face. He remembers how one day a buddy brought him a video of Miles. Somuah was mesmerised: "I really wanted to be able to play like that. I had no idea what he was doing or how he was doing it, I just tried to pick out the notes and imitate him. We are connected to the African-Americans via the history of slavery, so I was able to make a spiritual connection with Miles through that commonality." Somuah went on to listen through all the phases of his trumpet god’s career, while also studying the playing of Freddie Hubbard and Roy Hargrove. From then on, his goal became the exploration – through his own music – of the connections between Ghana and modern jazz. After a stay in China with friends, and several years as a member of a band touring France, Belgium and Spain, Somuah follows his partner to Holland. At the Codarts Arts School in Rotterdam, his vision of a cosmopolitan jazz language starts to take shape. He forms a cosmopolitan sextet and records "Outer Space" with them, a debut on which he defines his own sound: "On Outer Space I wanted to escape from the box of rules that the purists want to keep you in. It was about being myself, it was about the freedom to mix all the styles of music I like." "Outer Space", which received the Edison Jazz Award, has many flavours of Africa, with Highlife and Afrobeat shining through strongly. With his new album "Letter to the Universe", Peter Somuah has ventured further out into the musical cosmos as a travelling storyteller. His new compositions reflect the stages of his young life: his Ghanaian past, the work of his jazz idols and the lively “Afropean” scene of his new home in the Benelux. In the pulsating and frenzied "Mission On Earth", one can read an unmistakable dedication to Miles Davis's "Bitches Brew" phase, and also an echo of the layered architecture of today's cosmic jazz as played by the likes of Kamasi Washington. That track is also a perfect demonstration of quite how tight and organic the interplay with his Dutch band with keyboardist and producer Anton de Bruin is, and remains throughout the album. Somuah's work, however, is by no means a male-only affair: right from the prologue, he assigns an important role to slam poet Lisette Ma Neza, who has her roots in Rwanda. In what becomes a thread running through the disc, she formulates the big identity questions of the current generation travelling Africans who address their questions to the universe as they explore their life situated between continents, philosophies and lifestyles. Peter Somuah's music also deals with this Afro-African existence in a way that reaches out for answers. This is trumpet-playing that has nothing to do with showing-off and virtuosity. Rather, he creates a flow in an eloquent narrative, and yet there is also, very clearly, plenty of the joy of playing and danceability here. There are also colours and hallmarks from Ghanaian music be found on this journey, for example in the easy-going six-eight rhythms from the Ashanti region ("Green Path"), the fusion of boisterous Fra Fra music from the north of Ghana with jazz ("The Sky"), or in Highlife borrowings, notably in the appearance of Ghanaian veteran Gyedu-Bley Ambolley ("Reincarnation"). To follow Peter Somuah on his quest between the continents of Europe and Africa is something totally refreshing and unexpected, particularly for European ears. What the young Ghanaian has done is to bring his own new and previously unheard stories to the cosmopolitan jazz of the 21st century. This is an open-ended journey…which makes it all the more exciting to find out where Somuah’s story is going to take us. Credits: Music composed by Peter Somuah