Highlife Music

HIGHLIFE: MUSIC OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE AND FOR THE PEOPLE.

“African music is a spectacular adventure. Importantly, it can be understood in both the singular and the plural sense: a long, rich adventure made up of sharing, exchanges, a   melting-pot of inheritance and invention, looking backwards and leaping into the unknown”.

INTRODUCTION
One of the many results of man’s innate creativity is the emergence of the syncretic highlife music, a musical type birthed in Ghana from the acculturative impact of Europe on West Africa during the colonial period. Although the term ‘highlife’ was not coined until the 1920’s, it existed before then under various names and its creation occurred as a blending of Akan dance rhythms and melodies and European instruments and harmonies in three main contexts: the coastal military-fort brass bands, the port music of seamen and fishermen, and the local dance orchestras of the Christian elite of coastal towns such as Accra and Cape Coast.  

THE HIGHLIFE ROOTS
As noted by John Collins (UCLA 1976: 62), the Fanti coastal towns which recorded the longest contact with the Europeans, experienced the earliest Euro-African musical syncretism in West Africa. Their indigenous music and dance styles like the female Adenkum choirs, Adakim and the fishermen’s Osibi were influenced by new melody styles and instruments resulting in some of the oldest forms of highlife, the Osibisaba and Adaha music. The influences on these towns were as a result of the fife and brass-bands that were associated with European military forts stationed in these towns. In-fact by the 19th century a ‘native band’ had been set up at Cape-Coast castle to play western military marches and dance music but not local songs. The advent of Adaha in Ghana was as a result of the arrival of Western Indian troops at Cape-Coast Castle in the 1870’s to help the British fight the inland Ashantis. These soldiers in their spare time played their own Caribbean syncopated...