{"id":74828,"date":"2021-03-16T01:05:00","date_gmt":"2021-03-16T00:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/ghana-freedom-2\/"},"modified":"2023-02-22T16:59:46","modified_gmt":"2023-02-22T14:59:46","slug":"ghana-freedom-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/ghana-freedom-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Highlife, the soundtrack to a new era"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On the eve of independence, highlife was the fashionable music in Ghana. It was the music of high society and of the local elites who gathered for dance parties where people dressed in suits and top hats. As entry to these parties was too expensive for most, those who listened and watched from the outside named it \u2018highlife\u2019 \u2013 music for those living the high life. It was a mixture of local traditional music with a hint of calypso and jazz \u2013 which gave it its edge. And the king of highlife was Emmanuel Teteh Mensah, or E.T. Mensah to his friends. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A saxophonist and trumpeter born in the aftermath of the First World War, he spent his youth playing in great African orchestras. The Second World War made Accra, the capital of Ghana, an important base for the Royal Navy, and British and American military personnel founded orchestras there. Amongst them was the Scottish saxophonist Sergeant Jack Leopard, who recruited E.T. Mensah into his band, The Leopard and his Black and White Spots. For an orchestra that brought together Africans and Europeans, the name was rather apt. E.T. Mensah also had another job as a pharmacist, which helped him to make ends meet as playing the saxophone and highlife music were not yet enough to live by. In the early 1950s he led the Tempos and founded his own club, the Paramount. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It was there that he perfected the sound that would become the sound of independence. His success was enormous and after making a few records in the Decca studios, he left for London. For African musicians, London was the place to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

London was a crossroads where people from all over the British Empire met. They came from Africa \u2013 Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya, but also from the Caribbean \u2013 Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and not forgetting all the African Americans who came through. All these people, students, dockers and artists met in the clubs of Piccadilly. It was there that these cousins, scattered across the ocean by the slave trade, brewed a musical melting pot. It was into this truly pan-African mix that E.T. Mensah happily threw himself. He recorded a few records with Nigerians and Jamaicans from London and met the famous Trinidadian Lord Kitchener.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Kitch, as he was known by his fans, was one of the stars of calypso, a genre born in Trinidad and Tobago, and whose social and political works perfectly reflected the spirit of the age. When E.T. Mensah saw him on stage, Kitch had fallen in love with the latest jazz trend, Be-Bop. Lord Kitchener recorded a calypso tribute to his heroes: Dizzie Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, each of whom he quotes and imitates in his song \u2018Kitch\u2019s Bebop of Calypso\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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