The 7 best Highlife tracks of all time
Highlife
West Africa's first great popular music: Akan rhythms and palm-wine guitar meeting brass-band and swing arrangements in coastal Ghana, recorded from 1928 and named for the clubs ordinary people were not admitted to.
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Kwame Asare / Yaa Amponsah
Recorded in London with the Kumasi Trio, and the first Ghanaian highlife on record. Its finger-picked guitar figure became a rhythm other musicians simply refer to by name.
E.T. Mensah & The Tempos / All For You
Mensah put a dance band behind highlife and took it across West Africa. Louis Armstrong sat in with the Tempos in Accra, which tells you how good the horn section was.
Prince Nico Mbarga / Sweet Mother
Reckoned to be the best-selling African single ever made. A pidgin-English song about a mother's love over a guitar line of total sweetness, and utterly unembarrassed by any of it.
Nana Ampadu & The African Brothers Band / Ebi Te Yie
An animal fable about who gets the comfortable seat, read as criticism of the military government and pulled off the radio. Highlife's most elegant piece of political smuggling.
Sir Victor Uwaifo / Joromi
A Benin folk hero, a guitar figure that circles rather than resolves, and Nigeria's first gold record. Uwaifo built his own guitars, which sounds about right.
Gyedu-Blay Ambolley / Simigwa Do
Highlife with the funk turned all the way up and a rapped Fante vocal years before anyone in New York had a word for that. Genuinely ahead of itself.
Osibisa / Sunshine Day
Ghanaian and Caribbean musicians in London, making highlife that charted in Britain without diluting the percussion. The diaspora version, and a very good one.