Highlife Roots Revival

Palm-wine music was the acoustic precursor of Ghanaian highlife and was named after a homemade alcoholic beverage. Koo Nimo, now in his late 70s, is a veteran musician from the Ashanti region of Ghana and one of the nation’s musical treasures. Normally he plays solo, a storytelling songster accompanying himself on an acoustic guitar, but on this new recording he is joined by an ensemble of musicians and singers. It is an authentic down-home courtyard session recorded in the compound of Nimo’s own house, and there’s the real sense of a family band enjoying itself. Nimo has a remarkably dextrous guitar picking – he has studied classical and flamenco technique, though he keeps his performance to a pure African style. He is accompanied by further acoustic guitars, seprewa (a small version of the kora harp), and assorted hand drums, rumba boxes and banana bells. The percussion sounds randomly syncopated, with swathes of tumbling hand drums, earthy thwacks of hand on box, and the clang of metal on metal.

The liner notes give a good indication of the general subject matter of the songs (the legendary trickster spider Kwaku Anansi and the blood-sucking tsetse flies) and folkloric wisdom (allowing palm trees to grow without obstacle). They are all performed with a warm, relaxed and cheery disposition. The session is evocative of the family band feeling of seminal recordings by the Gabby Pahinui Hawaiian Band, or of the Joseph Spence & the Pinder family from the Bahamas. The music is quite different but there is the same charm: one that can often only be captured in a live location recording.