Highlife

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Highlife is a dance and music style in Ghana and Sierra Leone , which can also be found in other West African countries. The origins of highlife are mainly in Ghana in the 1920s. From here the style spread to the other countries of West Africa. Highlife is characterized by elements from jazz and the use of different guitars.

Highlife was created as a fusion between the traditional elements of Ghana's music and instruments from Europe . The importance of the members of the Kru ethnic group can hardly be overestimated. They got to know the guitar as sailors on European ships and integrated it into their own music. The guitar was also taken up in the music of other ethnic groups such as the Akan and Fante . The colonial administration had pursued the interest at the beginning of the 20th century to maintain its troops and administrators in the colonies. Local musicians were therefore trained for military bands and police orchestras and equipped with European instruments. The Ghanaian musicians developed a new style of music from the traditional rhythms they were familiar with, in conjunction with increasingly prominent elements from jazz, which was played on predominantly European instruments (including violins). In the 1950s, the groups were still recording Afro-Cuban percussion instruments. An up-tempo beat entered the music and can be played in different ways.

The name Highlife probably alludes to the group of people for whom this light music was initially played in bars, hotels and nightclubs, namely the high society of the colonial administration and the upper class. A variant of high life with acoustic guitars and traditional instruments spread from Sierra Leone among seafarers and workers in rural regions from the beginning of the 20th century under the name Palm wine , named after the inexpensive palm wine .

Highlife is considered to be one of the origins of the Afrobeat , which developed around the 1960s.

In Germany in the 1980s a crossover version of the traditional style emerged with the burger highlife ; important interpreters were George Darko and Lumba Brothers . Ghanaian immigrants pointed the way for the development .

Well-known musicians

literature

  • Wolfgang Bender : The Nigerian Highlife: Music and Art in the Popular Culture of the 50s and 60s . Edition Trickster / Hammer Verlag, Wuppertal 2007; ISBN 978-3-7795-0061-2
  • Graeme Ewens: Africa O-Ye! A Celebration of African Music . Guinness Publishing, London 1991; ISBN 978-0-306-80461-8
  • Ronnie Graham: World of African Music: Stern's Guide to Contemporary African Music Pluto, London 1992; ISBN 0-7453-0552-0
  • Atta Mensah, Gregory F. Barz: Highlife. In: Grove Music Online , 2001

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christian Schulze, Jean Trouillet African Highlife (Linernotes) 1990
  2. ↑ Joe Tangari: Africa 100: The Indestructible Beat (2005/2010), viewed May 24, 2017
  3. ↑ Goethe Institute on Burger Highlife ( Memento from July 16, 2012 in the Internet Archive )