Peter Somuah - Highlife

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 204, January 2025.

Peter Somuah
Highlife
ACT Music (45 mins)

In his previous work, Ghanaian trumpeter Peter Somuah has brought flavours of highlife into the idiom of contemporary jazz. With his third album, he switches it up by accentuating the innate jazz in highlife. Here, Somuah is accompanied by his Dutch and Surinamese quintet, together with guest vocal spots from highlife legends including Gyedu-Bley Ambolley and Pat Thomas, who add a political edge to proceedings with lyrics ruminating on the colonial history and legacy of their homeland.

Although the lyrics are pointed, the music itself is loose and laid back, really bringing out highlife’s eponymous feel-good vibes. The recording and production are also nice and clean, and it all adds up to a supremely smooth sound throughout the whole album. Somuah’s passion for both highlife and jazz is obvious in his compositions, arrangements and sparkling solos, which are invariably the highlights of each track.

Various Artists - Les Bushinengé: Nèg Mawon de Guyane

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 147, May 2019.

Various Artists
Les Bushinengé: Nèg Mawon de Guyane
Buda Musique (73 mins)

The Bushinengé people from French Guiana and Suriname are descended from escaped slaves who fled to the Amazon and intermarried with the local Amerindian population. As a result, their culture mixes influences from all over Africa and the Amazon basin.

For the Bushinengé, music and dance are two halves of the same thing, and you’ll never find one without the other. It’s all meant to bring people closer together and as a result, it has a real community feel. It also means that every element of the music is geared towards getting you off your bum. It’s almost exclusively based around percussion and song, which is sung with a really distinctive vocal style that uses wide, heavy vibrato. A West African influence is particularly noticeable, especially with patterns played on beer bottles that sound so reminiscent of those in Ghanaian music.

This album is the latest addition to the wonderful Musique du Monde album series. It was recorded across French Guiana, capturing all sorts of performance styles and contexts, from live shows to living rooms and everything in between. It’s a great musical overview from a region we rarely hear, and from a people we hear even less.