Highlife Music

Luke Barnes
Music History 1
4/21/2018

Highlife Music

Highlife music is always changing, going through style changes, instrument changes, and changes in the area of Africa that it is popular. Highlife music is also very hard to define in one sentence or to put it into one category. It can loosely be defined as Africa’s popular music and the soul of a lot of musicians in Africa. It is difficult to determine when highlife music started; Authors of Highlife music hypothesize it being originated anywhere between 75 years ago, to even a century ago. We also do not know exactly where it originated. ”Did it come from Nigeria? Ghana? Sierra Leone? Did it sprout spontaneously in various points across the West African coast? Or did it arrive there
This genre of music was known for using expensive brass and woodwind instruments such as trumpets and saxophones. Just as modern day jazz music uses trumpets, trombones, saxophones, drum set, and rhythm section etc. highlife music uses similar instrumentation set up. Highlife music also incorporates guitars and vocalists much like a jazz band. One type of instrument that a typical jazz band might not that highlife music bands have are Latin type instruments. Even though typical jazz bands perform Latin charts, Latin music is not the sole characteristic of a modern jazz band. In contrast, the majority of highlife music is characterized by Latin music and
The more guitar focused/heavy version of highlife music can be seen in rock’n roll in the USA. This version of highlife music emphasized more on guitar solos and a more what we know as heavy metal sound with the guitars. This is not the only idea that highlife music brought to America or any country, highlife music has been influenced many types of music. Even though highlife music has gone down in popularity a lot, the flame for this style of music will never be snuffed out completely. In highlife music’s most popular times, it prided itself as the basis of all musical language bridges of Anglophone West Africa. The melodic and rhythmic concepts of highlife music is the DNA that has continued to animate a variety of regional sounds that have arose in the years since the prime of highlife music. Nigeria has countless types of music and all of them borrow something from highlife music. There were many highlife music advocators and musicians during the prime of this style. Even today, Victor Olaiya, is actively keeping highlife music alive and well in Nigeria. Highlife music may not be the most popular music out there and it may not have the most followers of any type of music, but highlife music definitely is a special type of