Revival of highlife music my passion, my life —Bimbo Esho

Who is Bimbo Esho?

She is just an easy going person; a creative, quiet and reserved lady that loves to meet people who share same interests with her. My innate passion, talent and experiences also span over wide range of industries including entertainment, fashion and event management. My interest in music spans a period of over 12 years when, as a young undergraduate, I wrote my final year thesis on “Highlife Music in Nigeria”, a research study that took me on a musical research odyssey across the length and breadth of Nigeria, documenting and researching into the lives of different forgotten Nigerian music legends.

 

Can you tell me some of the things you have done over the years?

I am a columnist for the soft sell society magazine, City People, where I contribute weekly on its music column. My love for knowledge made me to create an online chat group called Members of Music Icons (MMIs) which comprises famous Nigerian music icons, researchers, music collectors, music directors, art collectors, poets, journalists, radio presenters, university dons and other prominent personalities from different sectors, all with a common goal to share music education and experiences. I have handled many projects for Evergreen Musical Company which includes Nigeria Independence Parade of Stars; Dr Victor Abimbola Olaiya’s 60 Years on Stage; A Centenary of Nigerian Music (1914-2014); Last of the Originals; and public presentation and launching of the entire works of Fela Anikulapo Kuti and many more.

 

Do you sing?

I don’t sing.

 

Why the passion and interest?

I grew up in a music environment where you have a father who started collecting music at the age of 12. So, ordinarily you are already a victim of music; everywhere around the home is music. My father is always recording; if there is a new album that comes out, he will pick it up. So, naturally, we grew up into music because that was like a kind of training and like a teacher for us. The types of music that our father collected were the kinds that have a lot of morals and values.

 

How many of your siblings take up music collection and as a profession?

I am the only one.

 

You deal with highlife more than other genres of music…

Yeah because my father dealt with highlife because he felt that he did not want that genre of music to go into extinction like the ones like sakara and apala. He felt that highlife is something that connects different ethnic groups across the country. It also cuts across the boundaries of different African countries. Highlife is a genre that one can actually turn into gold, unlike sakara that is fixated with Yoruba culture.

I was also enamoured by the cross-cultural exposure in highlife across the continent and so you can see the beauty in the genre. So, it should be put in its own proper shape.

 

You said your father impacted into the life of the children, but why is that you are the only one who has taken music collection up as a profession?

May be the course I read in the university also influenced my interest and passion in music collection. I read Anthropology at the University of Ibadan, unlike every other person who wanted to read Medicine or stuffs like that people were saying I should go for Medicine because I am brilliant and bright. But for me, I believe that what is your course of study in the university, you have to make the best opportunity out of it. I studied Anthropology which is about human culture, character and personality. I now used that to take music further; I started doing my research on the highlife music genre. I interviewed a whole lot of legendary musicians, including Dr Victor Olaiya, Sir Victor Uwaifo and a whole lot of them. I travelled far and wide to look for all of them. That was where the passion really built up and I said, ‘this is no longer just about the love for music. It is now about going into research and documenting the lives of our music legends’. So, that is where the other part of it came in; that it is not only about the music we loved in the house, but about taking it to another academic level and also turning it into something that could be very profitable.

 

How fulfilling is the profession as a music collector?

It has very fulfilling, even financially, of course. We have musicians that we have their sole rights to collect and sell their complete works. Evergreen Music is the only that can sell the complete works of the late Fela Anikulapo-Kuti in Nigeria. It is the same thing with Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey, the late Cardinal Rex Lawson, Dr Vicyor Olaiya and a whole lot of them. So, basically, its own financial fulfillment; emotional and psychological fulfillment that, ‘okay you are doing something that a lot of people thought they may not find, but it is now coming back to them’. That is like you are giving life back to people. So basically, it is fun.

You know what music is like: it is very spiritual and when now have people that are saying, ‘Evergreen, please we know that you are the only people that can get this music for me. I have been looking for it for ages,’ you get that sense of fulfillment. A very prominent Nigerian called me one day and he said he was looking for a particular music. He said the artist sang about twins and he has been looking for it since when he was a teacher in primary school. When he sang the song, the first person that came to my mind was the late Haruna Ishola. I looked for Gani, his son but he was indisposable then. But his own son, Tunde, told me that the song was not by his grandfather but by another man, Kasumu Adio; that he (Adio) had same voice like his own grandfather. I was like, ‘are you kidding me? Where can I get that piece of music?’ he told me and I looked for it and sent it to the man. The man said it was like I have added 20 years to his life. For me, that is fulfillment.

It was the same way a lot of people call me to ask for some particular songs. Recently, a guy in a group that I belong told me that he needed a particular track and I sent it to him. He just called me and started thanking me profusely. I now asked him, ‘was it a prescription by the doctor?’ He said no, but that it meant a lot to him. We have a lot of people that suffer nostalgia: there are some songs they have come across before and they want to listen to them but they don’t know where to find them again.

So, we have actually made ourselves like the largest collector of music in Africa. There is just no music that you are looking for, especially the old ones by the veterans that you cannot find with us. When you take a peep at our catalogue, you would be surprised at our collections as you discover that many of the old musicians don’t have their music again. But we found fulfillment in helping them to find such and keep for them. These old generation of musician and members of their families are coming back to us. We all know that a lot of people don’t look at the future; they don’t even hold on to what they have. But at a point, everybody has started looking back, asking us to help them dig into the past and give them this old generation of music.

 

It must be tasking moving around looking for this old generation of musicians and their works. What are the challenges?

I didn’t really so much get involved in the tasking aspect of the job as my father had already done a lot of that for me. Like I said earlier, he started picking and collecting music at the age of 12. He travels to different states to listen to these set of musicians playing life music: he records them when he goes to all those places. Of course, when he was much younger-he is 72 years old now-for the past 60 years, he has been collecting music all over the country. For somebody of his status who has been collecting music for 60 years, he is a monument and he is like an encyclopedia. So, what else would one not find with such a person? It has been a big task for him, doing that and he is now older. I have taken over from him and I want to take the collection of highlife and folklore music to the next level from there. We want to collect these works and keep them for posterity and even students from different universities can come over for their projects and theses on these icons and their work and also have direct connections, if possible, with some of these legends who are still alive.

 

How are you breaking even in the face of the crunchy national economy?

The music industry has changed in the sense that we sell CDs and the digital world has completely taken and now we are faced with the issue of the devil and the deep blue sea and how do we go from here. Going further, we are looking at it from another level entirely; we have done our work as collectors and we would continue to re-issue the works of these veterans. We are also looking at how we can build our own digital platform where all these songs can be bought online and people from all over the world can also have access to these works and the veterans can also have their royalties paid from these works.

So, we have always done our best to break even and we also want to move a step further as we plan to our foundation put in place and we see how people can also benefit from most of those works and all that.

 

Piracy has always been a big problem facing the music industry. Have you ever had any encounter with the problem?

In Evergreen Music Company, we always repackage our music, it has been difficult for the pirates to operate with us. And also there is the fact that pirates look at things that everybody wants, but our type of music is not for the weak-minded people; it is for a selected crowd. Also, pirates want something that is not very tasking, but ours is not just all about music; it is packaged as a collector’s item. It is something that you can keep also in museums, schools and libraries. What the pirate does is just putting a CD in a jacket and mass-produced. So, we have not really had any encounter with pirates.

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However, today the issue is no longer about anybody having any encounter with pirates as we are now fighting pirates that you don’t see. What people are fighting against then were pirates they can see in the market. But now, they are online; you don’t know who is downloading your songs; you don’t who is collecting your money. That is the height of piracy that has come to stay with us now. The physical piracy can be arrested by the government by drawing up some policies or make amendments to some of the existing platforms that the government had established to make them more effective in combating physical piracy.

In fact, piracy has become more deadly than it used to be, but we are preventing this by seeing how we can open a transparent digital platform where people can download and the musician knows what is coming to him or her. This is just like what we have been doing: we have terms of agreement that we run with all the artists on our platform and we are really successful and they are also happy with our terms.

 

Where did you hope to see highlife music in the face of the challenges posed by hip-hop music?

My father has given his life to High life and one of the things I found about that genre of music is that the practitioners, along the line; we used to have over 80 of them, but now we have just about five of them still active. This has been quite challenging that all those years, we just allowed the practitioners to die unsung. Our character here, we don’t celebrate people; we don’t care. Almost all of these people are now dead.

Now taking it to the next level, we need a lot of changing what it used to be like. The kind of highlife music in the generation of my parents is not what it has turned into in the contemporary times. Now we have contemporary highlife, while some others call it urban highlife. But we have to figure out how one can take it from that level to another brand or concept entirely.

 

Hip-Hop appears to have taken over while high life and even Juju and Fuji music seem to have been relegated. How did hope to put highlife music back into the consciousness of the younger generation of Nigerians?

What we planned to do is also to do collaboration between the old and the young and, with that, the consciousness would be there, like what some people did for Dr Victor Olaiya and Tuface Idibia. When you do such collaboration, you find out that the music will continue to be evergreen and exist. That is just one of the secrets.

We are also encouraging younger musicians to play more of Highlife music. There are a lot of them that are doing that but they are not doing it the way it used to be because as time is changing, like you rightly said, hip-pop culture has taken over.

So, there has to be a bit of fast tempo, like what Flavour and Bracket are doing. Funny enough, that also generated a lot of wide acceptance like what Flavour did with Shawale. And, of course, we can also help to educate young people, through concerts, to play more of highlife music.

 

Don’t you think that the drop in highlife could be linked to the fact that it is a tasking and more complicated genre of music, like what is happening to juju music which appears to be losing out to fuji music?

Really, highlife is not tasking. It is just that to be able to play highlife, from what I have experienced, you have to be a good musician and you must be good in composition because it is a genre that talks about happenings around you. You just have to be very creative to be able to compose songs that can stand the test of time, like what the late Adeolu Akinsanya did with Acada, the late Roy Chicago did with Wazobia, Dr Olaiya did with Omo Pupa and many others. The songs have to be evergreen. Most of our contemporary musicians compose their songs but there are a lot of songwriters who can compose for you, if you can’t. in the days of yore, those highlife musicians had very prolific writers-the likes of Adeolu Akinsanya who trained Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey on how to write songs and you can see that many of Obey’s songs are evergreen.

Essentially, you have to know how to write good music. Then, the instrumentation; you must have good instrumentalists; highlife is not moinmoin that you would just gather some drums. It has its own instruments in terms of the horns, percussions- it is a collection of different things. That is where the laziness may come in but if you are determined that this is the way you want to go, there are still a lot of bands around that play good highlife. Basically, there is nothing to hard in highlife music but it is because the society has changed and people now do more of hip-pop which you can easily mime. Highlife is not the type of music that you can mime: it is a culture, just like the Afrobeat. People would like to see you on stage and see the arrangement, the horns men, the drums, the trumpets and saxophones, the guitarists. It is also expensive to manage a highlife band now. Hip-pop has taken over because it does not take much: it is digital unlike Highlife or Afrobeat.