There is no way anyone can talk about highlife music in Nigeria without paying homage to Orlando Owoh, Osita Osadebe and Nico Mbarga. These legends were pioneers of the Nigerian highlife sound in the 60s, 70s and 80s. With hits like Owoh’s “Iyawo Olele,” Osadebe’s “Osondi Owendi,” and Mbarga’s “Sweet Mother,” these legendary musicians changed the soundscape of their time and are still influencing today’s artists.
Orlando Owoh
Originally starting out as a carpenter, Orlando owoh’s musical journey began in 1958 when he was hired to sing and play drums for the Kola Ogunmola Theatre Group. He soon started his own band, the Omimah band, and a 30-year plus career was born spawning over 40 albums and hundreds of songs. Amongst the most popular are Brother ye se, Day by day, Diana, Ebe mo be ori mi, Egi nado, Elese (sinner), Fiba fun Eledumare and Ma pa mi l’oruko da.
As the influence of newer styles like Juju and Fuji began to gain steam and highlife started to fade into the background, Owoh morphed his band to keep with the times, iterating from the original Omimah band to the Young Kenneries and the African Kenneries International. In the mid-1980s, he started to add a bit of political commentary to his music and got sent to jail for 18 months on charges of cocaine possession. He maintained his innocence till his death from health complications in 2008.
“I cannot forget the experience. It’s so painful,” he told journalists of the experience. “They say I sniff cocaine, it’s a lie. … Do I smoke Igbo [marijuana]? No, I don’t smoke Igbo, what I smoke is Ajuwa. Ajuwa is our local herb.”
Owoh toured the United Kingdom and appeared in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy. He also performed in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s even going as far as releasing a record in the US – Dr. Ganja’s Polytonality Blues, a 1995 reissue of earlier Omimah Band and Young Kenneries tracks. He was signed to Decca, Electromat and Shanu Olu labels, constantly churning out hits. Baba himself stopped counting his hits after a certain point, but estimates put it at over 40. Chief Orlando Owoh passed away on November 4, 2008 at the Ikeja General Hospital, after battling the complications of a stroke.
Osita Osadebe
Though he didn’t invent highlife music, Chief Osita Osadebe added merengue and rumba sounds and made that package his own. Born in 1936, Osadebe was a chorister in his church as a boy, played in the school band and was interested in classical music. “The man who mainly inspired me into singing was the late [Nat King] Cole, an American,” Osadebe said in a 2004 interview with The Daily Sun. “He sang in English, Spanish and other languages. I loved his music.”
Osadebe started his career singing in nightclubs as part of The Empire Rhythm Orchestra, led by E. C. Arinze, and that is where he built up most of his music skills. In 1958, he found national success with his recording “Adamma,” a tribute to a beautiful woman. He also released his debut album in the same year and would go on to write over 500 songs, more than half of which were released commercially.
After the Biafra War of the 1960s, tribal tension permeated the country and musicians only had limited locations to perform. Not Osadebe. Such was the level of his success that he still performed all over the country to sold out crowds. “He managed to come back after the civil war when there was a rift in the country … when really no one else did,” said Andrew Frankel, who produced three of Osadebe’s albums, in an LA Times interview. “The poetry of his music and the philosophic way he speaks about life … really set him apart.”
As he became more established, Osadebe’s music began to mature and take on social commentary similar to, but not as confrontational, as Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s. “Osadebe succeeded in breaking away from the conventional big band format established by the pioneers of the music, a format that favoured melodic progressions that were in the common meter, church hymnal tradition. He succeeded in completely transforming highlife into the call-and-response pattern of African music,” wrote Benson Idonije, Fela’s former band manager, in a 2007 obituary piece in The Guardian.
In 1984, he released “Osondi Owendi,” which was the second biggest-selling record in the history of Nigeria at the time. It is also Osadebe’s biggest record. He and his band toured the US twice and released a 1996 hit called “Kedu America”. The highlife icon died on May 11, 2007 of lung failure at a hospital in the US. He was survived by five wives and several children.
Nico Mbarga
Prince Nico Mbarga was a product of his Nigerian and Cameroonian parents, adopting both cultures in his sound. His biggest single “Sweet Mother” sold over 13 million copies and is widely regarded as the most successful Nigerian song of all time. It sold more than any of the Beatles’ hit singles and it all came after Mbarga had been dropped by his label at the time, EMI.
With his soulful vocals set to the light melodies of his acoustic guitar, Mbarga created a unique hybrid of Igbo and Zairean guitar playing and uplifting highlife rhythms. He had found music as a child listening to the highlife sounds coming from his father’s radio but he truly fell in love in the five years he spent working as a band boy in Cameroon during the Nigerian civil war. He made his professional debut as a member of a hotel band, the Melody Orchestra, in 1970.
When he returned to Nigeria after the war, Mbarga formed his group, Rocafil Jazz, signed a contract to play every Sunday at Onitsha’s Plaza Hotel, and began to mix with stars like Stephen Osadebe and Bobby Benson. He got picked up by EMI in 1973 and released his first hit “I No Go Marry My Papa,” about a daughter disagreeing with her parents over the choice of her husband. But the bands failure to turn in any new hits resulted in their contract with EMi being dropped. Less than two years later however, Mbarga wrote “Sweet Mother”, released it under the Onitsha-based Roger All Stars label and his life never remained the same.
Between 1971 and 1981, they made nine albums but never could replicate the success of “Sweet Mother.” Mbarga temporarily relocated to London in 1982 and played with London-based highlife band the Ivory Coasters and Cameroonian vocalist Louisiana Tilda. Unfortunately, despite owning his own Polydor-backed imprint on his return to Nigeria, he never could quite recapture the previous heights of his career. The Rocafil band disbanded partly because of a money dispute but also because the small band was unprepared for the success of “Sweet Mother.”
So he moved back to his hometown of Ikom in Cross River State, set up two hotels and managed them for the rest of his life. Still chasing the former glory of his career, he managed to reassemble the original members of the band again after a ten-year hiatus for a scheduled tour of the United States. He was on his way to pick up the visas when he ran out of fuel and took an okada. Mbarga was struck by a car while on the bike and would spend the next two weeks in and out of consciousness until he finally died on June 24, 1997. He was survived by his wife, concubine and their children.
With colourful stories, lives that have impacted generation after and music that has withstood the test of time, Orlando Owoh, Osita Osadebe and Nico Mbarga are luminaries of one of the most enduring genres of Nigerian music. They lived, they loved and they performed. Their legacies will continue to live on and influence the art of music making in Nigeria.