Afrobeat with jazz styles blend into something fresh and natural, like they were always meant to dance together

ACT Music

Peter Somuah – Trumpet, Vocals, Cowbell; Jesse Schilderink – Tenor Saxophone; Anton de Bruin – Keyboard, Rhodes, Synth; Jens Meijer – Drums; Danny Rombout – Congas, Shekere; Marijn van de Ven – Double & Electric Bass; Lamisi Akuka – Vocals; Thomas Botchway – Talking Drum & Shekere on #9; Pat Thomas – Vocals; Gyedu-Blay Ambolley – Vocals; Bright Osei Baffour – Guitar on #02, #05, and #09

You know when music just hits different? That’s what trumpeter Peter Somuah’s third album, HIGHLIFE, feels like. It’s more than just great jazz, it’s a bridge between worlds, weaving Ghana’s musical soul with modern jazz in a way that feels both rooted and revolutionary.

Growing up in Accra before settling in Rotterdam, he picked up the trumpet at 14 and dove into the city’s pulsing highlife and reggae scene. But then Miles Davis happened, and then Freddie Hubbard and Roy Hargrove. These jazz giants sparked something in him, a vision of what could happen when jazz and highlife dance together.

Somuah’s 2022 debut, OUTER SPACE, mixed jazz, funk, and electronics with West African grooves and last year’s LETTER TO THE UNIVERSE pushed further, blending highlife, post-bop, and urban beats into a rich, genre-spanning fusion.

Somuah kept the core sextet from his previous two albums: Jesse Schilderink on saxophone, keyboardist Anton de Bruin, drummer Jens Meijer, conga player Danny Rombout, and Marijn van de Ven holding down the bass. Sure, none of them grew up in Ghana, but as Somuah puts it, “that doesn’t matter at all. Their deep passion for highlife and Afrobeat, and the feeling they’ve developed for this music, are what truly count.”

The album opens with 93-year-old Koo Nimo talking about how Ghanaian musicians took those British colonial waltzes, sambas, and boleros and transformed them into something uniquely their own. It’s a perfect setup for what’s about to unfold.

From here another highlife luminary Pat Thomas brings his “golden voice” to the sultry sway of ‘We Give Thanks,’ a tune with a Cuban-jazz swagger and those Fela farfisa organ licks that spark the album into life.

Speaking of legends, Gyedu-Blay Ambolley, who pioneered ‘hiplife’ (rap within highlife) back in the seventies, brings his weathered purr to “Chop Chop.” His raw vocals cut through a joyous soca groove while Somuah and Schilderink’s horns weave playfully around the melody. When Ambolley starts taking aim at political greed, it’s a sharp reminder that highlife was always music of resistance.

Imagine Tony Allen’s signature shuffle meeting Miles Davis’s minimalist trumpet, that’s ‘Drumbeat.’ It shouldn’t work, but it absolutely does. Then “Conqueror” comes in hot with this in-your-face Afro-funk that somehow ends up swinging like nobody’s business.

‘Re-imagined,’ takes a smooth bossa and gives it these sharp brass punches somehow still keeping it cool. Somuah even steps up to the mic on “Mental Slavery,” and it just works.

On paper, mixing heavy Afrobeat with jazz might not have worked. But in Somuah’s hands, these styles blend into something fresh and natural, like they were always meant to dance together