“I WANT to help educate Ghanaians, not to see themselves or their music as inferior compared to the Western world, but to embrace themselves and achieve whatever they worked towards in their own music.”
 
So declares Ghanaian trumpeter and composer Peter Somuah, born in Accra, Ghana, where his mother was a clothes trader and his father worked for the Ghana Poultry Farms Association. He had an uncle in England who was a guitarist and named Peter on a visit to Ghana.
 
He began on trumpet at school, also playing drums, saxophones, atenteban (traditional bamboo flute), djembe and xylophone. “As a teenager I really enjoyed brassband and highlife music,” he says. “I played with brassbands in the street and listened to highlife all day on the radio.”
 
A friend introduced him to jazz when he was 16. “I went to his house and he showed me videos of Miles, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. I was in awe as I watched them and said to myself, ‘I want to play like that!’ I started imitating them even though I had no idea what they were playing. I transcribed with my ears, without sheet music, inspired by Miles’s Birth of the Cool and Bitches Brew, Parker’s Now’s the Time and Dizzy’s Groovin’ High”.
 
When he left school he found a side-job in a cycle repair shop, “while I earned money too in highlife bands in bars, at weddings and funerals.” His partner had moved back to the Netherlands, so he went to Rotterdam. “I met some people there who were passionate about music. We jammed and they invited me to their gigs, playing jazz standards and original music.”
 
His new album, Highlife, is full of African fire, audacity, joy and critical consciousness. “Ghana’s musicians created highlife music during colonial times. The British had military bands which played styles from outside Ghana — waltz, bolero, samba etc, and Ghanaian musicians continued those influences with traditional drumming patterns, creating this new genre called Highlife.
 
“Initially it was the colonial elite who got to enjoy the music in their fancy dance halls, (hence the name from ‘high life’). But over time many sub-genres emerged that were played in the villages. Then “Burger Highlife” came in the ’80s when many musicians emigrated to Hamburg because of the military regime’s evening curfew, which stopped them performing and earning an income.
 
“In the Netherlands, I found musicians very open to explore music outside of their regular circle. We rehearsed many Ghanaian rhythms, then in 2022 our band made a trip to Ghana to connect with local musicians.”

Thus, the album has deeply educative qualities which along with some hot playing from all members, includes snatches of vocals and interviews with highlife veterans like Pat Thomas, 93 year-old griot Koo Nimo and Gyedu-Blay Ambolley, while the track Mental Slavery recalls the album by US multi-saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk — Volunteered Slavery — in which Rahsaan satirised the way in which mentalities are so easily bludgeoned, and dominated unconsciously by continuous hostile alien culture.
 
“My music is full of influences from many genres,” asserts Somuah: “jazz, funk, highlife, Afrobeat, Latin, soul, Hiphop, gospel. I call it ‘Global Sounds’. Hopefully we’ll soon be playing it all in Britain.”
 
After Hearing this album, I’ll be first in the queue. And what about the prospect of playing alongside another virtuoso of Ghanaian roots who has taken jazz to his heartsblood, Nottingham saxophonist Tony Kofi? “Yes, I’d love to play with Tony,” he exclaims. And I’d love to hear his searing trumpet with Kofi’s rampaging Africa-rooted horn: that’s something certainly to hope for!

Highlife is released by Act Records