“Please, let's have me and Ayo for a while. I like to perform some jazz standards,” says Jimi Solanke (b. July 4, 1942), one of Nigeria's folklorists and musicians, to members of his eight-player band. It is July 4, 2013, and the group is performing as part of a program celebrating Solanke's seventy-first birthday. Solanke is well-known in the Nigerian music and entertainment industry by many stage names, such as “Baba Agba,” “Uncle Jimi,” and “Master Storyteller,” and his band draws from a wide range of styles like highlife, jazz, and folk. While I double as the second keyboard player on the group's African popular music songs, my primary job at this particular gig is to act as a jazz keyboard accompanist. As the other band members leave the stage, Solanke and I begin with “Fly Me to the Moon,” one of his favorite jazz standards. This is followed by...
“We Had Our Own Jazz Bands”: A Five-Bar Intro to Jazz in Lagos, 1950–19901
OLADELE AYORINDE is a visiting assistant professor of ethnomusicology at the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. Located primarily in South Africa and Nigeria, his research explores music and music-making as a window into contemporary Africa's complex social, political, and economic development processes. His research interests include urban ethnography, African music and cultures, popular music and music industries, economic ethnomusicology, cultural policy and management, sound studies, Western classical music, the Global South, the political economy of everyday life, archiving and documentation, and issues of transformation and decolonization in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Black diaspora.
Oladele Ayorinde; “We Had Our Own Jazz Bands”: A Five-Bar Intro to Jazz in Lagos, 1950–1990. Jazz and Culture 1 June 2023; 6 (1): 27–51. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/25784773.6.1.02
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