In the 1950s and 1960s, if you wanted to dance in Lagos, you went where Bobby Benson was playing. The former sailor had returned home with a love of jazz, big bands and showmanship, and he built a band that mixed Western swing with West African rhythms. His nightclub, the Caban Bamboo, became one of the city’s most famous venues. His song Taxi Driver became a highlife classic. Many of the musicians who later led Nigeria’s top bands learned their trade with him.
Early life and a new sound
Bobby Benson was born in Nigeria in 1920. As a young man, he worked as a sailor, travelling widely and encountering jazz and dance music abroad. He returned to Lagos in the late 1940s and formed a band, later known as the Bobby Benson Jam Session Orchestra. Benson’s band blended highlife with jazz, swing and Caribbean influences, using brass, saxophones and electric guitars.
His song Taxi Driver became one of the most popular highlife songs of its era and is still played today.
Caban Bamboo and highlife's golden age
He opened the Caban Bamboo nightclub in Lagos, which became a centre of the city’s nightlife. Many musicians who passed through his bands went on to fame, including Victor Olaiya and Roy Chicago. Benson was known for his showmanship, comedy and theatrical performances. Lagos in the 1950s and early 1960s was a centre of highlife, with bands competing for audiences in clubs and hotels.
As musical tastes changed with juju, Afrobeat and soul, Benson’s popularity declined, though he remained respected. He died in 1983. He is remembered as one of the fathers of modern Nigerian popular music.
Afrobeat and his recordings
The big-band highlife tradition he helped build fed into later styles, including Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat. Benson’s shows combined music, dance and comedy, which was unusual for Lagos bands at the time. His performances drew audiences from across the city’s growing middle class, and his name became a byword for a good night out. Many of his recordings have been reissued for new listeners.
Bobby Benson brought the sounds of the world’s ports home to Lagos. The dance floors he filled became the classrooms for a generation of Nigerian bandleaders.
