In 1956, the most famous trumpeter in the world walked into an Accra club and played with the man Ghanaians called the King of Highlife.
Louis Armstrong was touring Africa. In Accra, he met Emmanuel Tettey Mensah, known as E.T. Mensah, a trumpeter and bandleader who had spent the previous decade turning highlife into the sound of the Gold Coast’s cities. They played together at Mensah’s club, and the night became one of the best-known moments in the history of West African popular music: jazz’s greatest star meeting the man who had taken jazz and made it African.
A pharmacist with a trumpet
Mensah was born in Accra in 1919. He learned music as a boy in school bands and played in the Accra Orchestra. He also trained as a pharmacist, and for part of his early career he worked as one while playing music at night.
During the Second World War, Allied soldiers were stationed in the Gold Coast, and British and American servicemen brought swing and jazz to Accra’s clubs. Mensah played with army bands and learned from the swing arrangements and the professional standards of the military musicians. After the war, he took those lessons into a new kind of dance band.
The Tempos
The band was the Tempos. Among its early members was the drummer Guy Warren, who later became famous as Kofi Ghanaba and played with jazz musicians in the United States. Together they built what became known as modern dance-band highlife in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The Tempos mixed local melodies and rhythms with swing, calypso and Latin music, played on trumpets, saxophones, guitar, bass and drums. The songs were sung in Ga, Twi, Fante and English, and they were written to be danced to. Hits such as “All For You” became standards.
Across West Africa
The Tempos toured across West Africa, including Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Liberia, and their records sold throughout the region. Their influence on Nigerian music was large. Nigerian highlife bandleaders of the 1950s and 1960s drew on the dance-band sound the Tempos had built, and that tradition later fed into the music of a young Fela Kuti, who started out playing highlife before inventing Afrobeat.
Independence and after
Highlife was the soundtrack of Ghana’s independence era, and Mensah was one of its best-known faces. As tastes changed in the 1960s and 1970s, with guitar-band highlife, soul and later Afrobeat rising, Mensah’s dance-band style faded from the charts. He was rediscovered in the 1980s, when a new generation of listeners in Europe and America went looking for the roots of African pop, and his old recordings were reissued.
E.T. Mensah died in 1996. Anthologies of his music still carry the title Ghanaians gave him while he was alive: King of Highlife.
What the Armstrong night meant
The meeting in 1956 has been retold many times because of what it symbolised. An African American jazz giant came to Africa and found a musician who had absorbed jazz and turned it into something new. Armstrong later spoke of feeling a connection to his ancestors on the trip.
Ghana would become independent the following March. The music played at many of the independence dances was the highlife Mensah and the Tempos had built.
