GWEN ANSELL pays tribute to the man who introduced the sounds of West Africa to the world
THE king of highlife is dead. Emmanuel Tetch (ET) Mensah, trumpeter, saxophonist, bandleader, composer (and, in periods of musical layoff, a practising pharmacist), has died in his birthplace of Accra, Ghana, at the age of 77.
Highlife music is the archetypal anglophone West African sound. It’s still one of the most popular musics of the region. Heard everywhere, from beerhall and marketplace to State House, highlife, like its cousin marabi here, shaped Western dance- band sounds, brass orchestrations and guitar licks to African tastes.
And, just as marabi music made its greatest strides when “Zuluboy” Cele perfected the combination of African voicing and Western instrumentation, so highlife — established in the 1920s — made the same creative leap in the early 1950s. And the architect was ET.
“What happened,” said the man himself, “was that we urgently wanted an indigenous rhythm to replace the fading foreign music of waltz, rhumba, etc. We evolved a music type relying on basic African rhythms: a criss-cross African cultural sound. No one can really lay claim to its creation. It had always been there entrenched in West African culture. What I did was to give highlife world acceptance.”
Even this mild claim was uncharacteristic for a man whom colleagues recall as modest and self-effacing when not behind his horn. Unlike more Westernised ensembles, his band, the Tempos, featured an augmented rhythm section and lyrics in Ghanaian indigenous languages like Twi, Fanta and Ga.
By the mid-Fifties, as the only professional band on the then-Gold Coast, they were touring the region and ET had made his first trip to England. In 1956, ET shared a Ghanaian stage with Louis Armstrong, who paid fulsome tribute to his skills.
Always an innovator, ET returned from semi- retirement in the late Sixties with a new Tempos band incorporating rhumba and reggae influences to appeal to younger audiences. But by the late Eighties his health had begun to fail and two years ago he was confined to a wheelchair by a stroke.
Popular Accra paper Public Agenda this week described ET’s legacy as “a national treasure”. For fans, there will be a sadness, in the words of his most famous song, “All for you, ET.”
ET Mensah’s recordings have been reissued on, among others, the Sterns Africa label. Check specialist African record stores like Yeoville’s Cadence Tropicale to hear the original highlife sound of Mensah and contemporaries like Guy Warren