[Today: Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe lives the highlife...]
Compiling seven songs recorded between 1970 and 1985, Sound Time is an outstanding overview of the music of Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe and his Nigerian Soundmakers – the foremost practitioners of the style of music known as highlife. Working in and around the Nigerian capital of Lagos, Osadebe and his group streamlined a fusion of reggae, calypso, soul, and funk into rhythmically gymnastic sounds that both reflected and updated the traditional popular music of Nigeria.
Highlife was the undisputed sound of West African music prior to 1970. When civil war broke out in the Biafra region of Nigeria in 1967, the resulting three years of fighting left the Lagos music scene decimated. Into this breach stepped Fela Kuti and King Sunny Ade, the main architects of the musical styles that became known respectively as Afrobeat and JuJu music. But Osadebe and his group played whenever possible, adding subtle tweaks to the highlife formula that eventually paid off in strong record sales. Indeed, while Kuti and Ade are more well known to western ears, Osadebe enjoyed a long string of hits in his homeland during the 70’s and into the mid 80’s.
Osadebe, who passed away in May of 2007, was known as the ‘Doctor Of Hypertension’ for his ability to move a crowd. “The man who mainly inspired me into singing was the late [Nat King] Cole, an American,” Osadebe told the Nigerian Sun News in 2004. “He sang in English, Spanish, and other languages. I loved his music.” Of course, Osadebe’s music – heavy on wah-wah, with endlessly funky grooves and lyrics that wax philosophically on the politics of race – sounds nothing like Nat Cole, and has much more in common with James Brown’s music of the 1970’s. In much the same way that Brown’s Star Time is the defining document of American funk, Sound Time is the essential bedrock of the Nigerian highlife sound, an album as enjoyable as it is groundbreaking.
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Tags: Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe, Nigerian Soundmakers, Sound Time
