Vintage Palmwine
We've just enjoyed the release of a long-unavailable collection of early 80s Ghanaian highlife. Ghana is the home of palmwine guitar music, named after a local beverage made from the fermented sap of the oil palm tree. It's a charmingly relaxed acoustic folk style which has relatives in other parts of West Africa, as fans of the late great Sierra Leonian musician S.E.Rogie will already know. Palmwine music was hugely popular in Ghana before the advent of electric highlife guitar bands in the 1960s, but there have been periodic revivals of interest in it, aspects of which this compilation of three key exponents of the style documents. Anyway, palmwine music was the forerunner of highlife itself, something which the inclusion of the famous highlife number "Yaa Amponsah" (used by Paul Simon on his 1990 Rhythm Of The Saints album) demonstrates. These recordings were made by the Accra-based producer and musician Professor John Collins, mostly at his legendary 4-track Bokoor Studio between 1983 and 2000. Collins can be heard discreetly playing a small percussion instrument called an asratoa on some of the six numbers by the late T.O. Jazz, who passed away in 2001. His slightly plaintive but appealing singing is also accompanied by distinctive Ghanaian harmonies/backing vocals, his own typically palmwine thumb-and-forefinger picked acoustic guitar, percussion and the booming sounds of the giant premprensua hand piano. A relative of the Cuban marimbula and Jamaican kalimba, it is similarly used in place of a bass. Three artists provide a total of 14 tracks reflecting the closing moments of a golden age in West African music - T O Jazz, Koo Nimo and Kwaa Mensah. Of the three, Nimo is the only one to have had an album available in recent years so this collection restores to us a vital part of the Ghanaian music culture as well as bringing us some diamonds of acoustic dance music.