Chris Ajilo is no doubt one of the pioneers of highlife music in Nigeria. He was also involved in music productions and arrangement with the Polygram Records for a long time. For many years, from 1955 when he began his musical career, his voice resonated in many studios and radio stations across the globe. Today, he is retired but not tired as he told Edozie Udeze in this encounter which took place during one of his outings at Ikeja, Lagos
Yes,” he began, his voice as strong and as quizzical as ever, “I am retired. I now live in my small flat or, if you like, call it a hut in Ijebu-Ijesha, Osun State. I get up in the morning, I go for my walk for one hour. Most people in my area call me Baba Soldier. The kids around call me Baba Soldier and I call them Baby Soldiers. Now I teach music and take myself away from trouble.”
At 85 years plus, Ajilo still strides about with unbridled agility typical of the life of a born entertainer. He still loves to sing and dance and play his favourite instrument which is the trumpet. Even though he stoops a bit, life to him is more meaningful if one does much to limit some excesses in life. However, he looked back and forth and took a swipe at the music and entertainment industry in Nigeria. “Oh music will always grow,” he enthused, smiling. “It is either going to the right or to the left. But I personally believe in good music. I was trained as a musician and I know how far, how difficult it is to be a professional musician.”
He then zeroed his attention to the present situation in the industry and said, “many people believe that music is an easy thing. You just know how to sing a song, and then you become a star. But I don’t believe in all that. You have to learn music the proper way and that was the way we were taught. That is why I now have my typical school of music at Ijebu-Ijesha. It is not an academy yet, but I pray it will get to that stage someday soon. But there are many schools today that they cannot even teach music as a subject. I am only lucky that I grew up in Lagos. I was born in Lagos and the school I went to, that is CMS Grammar School, Lagos, had a good music classes for students up to form three.”
So for three years, music was made compulsory in school. This situation offered many students the time to be exposed to music on time. That was how and where Ajilo’s love for and devotion to music began and he promptly decided to make it a career. “So that was the foundation we had. And you need such foundation even more now to build the music industry. It is on that sort of foundation that you can build and ensure that the younger ones get it right. That, indeed, is what has kept me going all these years,” he reminisced.
He still feels that the foundation of a good thing is the fundamental value for growth. “A lot of the musicians we have now do not have the rudiment and that is why most of the lyrics and messages you have do not inspire the soul. And without that, without that foundation, what can you possibly be? You can’t build on anything. The music of today, they deal mainly on rhythm, but where they do not even deal on rhythm, they dwell on repetition. Many of their words are meaningless and they dwell so much on copying. So what do you say? You cannot compare what we had before with what obtains nowadays. When you talk of highlife music, for instance, it is a music that has good lyrics, good danceable rhythm and it has a form. I was a producer, a staff producer at Polygram, the only one all over the world, for many years. I was the only one and with that I am still eager and interested in teaching people what is real music.”
He went on:”oh, highlife music is not dead and it cannot die. What is happening today is tit bits from here and there. And then they mix it up and call it something else. But highlife is our traditional music. In other words, the whole of West Africa, highlife is the music. Nobody can tell me it originated from Ghana or elsewhere or even from Cameroon. It is all African music which has been with us from time immemorial. And the main thing is the message, the music itself and the lyrics. However, you cannot have highlife in the calibre of the big names we had before. Why? This is so because the people we have today do not have the cognate foundation. Some of my students do well today because they took time to learn the rudiments. There was one of them who once lived in Ibadan, but today he has his own school of music in Kaduna. And he has been graduating other musicians. Today I have some of my students who are even playing in churches all over the place. That is what we need, to expose these younger ones to this foundation right on time.”
With the name of his school as Chris Ajilo School of Music, he has taken it beyond the level of instructing only people within his area. “Oh, yes, people come from far and near to learn. It is located at Odo-Oja area of Ijebu-Ijesha. It is in my own house. However, when it comes to having big recording companies in the league of what we need before… well, I was invited to work with Ponogram. In fact, before then, the first Philips recording studios was in Lagos. And the engineer who put it up for Philips, I was with him, assisting him to put it up. Then I had my own band. But what I am trying to say is that the first Philips actually opened doors for other recording companies like the Ponogram/Polygram in Nigeria. You see, if you are a trained musician, you are open to work in other departments of the entertainment industry. But if you don’t have, then your knowledge is limited. From 1979 up to 1996, I was with Polygram to produce a lot of musicians.”
Ajilo believes that if more schools offer to teach music it will help to develop the industry and offer more jobs to the youths. Yet, his greatest fear is that we do not have even enough music teachers to face the task. “All you can do for us is to propagate this idea. But who are those who are going to teach? Where are they? That, in itself, becomes a bigger challenge. So, what I am doing is building up gradually. And I will tell you today that by the grace of God, we will have an academy where we teach music in Ijebu-Ijesha.”
As a young man, Ajilo was billed to study Engineering at the Birmingham School of Technology. But while there, the natural lure for music took hold of him that even his mother told him that he may not amount to anything good. “I belonged to the youth club in England then and each time we had a programme all I was interested in was to watch the band play. Then, one day I decided I might as well go back to music. And I wrote to my mother and she screamed and said you want to leave engineering for music? Do you want to come back to become an Alagbe? Alagbe means I may be playing and put out a plate to solicit for money. For that alone, I never replied my mother for one solid year. And I went straight back to London into music school. Since then, there is going back. It was in August 1955, that I finally made up my mind to go into music full time. That was in Lagos but before then I was leading different bands in England.”
In his days, most of his contemporaries were known to be resident bands in hotels and brothels. But Ajilo disassociated himself from such. “Mine was different,” he opined confidently. “I was never resident in any big hotel. I was fond of going on tours round the country. My territory was not limited. I went up to the East, to the West, to the North, up to Ghana, playing good music and getting good attention. But the only hotels where I ever became resident were the Mainland hotel, and then Federal Palace hotel in Victoria Island. During the Independence Day celebration, I was leading the national band. The band was formed by our union. I was the president of Nigerian Union of Musicians. It is PMAN today. But how does it become PMAN today? Yes, I will tell you.”
He delved into the history of the musician union at that point in time and why it finally came to be known as Performing Musicians Association of Nigeria (PMAN). “In those days, even though people could form unions, but government at a point said, oh, we want industrial unions. And then the registrar of trade unions said the Musician Union of Nigeria should join with Radio and Television Union of Nigeria (RATAWO). The members of radio and television people were working as salary earners with government. We musician were different and they withdrew our certificate. Few years later we came together to form what we have today as PMAN. It is called Performing Musicians Employers Association of Nigeria. We were not then registered as a union but as an association… Thereafter, they gave us the acronym PMAN and dropped E. And that was how it came to be.
“Even though today I am 85 years and seven months, my interest in music has not waned. You see, in my school I even have a 72-year-old man who is taking lectures and he is also the owner of a private primary school. He even has his own children in universities. That is the beauty of life. Never give up. What I am saying is that if our musicians can put down their pride and learn proper the rudiments and theories of music, we will go a long way indeed.”
He is also a man who confessed that God has been gracious to him. “God has been good to me. I have two children; a boy and a girl. One is in the United States of America with her family. Although she has the flair for music, she is not a musician. They have their children. My son at the age of three picked up a trumpet and blew it. I never forced them to take up music. My daughter sings well but she is not a professional musician.”