I must confess right at the onset that I had absolutely no knowledge of Mohbad until the day after his death was announced. That being the case, I must confess that his name in the title of this piece is no more than a convenient peg on which to hang this article. After all, I have very little knowledge of the artiste and even less about his artistic work. These notwithstanding, it would be negligent for a regular columnist to ignore the furore which the passing of Mohbad has generated in virtually all media outlets over the last two weeks.
The first time ever that I heard about Mohbad, real name, Ilerioluwa Oladimeji Aloba was in a news feed which announced his sudden death. What drew my immediate attention to the subjet was his age. There is some element of waste when a twenty-seven year old person is reported dead especially when the death was sudden as it was in this case. The first thought in such circumstances is that there is more to that event than meets the eye. In the case of Mohbad such suspicion was justified by the fact that the young man had questioned the status of his safety shortly before he died in what has turned out to be inexplicable circumstances . Given this background, it is puzzling that he was rushed into his grave less than twenty-four hours after he died. It has even been said that his father had to be persuaded from lowering his son’s body into the grave as late as midnight on the day of his demise. One wonders why there was the need to dispose of his body with such undignified haste.
Even under the most normal of circumstances, there is a great deal of sadness attached to the death of a twenty-seven year old. At that age, one is confidently expected to be in prime physical, mental and psychological condition. At that age one is expected to be on the threshold of one career or the other after a long period of tutelage. At that age one would have invested in training for a career and thinking of settling down to begin to shoulder marital responsibilities. To put it into proper context, death at twenty-seven is a tragedy of monumental proportions not only for the immediate family of the victim but to society as well. Up till then, the dead person would have been a consumer of public amenities and just about to become a contributor to societal needs. It was from these points of view that I considered the report of the sudden demise of Mohbad.
Within twenty-four hours after I became aware of the person however, it became clear to me that Mohbad was not just any young man but one who had contributed much more to society than your typical twenty-seven year old. On the contrary, he was a big star, shining uncommonly brightly in a Milky way of stars, a young man of exceptional promise which made his demise all the more painful from both personal and societal points of view. I have always been in awe of people with any form of musical talent probably because my only talent in that direction is severely restricted to listening to the product of those to whom the Muses have been kind enough to admit into the brotherhood of Orpheus. He it was who was so gifted that he was able to charm his way into the underworld there to seduce Hades with his talent. He gave such a performance before the the Lord of the Underworld that his wife Euripides who had died was given leave to go back to the land of the living. Such is the power of music that according to the immortal bard, music is the food of love which sickens and dies in its absence. I have always wished that I had a modicum of musical talent but having lived so long without it, I have learnt to come to terms with my condition.
I have been a lover of music all my life, since I was first fascinated by the music of the young Victor Olaiya singing Mumude around 1958. However, I really arrived on the music scene in those halcyon days of the sixties, just after independence when music of all genres began to shake our air waves. Music was not only coming from Ghana, Britain and the USA but it was being made and released by a crowd of musicians right here in Nigeria, so much so that the music aficionado was spoilt for choice. Those were the heydays of highlife and there is little doubt that the high priest of highlife was Bobby Benson.
Bobby Benson had started his career as an entertainer in the period after World War II and formed a big band which played a broad repertoire of music styles and was fronted by his wife who danced to the melodies of her husband’s band. However, it was the time that highlife was taking shape and Bobby Benson became a pioneer of this genre which was to become very popular in both Ghana and Nigeria. It is not therefore coincidental that Bobby Benson who played trumpet, saxophone and piano had space in his band for a bevvy of young musicians who can now be regarded as having provided a backbone for the music genre which over a span of more than seventy years has refused to die. It might have changed shape and evolved in other directions but it has survived all kinds of tribulations and after all said and done, there is Afrobeats today because there was highlife and people like Bobby Benson who brought it to life. Bobby Benson was not just an entertainer who played highlife but a mentor to some of the legends who left their mark on the development of that musical genre. The alumni of the Bobby Benson school school of highlife music reads like a list of who is who in the field.
One of his earliest mentees was Victor Olaiya who in his prime was reverently referred to as the evil genius of highlife and was closest to being named as the official highlife musician to the nation as he played several gigs on official occasions. He was on the bandstand when Queen Elizabeth came visiting in 1956 and shared the bandstand with the great, Louis Armstrong to celebrate Nigeria’s independence in 1960. He was back three years later to celebrate with the country when she attained the status of a Republic. One other factor that is worthy of note is Victor Olaiya’s longevity as he was active on the music scene for more than sixty swinging years as band leader and front line trumpeter. There was also a time when he joined the soul music bandwagon at a time when that American export was sweeping the world.
Another Bobby Benson alumnus was Victor Uwaifo who first came to public attention for his high jump exploits as a student of St, Gregory’s College in the fifties. Known for his virtuosity with the guitar, Uwaifo turned to, or rather, combined his music with academics and went all the way to becoming a Professor of fine arts at the University of Benin. Joromi, perhaps his best known work was a monster hit in 1966 but has retained a freshness which has continued to impress generations unborn at the time it was composed.
John Akintola Ademuwagun who left the sedate setting of the classroom for the hurly burly music world also served tutelage under Bobby Benson. Better known as Roy Chicago, he was one of the better known bandleaders in the sixties as his Abalabi Rhythm. Dandies fronted by the velvety voiced Tunde Osofisan churned out chart busters one after the other with onilegogoro composed by Jimi Solanke being the biggest hit of them all. At over eighty, Jimi Solanke is still making music in his own inimitable fashion. Roy Chicago’s greatest claim to fame was that he not only reached into the richness of Yoruba culture to create his own unique sound but somewhere along the way he introduced gángan into highlife.
Another product of the Bobby Benson school was the maestro from the creeks, the unforgettable Cardinal Rex Jim Lawson. Just writing that name has led to an attack of goose pimples brought on by the memory of the smoothness of his music. For good measure, Rex Lawson played trumpet with both Victor Olaiya and Roy Chicago before forming his own band. Unfortunately, his enormous potential was truncated by death at the age of thirty-three. His was a case of not how long but how well as he left behind a massive legacy in the minds of those who have been fortunate to have the opportunity of listening to the music of this honorary but highly appreciated Cardinal of the Church of highlife. Zeal Onyia and Eddie Okonta are two other giants of highlife who once studied at the feet of Bobby Benson.
All the musicians mentioned above were not only superb instrumentalists, they were all composers of the first order. Bob Dylan it was who won the Nobel prize for Literature for the sheer poetry of his songs and this is as it should be because what are songs if they are not poetry set to music? Apart from being poets, these musicians were also great instrumentalists coaxing beautiful sounds from their instruments with which they developed a familiarity reserved for parts of their body. They were not born with the virtuosity we have come to associate with them but learnt how to play them and then developed a familiarity with them through long bouts of assiduous practice. These men were however not just players of their instruments but were creators, explorers of uncharted territories who had to make things up as they went along. They were also men of iron discipline who had to convince other men to submit to their demonstrable superiority in skill and determination to make something out of practically nothing.
Bobby Benson and Co were all innovators but the man who took highlife forward was Fela Ransome-Kuti who came back from his musical studies in England and put a band he called Koola Lobitos together. Highlife was fusion music at its best as it contained elements from jazz, calypso, samba, ball room music and indigenous music all rolled together to produce a giddy mixture of sound and emotions which captivated a large audience in Ghana and Nigeria. Fela extended that tradition but unlike the pioneers who incorporated the big band sound of jazz giants like Louis Armstrong, Count Basie and Duke Ellington into their music the jazz content in Fela’s music was the atonal jazz genre of bee-bop made popular by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davies. You either liked it or you did not, which is why music lovers of the time were almost equally divided in their appreciation or the lack of it for the music being played by Fela and his Koola Lobitos. As we moved into the seventies however Fela had an epiphany and began to play a brand of music which he called Afrobeat because it was the sound of Africa produced by a band which for emphasis was called Africa ’70. This medium crossed all boundaries both physical and psychological and became truly international as it left the shores of Africa for other parts of the world. By the eighties Fela, now known as Anikulapo-Kuti was perhaps the best known Nigerian outside the country both for his music and his activism which was directed primarily against the Nigerian state with whom he had a lot of beef to settle. He also gained instant fame or notoriety in some quarters when he married twenty-seven wives in one day. Fela was a classically trained musician and in the early days of Koola Lobitos, all the members played from the sheet music in front of them on the band stand! This was a departure from the older exponents of highlife who were taught to play by ear. Like them however Fela was an instrumentalists par excellence who made great music from his trademark trumpet, the saxophone and the electric organ. As it has turned out, the most famous alumni of the Fela school are his own sons, Femi and Seun who are keeping a family tradition in music going strong.
