If music be the food of love, play on, says the great bard of Stratford Upon Avon. And we say, in supporting and supplementary melody, that if music be the fruit of life, please croon on. Do not wake me from the sweet and mellifluous lullaby. Let me stir, among maids, maidens and mermaids, to the sound of music and merriment. Then hell itself can go to hell.
Music washes away all crimes against humanity, shrouding the sinner with the toga of sainthood. William Shakespeare himself was not a perfect person. He had his own grave defects of character. Apart from the well-known vagrancy of his youth, he was also fingered as a deer poacher, pincher of other people’s meat, or a merchant of venison, if you like. But he gave the world his beautiful sonnets and great plays. And that is that.
There is something soothing and redeeming of humanity about music. It cleanses the system and washes the soul of poisonous accretions. It sooths and becalms the temperamental and gives hope to the hopelessly despondent. One day scientists and researchers will discover how and why music connects so well with the human psyche and how hominids aspiring to humanity discovered the link between musicality and growing refinement. It is one of the secrets of civilization.
Great and profound music is not the exclusive preserve of one people, or race or nation. You cannot judge the cultural production of another society by your own output. Marx and Engels, the modern masters of dialectical reasoning, often rumbled endlessly about why it should be the lot and lucky lottery of some “undeveloped” people to produce works of stunning beauty and profundity.
Engels came up with the terse summation that economically backward nations can play first violin. It was as patronizing and avuncular as it could get. No wonder they stripped the “dark” continent of its cultural artifacts and stole the place blind upon reestablishing contact with the cradle of civilization, their own civilization. The son of a thief who is anxious to contribute to the communal saving scheme is merely in a hurry, after all, it is his father that will eventually empty the entire coffer.
But this is not before us this morning. What unites and binds us as humanity is far more than what divides us. As Christmas and its festivities got underway, yours sincerely has been in a musical state of mind. Despite the trying times and the terrifying conditions of the ordinary people of this country, music has been in the air.
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Everywhere you turn, it booms; every side you turn, it blows its mighty horns. At some point in the not too distant future, when full peace and prosperity have returned to the country, every school pupil will return to the habit of keeping a musical notebook filled with the latest lyrical sensation from home and abroad. And there shall be music again.
And so on this cool and pleasant evening of penultimate Sunday when the harmattan weather seemed to have borrowed some wintry tropes from abroad, yours sincerely headed for the Fadeyi upper market enclave of the Alakija clan for the annual reunion of the group known as Music Minds. It turned out to be a musical extravaganza and a moveable feast of superb taste and cultural refinement.
Yinka Alakija, as personable as he is pleasantly eccentric, is a scion of the illustrious Alakija family. A multi-talented cultural entrepreneur and notable Highlife musician in his own right, Yinka, or Alakay as he is known among friends and musical acolytes, is one of the moving spirits behind the group. He has hosted the annual gathering of the association ever since its inception.
This evening was going to be a reunion of some sorts, yours sincerely having been unavoidably absent for almost four years due to engagements abroad around this period. Gently nudged on by our delightful and ever amiable friend, Chief Muyiwa Runsewe, who had surfaced all the way from his Ogbogbo-Ijebu redoubt, it was not an occasion to miss.
The party, and the carousing that went with it, were well underway by the time yours sincerely found his way into the gathering. Food and fodder flowed freely. As one made one’s way through the forest of august and distinguished Nigerians, a familiar figure suddenly emerged from the shadow gently berating snooper for not instantly recognizing him. It was Ayo Iginla, quiet, self-effacing and accomplished technocrat, former Rector of LAPOSTECH and one of the greatest aficionados of the finest music around.
Ayo is also the headmaster and Iron Chancellor of the musical forum of the group, an elite gathering of the luminaries of musical enlightenment whose knowledge of the history and current developments in the trade is a tad short of confounding. Nothing escapes his eagle eyes, and no infraction or infringement can elude his benevolent visage.
This is an iconic gathering of the cultivated and the cultured where one learns something new on a daily basis. The quartet of Obong Dee, Iginla , Akin Fatunke and the calm and retiring Josef Bel-Molokwu and one or two others can easily double as professors of Musical Diversity in any serious university anywhere in the world. This is where the professor becomes an apprentice journeyman quaffing endlessly from the fountain of musical wisdom.
As one made to sit with them in the shadow, Ayo Iginla and Gboyega Adelaja, aka General Lobito, old Grammarian and multi-talented musician, politely declined pointing one in the direction of the directing table. Good evening, Aremo Segun Osoba, elder statesman and one of the most distinguished musical buffs the country has thrown up. Good evening, Obong Dele Adetiba, refined and exquisitely well-bred gentleman and impossible connoisseur of fine music.
Yours sincerely respectfully call Dele Atiba, Ajiferuke, a name taken from the timeless inscription on the very house his father resided in snooper’s homestead back in the fifties while he was the Education Officer for the entire district. And how are you, Muyiwa Adetiba, his younger brother, popularly known as the quiet one, famed columnist and publisher and his matronly wife and ever present companion?
It was a star-studded table. There was also Prince Yemisi Shyllon, philanthropist, cultural enthusiast, master collector of indigenous art and a friend since our Kaduna days in the mid-seventies. Akin Fatunke, renowned publicist and multinational technocrat, arguably the moving spirit behind the musical fantasia was darting here and there. Finally, there was the lady of the evening, our own screen diva, role model and ageless cultural dowager, Taiwo Ajai-Lycett ever winsomely winking at one with conspiratorial relish.
Nestling at the intersection of three streets in the upper market tail end of Fadeyi where it abuts into old colonial Yaba, the Alakija Villa remains a monument to class and understated elegance over sixty years after it was built at the turn of the sixties.
Straight down the street from the other end and across Ikorodu Road, you are in Idioro, an iconic site of the cultural battles between Fela and the federal authorities in the seventies and eighties. Behind that is the proletarian paradise of Mushin where yours sincerely and other able-bodied artisans swung to the counter-hegemonic lyrics of Ayinla Omo-Wura in the late sixties and seventies.
If you are wondering what the Alakijas were doing stranded among the hoi polloi, you must also remember that a stone’s throw away was the Yaba upper class dominion of the Bensons, the Magnum-Williams, Bode Thomas, Murray, Pearce etc.
As a body of music lovers and active musical talents, Music Minds is geared towards a legacy of genius harvesting and talent discovery. The array of talents gathered here tonight will make the authorities blush. The mastery of key musical instruments is a tad short of the miraculous. An amazing nine year old Adetomiwa Omololu played classical tunes on the saxophone. Oladejo Caleb, visually impaired, dazzled with his mastery of the drum set while Oyebanire Nifemi demonstrated precocious excellence with the sax.
It is said that youth is a stuff that will not endure. But if you are bowled over by the excellent outing of youth this beautiful evening, you would have to wait until the oldies stormed the stage. A fully kitted Highlife band began dishing out timeless classics of the genre sending the soul to ecstasies of nostalgia. Something definitely went wrong here. There was surely a country.
As the group moved seamlessly into Fela’s pre-revolution music, when the great man was still an upper class Bohemian maestro of Afro-Caribbean medley, my friend, Chief Muyiwa Runsewe, rued mournfully that Fela would have been a greater musician had he not dabbled into radical politics. Well, well, the jury is still out on that one. The fact remains that Fela would not be Fela had he not consciously and adamantly inserted himself into the matrix of radical politics.
The night wore on pleasantly and it was time to give the awards and commendations. The chairman of the Music Minds Legacy Project, Prince Yemisi Shyllon was ably assisted by Taiwo Ajai-Lycett, a woman whose own life is a tribute to indomitable courage and uncommon bravery. The winner of the talent hunt was Alaba Praise. Adetomiwa Omololu went home with the keyboard prize while 10 year old Victor Oyedokun will be strumming on a guitar donated by Taiwo Adelaja.
It has been a wonderful evening with the masters of music.
