Highlife is a music genre that started in West Africa, along the coastal cities of present-day Ghana in the 19th century, during its history as a colony of the British and through its trade routes in coastal areas. It describes multiple local fusions of African metre and western jazz melodies. It uses the melodic and main rhythmic structures of traditional African music, but is typically played with Western instruments. Highlife is characterized by jazzy horns and multiple guitars which lead the band and its use of the two-finger plucking guitar style that is typical of African music. Recently it has acquired an uptempo, synth-driven sound.
Highlife gained popularity and the genre spread throughout West African regions. Pioneers like Cardinal Rex Lawson, E.T. Mensah, Victor Uwaifo, all perfected this sound by infusing traditional Africa drums and western "Native Blues." After the war its popularity came back within the Igbo people of Nigeria, taking their own traditional guitar riffs and the influence of the diverse culture and flavor of Nigeria, mixed and perfected it to form Igbo highlife which became the country's most popular music genre in the 1960s.
Highlife has remained a part of popular music for Ghanaians and their diaspora globally through its integration with religious institutions and the positive effect it had on immigrating Ghanaians leaving their homeland.
History
The following arpeggiated highlife guitar part is modeled after an Afro-Cuban guajeo. The pattern of attack-points is nearly identical to the 3-2 clave motif guajeo as shown below. The bell pattern known in Cuba as clave is indigenous to Ghana, and is used in highlife.
The origins of Highlife stem from colonialism and trading in West Africa through regional styles of music;
Palm wine music
Palm-wine music was one style that originated on coastal locations when local musicians began using portable instruments brought by traders and fused it with local string and percussion instruments. It was usually played in a syncopated 4/4 metre. This music was played in low class palm-wine bars at ports where sailors, dock workers, and working class locals would drink and listen to the music. Eventually this genre worked its way inland and a more Africanized version came containing 12/8 polyrhythms, this would be known as the "Native Blues". This style would gain popularity up until World War 2 when production of the records were stopped.
Brass-band highlife
A style of highlife that resembled western brass bands in European forts across West Africa. The military would use local musicians in their brass band regiments and taught them linear marching music. After these musicians saw how the West Indian regimental bandsmen practiced traditional music in their spare time it inspired them to do the same. The fusion of linear marching music with polyrhythmic local music created a danceable style called adaha, as well as a style with cheaper, local instruments called konkoma. This fusion was similar to the birth of jazz in New Orleans.
Dance and guitar band highlife
In the 1920s, Ghanaian musicians incorporated foreign influences like the foxtrot and calypso with Ghanaian rhythms like osibisaba (Fante). Highlife was associated with the local African aristocracy during the colonial period, and was played by numerous bands including the Jazz Kings, Cape Coast Sugar Babies, and Accra Orchestra along the country's coast. The high class audience members who enjoyed the music in select clubs gave the music its name. The dance orchestra leader Yebuah Mensah (E.T. Mensah’s older brother) told John Collins in 1973 that the term 'highlife' appeared in the early 1920s "as a catch-phrase for the orchestrated indigenous songs played at [exclusive] clubs by such early dance bands as the Jazz Kings, the Cape Coast Sugar Babies, the Sekondi Nanshamang and later the Accra Orchestra. The people outside called it the highlife as they did not reach the class of the couples going inside, who not only had to pay a relatively high entrance fee of about 7s 6d (seven shillings and sixpence), but also had to wear full evening dress, including top-hats if they could afford it." From the 1930s, highlife spread via Ghanaian workers to Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria and Gambia among other West African countries, where the music quickly gained popularity.