For the first time, the continent of Africa has been awarded three out of the eight slots at the ‘Overseas’ showcase dedicated to emerging jazz bands/artists. A jury of African jazz practitioners together with the Jazzahead Artistic Director, Goetz Buhler, narrowed the applications down to 20 from all corners of the continent before selecting the final three who are AFRO4 Band (Nigeria), Alune Wade (Senegal), and Christine Kamau (Kenya)
From Africa’s perspective, the performance of AFRO4Band from Nigeria tonite @ 8:15pm will be the beginning of our contribution to jazzahead! 2024 along with the Africa Jazz stand which will be fully manned from tomorrow with the delegates from South Africa, Nigeria, Senegal, Mozambique, and Germany. Come and see us at stand 604E, and discover the world of African Jazz.. . Peter Fisher, PF Music
AFRO4 Band (Nigeria), a band comprising three Nigerians and a South African will be featuring at the Jazzahead! 2024 – a global platform for jazz performers and enthusiasts which holds in Germany every year.
The Nigerian/African representatives will feature at the top Jazz festival on Thursday, April 11 in Bremen, Germany.
Jazzahead! 2024 brings together musicians, industry professionals, and jazz enthusiasts from around the globe. It is a unique convergence of a trade fair, conference, and showcase festival. In 2023, it brought together 2,800 professionals from 51 nations across various sectors, including artists, bookers, labels, agencies, and more.
The Nigerian band, comprising Bright Gain – Nigeria (bass); Leader; Adewale S. Adeyemi – Nigeria (drums) – Yamaha Brand Ambassador, Luyanda Madope – South Africa (piano/keyboards) and Victor Ademofe – Nigeria (trumpet/flugelhorn/percussion) will be first to feature at the Jazzahead.
According to Peter Fisher, the bass player/engineer, who is facilitating the representation, “For the first time, the continent of Africa has been awarded three out of the eight slots at the ‘Overseas’ showcase dedicated to emerging jazz bands/artists. A jury of African jazz practitioners together with the Jazzahead Artistic Director, Goetz Buhler, narrowed the applications down to 20 from all corners of the continent before selecting the final three who are AFRO4 Band (Nigeria), Alune Wade (Senegal), and Christine Kamau (Kenya). Also, for the first time, there will be a dedicated AFRICA JAZZ umbrella stand where artists, promoters, and media will participate and be available to meet with global jazz music stakeholders.”
Also, for the first time, there will be a dedicated AFRICA JAZZ umbrella stand where artists, promoters, and media will participate and be available to meet with global jazz music stakeholders.
Tracing the origin of the band, Fisher, wrote: “October 2023, Lagos, Nigeria I receive an e-invite to a listening party of the debut album for a new group called AFRO4 Band. On closer inspection, I recognized the images of 3 of the members, whom I had met over the last 6-7 years while I was working on my African Jazz radio show, “Jazz and Conversations”. What I heard that day in the listening party, was a sound that had been sculpted to appeal across all generations and also across the African Continent. They had reworked the music of some of the greatest musical icons from yesteryear on the African continent such as Miriam Makeba, Prince Nico Mbaga, and Ebenezer Obey, and created a sound to connect both the old and young generation. The members of the band are masters of their instruments with more than one hundred plus years combined of playing and performing their craft.
Speaking in an interview, Geoffrey Kwale, Managing Partner and Executive Producer of the band said that “AFRO4 has a special interest in projecting the diverse African genres that reflect the continent’s traditional music, though jazz influenced. We are focused on the various sounds of Africa as a whole, taking you on an African ‘sonic journey’. He also stressed that ‘the time has come for Africa to play its music with a global flavour, celebrating the ‘African standards’ as performed by the great African musicians from the past”
The JAZZ FROM AFRICA project was initiated by a group of prominent jazz figures on the African continent, and aims to showcase the diversity and vitality of African jazz, highlighting the unique voices and perspectives that emerge from the continent. The collective includes Peter Fisher from Nigeria, Dudu Sarr from Senegal, Walter Wanyanya from Zimbabwe, Claire Diboa from Cameroon, Mantwa Chinoamadi and Lesley Wells from South Africa, Amro Salah from Egypt, as well as Julia Kastl and Stefanie Schumann from Germany. As part of this initiative, AFRO4 Band has come to fill the world with sensational jazz. The band has a mandate to do music beyond the conventional Afrobeat, because there is so much more to African music than Afrobeat, considering the varieties of genres within the African music. The “JAZZ FROM AFRICA” initiative is aimed at fostering a deeper understanding and appreciation of African jazz within the global jazz community.
About AFRO4 Band:
“For us at AFRODYSSEY MUSIC, we feel gratified that we will be participating at jazzahead! 2024. That our main act AFRO4BAND is selected to represent Africa is most exhilarating. We especially feel very happy that these four great musicians in Bright Gain, Wale Adeyemi, Luyanda Madope and Victor Ademofe will be in Germany to make all of Africa proud”. Courtesy of AFRODYSSEY MUSIC LTD – Geoffrey Kwale
For more information about Jazzahead, please visit https://www.jazzahead.de/en. Anyone from the African jazz scene who is interested in joining us on the Africa Jazz stand, (Booth #: 6E40) should urgently register at https://www.jazzahead.de as a co-exhibitor on the stand.
AFRO4 Band members — Bassist, Bright Gain (left), Pianist, Luyanda Madope, Trumpeter, Victor Ademofe, Drummer, Wale Adeyemi … on arrival in Bremen –upon arrival in Bremen, Germany on Tuesday, April 9
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Journeys of African Jazz
By Peter Fisher
“African jazz is a phoenix, an emblem of resilience and innovation”, writes Gabriel Mahia in Medium. “It survived the choking grip of apartheid; it thrived despite segregation and plunder. It reinvented itself, fusing indigenous elements with international nuances to create something spectacular. Now, that’s an epic narrative, one worth sharing.”
Live in Bremen, ready to roll tonight
THIS statement in the jazzahead! Trade Fair guide (pg. 44) taken from an article by Gabriel Mahia on the Medium website (“African Jazz: From Township Grooves to Global Stages; Aug 29, 2023”), can be attributed to, and only applies to the evolution of African jazz in South Africa, as is the article itself. Apartheid occurred within the borders of South Africa and nowhere else. Colonization, which occurred across most of the Rest of Africa, though similar was not the same thing.
The true origins of African jazz go back to the slaves that were taken from Africa’s shores, and sold in the Americas. They turned to song and dance to alleviate their frustrations and the misery of their existence as slaves (Africans are still to this day the only race on earth that uses their pain in this way).
With the slaves brought from Africa, this thing we call jazz evolved into what we know today as American Jazz, with many of the pioneer masters of the genre being of black (or negro) origin. There were various music genres developed over the years on the African continent (in West Africa, it was hi-life) with different forms happening all over the continent. American Jazz returned “home” with three main characters, Fela Kuti, the Father of Afrobeat (not Afrobeats) – Nigeria; Manu Dibango, the Creator of the Makossa sound – Cameroon; and Hugh Masekela, the Father of South African Jazz, after spending years in the diaspora learning music and embracing jazz. Each returned to their homelands and brought with them a new sound, based on the same jazz rhythms that evolved from the slaves, and blended this with the culture, instruments, and music of their homelands, creating three completely different forms of African Jazz. Others from Africa did the same. In Ethiopia, Dr Mulatu Astatke is credited with being the Father of Ethino-Jazz, and there are others.
The journey of African Jazz has been a desperately difficult one for the practitioners who embraced the genre and for whom it became their source of income, with little commitment from the jazz music buying public on the continent, who in the early years invested in the music of Herbie Hancock, Bob James, Grover Washington and the like, and coming into the present generation, “Smooth Jazz” which in essence is not jazz, but “Instrumental R&B”.
Then we have the all-embracing music genre called “World Music” which became an umbrella genre for most other types of music created on the planet, outside of the established regions and genres created and monetized by the developed world. Under this umbrella, African Jazz has been plodding away almost in obscurity, but evolving all across the continent to the point now where the sound is so varied region-to-region, as it has been fused with the culture instruments and music in all four corners of the continent.
Finally in 2024, at jazzahead! African Jazz will finally get “heard” clearly and without distortion by the performances of AFRO4 Band (Nigeria), Christine Kamau (Kenya), and Alune Wade (Senegal). I bid you take this opportunity to sample firsthand the emergence of the African Jazz genre. Now is the moment for African Jazz! JAZZ HAS FINALLY COME HOME!
Peter Fisher (aka The BassMan)
For: PF Music
