Paa Kow – Memphis Flyer

Jamie Harmon

Obruni Dance Band & the Mama Africa Dancers

One night this summer, with some time to kill, I dropped in to the Wiseacre Brewing Company on Broad Avenue. Walking across the parking lot, I heard grooves not often played in our neck of the woods, and opening the door to the bar, the music suddenly springing into the night, only confirmed that we weren’t in West Tennessee anymore. It had to be West Africa.

Filling the room were the sounds of an ace Ghanian highlife band. The band was collaborating that night with dancers who sang along with many of the classic highlife numbers. Hypnotic, joyous guitar arpeggios shimmered over fiercely syncopated beats — this was the real deal! But scanning the players, I saw only familiar faces from other combos around town.

The Obruni Dance Band is indeed comprised of local talent. And, given that many American fans have had African music on their radars since the 1960s, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that enough Memphis musicians were big enough fans to eventually create their own band. Here, along with a slideshow using Jamie Harmon’s images of the show I chanced upon that night in July, are the details of how that happened. I asked Obruni’s founder and lead singer, Adam Holton, about the origins of his interest and what his vision for the group might be.
Jamie Harmon

Adam Holton & the Obruni Dance Band

Memphis Flyer: How did you first get into highlife music, and how deep did you go with it?

Adam Holton: I’m from Memphis and I first learned about highlife and other types of Afro-pop when I was in school at University of Colorado, Boulder. There was an ethnomusicology professor from Ghana named Kwasi Ampene who had a “West African Highlife Ensemble”. I went to see a performance of theirs, and I was blown away by this huge ensemble of 20+ musicians, dancers, and drummers playing this infectious dance music with killer bass lines! I joined the group the next semester and stayed in the group under Kwasi’s leadership until after I graduated. I traveled with Kwasi to Ghana as a part of a study abroad program, and got to sit in a few times at clubs in Accra. I also took some bass lessons from Ralph Karikari, a killer highlife bassist and guitarist who is famous for his role in Dr. K. Gyasi’s Noble Kings band.

It sounds like Boulder must have quite an Afro-pop scene.

The West African Highlife Ensemble would invite guest artists each year for a big performance, and through these special performances I got to back up some heavy hitters including Mac Tontoh of Osibisa, Okyerema Asante, and Paa Kow. Paa Kow is a drum prodigy who was playing professionally before he was a teenager, and he and I started the By All Means Band together in Colorado, playing Afro-funk-fusion. We eventually moved to Memphis in 2007 and played here for a little more than a year before breaking up.

Where did you go from there?

I went in other musical directions with other musical projects (Mister Adams, Big Barton) just following my muse where it wanted to go. Some time in 2016 (about seven or eight years after the band broke up), I kind of looked up and realized that this music that I had devoted many years of my life to learning and playing was no longer a part of my life, and I missed it terribly! No one in town was really doing the Afro-pop thing, so I decided to start a new band. Initially, I tried to find any West African musicians who might be in the area, but to date I haven’t had any success with that. So I just started calling on players who had some world music experience or who have jazz backgrounds and can really play just about anything you throw at them.

Obruni means foreigner in the Akan language of Twi. As a white American in Ghana, you’re kind of a sore thumb, so strangers will playfully call you Obruni as you pass them in the street or markets. I decided to name the band Obruni Dance Band because I figured American audiences wouldn’t know what it meant, and I thought that it would be kind of an inside joke to Ghanaians who would immediately know that the band wasn’t from Ghana. Highlife bands are often really large by comparison to rock bands, which translates to a lot of concentrated human energy during performances. The band started with five members (Logan Hanna, Stephen Chopek, Felix Hernandez, Gerald Stephens, and myself), but we have since added Victor Sawyer and Jawaun Crawford on trombone and trumpet.

So does the band mainly play classic highlife music, or do you write originals in that style?

Right now Obruni plays about 50/50 original music versus covers. We are somewhat limited in the covers that we can do because I am by no means a fluent Twi speaker, and so I mostly focus on songs that are sung in pidgin English. Sometimes, I take a popular rock song, and give it a heavy highlife makeover so that pretty much no one would ever recognize it. We do songs by The Beatles, Nirvana, Dire Straits, and Warren Zevon alongside songs by Osibisa, Prince Nico Mbarga, The Sweet Talks, and George Darko.
[slideshow-1] See events listed below to discover two ways to hear the Obruni Dance Band this weekend.

“It’s true,” admits Ghanaian drummer Paa Kow (pronounced like Paco, with a stop in the middle) about playing with musicians from the U.S. “Somebody from home would actually understand what I’m doing more because we are speaking the same language. But music is huge enough for everybody. You get a band and make sure the sound is what is needed. You find better musicians who can feel it, and you get what you want, which is what I’m doing right now.”

Paa Kow will play at the Hi-Tone on Tuesday, August 19th. Opening act, Mister Adams, is led by Memphian Adam Holton, who is one of Paa Kow’s former sidemen and students. Holton studied at the University of Colorado Boulder, which is home to the West-African Highlife Ensemble. Holton met percussionist-producer Peyton Shuffield in that program, based on highlife, the national sound of Ghana.

“The professor who led that group would take a group [to Ghana],” Holton says. “On Peyton’s trip there, Paa Kow happened to be in town. Peyton was like, ‘We’ve got to get this guy to the U.S. People would freak out if they saw him playing drums.'”

Paa Kow came to Boulder and later returned to Ghana with Holton, Shuffield, and others in tow.

“We got to play with a lot of Paa Kow’s old buddies in Accra, the capital,” Holton says. “A lot of the elder statesmen of highlife, like George Darko. It was eye-opening to go to his home country and see how he was treated there. Just from knowing him over here, you had no idea that at any music spot in Ghana, they all know him and are looking up to him. He’s an idol to all the young musicians. They were carrying his drum bags for him. He’s treated like royalty over there.”

Highlife is a 20th-century hybrid of traditional music of the Akan people from the Gold Coast of Africa and popular music influences from colonial sources. It was music for the elites, hence the name and Paa Kow’s stature in his native Ghana. Paa Kow’s playing reflects an African approach to drumming that is as much tonal as it is rhythmic. The clave beat that underlies most of what we consider Latin music came to this hemisphere through Ghana and Cuba. Rather than the tick-tock/on-off of western drummers, Paa Kow develops polyphonic, tonal rhythms that bubble like lively conversation. Each drum seems to have 10 voices.

“I think it’s part of the tradition in Ghana and growing up in that village,” Paa Kow says. “I started making my own drums from cans. Making something and playing and make sound out of it, it helps. That’s what everyone does. You can see them making their drums, putting a calf-skin on it. But the sound that would come out of that drum, you won’t believe. It was just the tradition. That helps me make sound out of any drum. You can see a drum that is busted. You get a head on top. It all is going to come from you. You can buy the most expensive drum you could ever buy or drums that are just old. But the way you make the drums to sound, that’s what’s important. That’s what it is. And if you can make sound out of even a can, you can make sound to make a better rhythm out of it. That’s what I’ve been believing since I’ve been growing up.”

Paa Kow’s parents were well-respected musicians in Ghana during his childhood. He’s been a serious musician since he was a child.

“I think percussion is the same as a drum kit,” he says. “The reason why I say that is you’ve got to pick up the percussion and make sound out of it. Making sure that the sound that’s making out of it is ready. Playing a cowbell in a band, if it’s a clave, I have to keep it. I see the same attitude on the drums. I think that being a percussion player helps you play a drum kit or any instrument. Keyboards, bass, everything; it’s all based on the percussion. So I saw that and I was like, Wow, I want to do more. I’m playing a cowbell or only two congas. I want to play the pedals, put my foot on the high-hat stand and make a lot of sounds. I decided from that time, I would play the drum kit, at the age of seven.”

Asked if there are any recordings of his parents, he says, “I wish. Back in those days, it’s hard to get recordings of stuff. My uncle has an album. He did it with some producer. The guy brought the instruments in from Germany. He was playing shows and everything. But I didn’t think of that at that time. I need to check. I bet it’s great stuff. My mom was part of the band. She was a singer. But I didn’t do any recording with them. I was too young.”

After making a name for himself in his homeland, Paa Kow set his sights on the U.S. Meeting Shuffield turned out to be the opportunity that worked for both of them. Shuffield produced Paa Kow’s latest album, Ask.

“Peyton came to Ghana in 2006,” Paa Kow says. “He came with the students from Boulder, Colorado, and was looking for someone to study with. He asked everyone to come and meet with him. So he gave me a call and he came over. He actually saw what I have. That’s the reason why we met in Ghana. I was touring around. I was like 22 and already playing with some big bands in Ghana. That same month, I was supposed to come to the U.S. It didn’t happen.”

Shuffield arranged a guest position at the Highlife Ensemble and Paa Kow came to the U.S. in 2007. He appreciates all the musicians who have worked with him here as much as they appreciate him.

“In Ghana, we have a traditional music, and we have some called highlife,” Paa Kow says. “There is deep traditional music. Coming here changed my vision of it. I’m kind of doing my own thing, which is one sound from home — I still get all the tradition stuff. And being in the States, the musicians I play with are all educated musicians from the music school. It’s good with the fusion and the jazz and stuff. But I don’t think I’m doing a pure highlife. I have my own vision going on with my music right now. But those are influences, the jazz, blues. I call it Afro-fusion.”