Akwete Sound: Homage to Sir Victor Uwaifo

If you remember “Joromi,” a popular Edo highlife tune from the 1960s, then you might be familiar with Victor Uwaifo (1941–2021), the original Guitar Boy. He and his band, the Melody Maestros, released 100 singles and eight LPs on the Phonogram label,¹ between 1965 and 1976. Among them was Uwaifo’s Ekassa series, which he described as “progressive traditionalism”² and included the song “Kirikisi (Ekassa 24)” as part of Uwaifo’s reinvention of new forms of music based on traditional sounds and rhythms. With his Akwete sound, Uwaifo transposed the colors and patterns of a traditional Igbo handwoven textile into sounds, creating a “moving rhythm of color.”³

Ekassa is a traditional dance performed during the coronation of a new oba (king), but Uwaifo’s version, in his own words, “incorporates the beat of the tom-tom and agba drums, Western wind instruments, two guitars and, of course, me on the guitar singing in the Edo language.”⁴ “Ekassa 24” expressed a time of creativity and optimism for the people of Nigeria during the early years of independence. Like Akwete, the melody and lyrics weave together the past, present, and future in ways that speak to Alonge’s aspirational portraits of an Edo community grounded in their past but looking toward their future.

Endnotes
1. Collins, John. 1985. Musicmakers of West Africa. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 74.
2. Interview with Victor Uwaifo. https://afropop.org/articles/uwaifo. See also Austin Emielu. 2018. “Tradition, Innovations, and Modernity in the Music of the Edo of Nigeria: Toward a Theory of Progressive Traditionalism.” Ethnomusicology 62 (2).
3. Collins 1985, 78.
4. Ibid, 78–79.