Africa Is a Country

The Trumpet King

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

The Trumpet King

By
Sean Jacobs

Zeal Onyia was a master Nigerian trumpet player from the 1950s treated as an equal by Louis Armstrong.

Jeremy of Naijablog forwarded me this Youtube video of two recorded songs by  Zeal Onyia, the master Nigerian trumpet player from the 1950s of whom Louis Armstrong on a visit to Nigeria in 1961 was to have asked:  “Who is that hip cat?”

In the video you can hear two of Onyia’s highlife inflected compositions, “Money Trouble” and “Lumumba.”  The recordings you hear “were taken from a tape of tape that was originally recorded off an old 78 rpm record given to Don [Maxwell, the guy who originally uploaded them to the internet] by Zeal Onyia himself in 1964.”

You can read the story how these two recordings came to be in the possession of Maxwell on his site Abstract Concrete Works.

Further Reading

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O som da revolta

No seu terceiro álbum, o artista afro-português Scúru Fitchádu funde a sabedoria ancestral com a revolta urbana, transformando memória e militância em uma trilha sonora para a resistência.

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After the uprising

Following two years of mass protest, Kenya stands at a crossroads. A new generation of organizers is confronting an old question: how do you turn revolt into lasting change? Sungu Oyoo joins the AIAC podcast to discuss the vision of Kenya’s radical left.

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Colonial urbanism cast African neighborhoods as chaotic, unplanned, and undesirable. In postcolonial Dar es Salaam, that legacy still shapes who builds, who belongs, and what the middle class fears the city becoming.

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Colonize then, deport now

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