Africa Is a Country

The Trumpet King

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.

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