Alhaji Waziri Oshomah

Since 1973, singer, composer, and bandleader Alhaji Waziri Oshomah has combined deep devotion to Islam and community with his own hybrid Nigerian highlife/Afemai music on dozens of recordings. Oshomah's sound embraces the secular and the sacred, melding local folk styles and pan-Nigerian highlife (from the more horn-driven approach of Lagos to the grittier, more guitar-centered Afemai style of the village of Estatko) with Western and Afro-pop. His lyrics draw on Judeo-Christian imagery while conveying Islamic values in an accessible way. His debut, 1973's Ikkhayeapeya Iyowame, appeared from Decca West Africa, as did two singles. For years, he followed that release formula. His major albums include 1977's Life, 1993's Conscience, and 2021's Grace. In 2022, Luaka Bop released the compilation The Muslim Highlife of Alhaji Waziri Oshomah as the third volume in its World Spirituality Classics series. It was followed in 2023 with Vols. 1-5 (1978-1984); each album was released in succession from his mid-career output. Waziri Oshomah was born Isah Sule in 1948 into a Muslim family in the town of Osomegbe, Afenmailand in Edo State in southern Nigeria. Both his parents were composers and lead vocalists in local cultural groups. The musical trait was fostered and inherited. Young Isah took to performing quite early. At age seven, he was fronting the school band at his primary school. Alongside a natural interest in his community's indigenous music, he was obsessed with the new sound of the '50s highlife embraced by the younger generation. He would memorize songs sung by Bobby Benson, Sir Victor Uwaifo (whose title Oshoma borrowed for his own in tribute), Eddy Okonta, and I.K. Dairo. By age ten he had already started attending and performing at nightclubs to the alarm and consternation of his devout parents. He calmed their fears by successfully completing his high school education and securing a government job as a gauge reader with the Ministry of Water Services and Hydrology. That said, he never stopped playing music. By 1965, he had created the alternate identity Waziri Oshomah. At night and on weekends, he performed locally with traditional percussion orchestras. The influence of Afemai music had slowly begun to expand thanks to Estatko bandleader Anco Momodu, the first Afemai musician to establish a national profile. In 1967, Oshomah joined Momodu’s group as a singer and keyboard player. With Momodu, he became a seasoned performer and got his first exposure to the recording studio. Oshomah felt that the music could be taken even further. In 1970, as the Nigerian Civil War began slowly winding down, he conceived his own band, the Traditional Sound Makers, wedding Western-influenced instrumentation and amplification to the deep well of the region’s folk styles. The band could not afford transport and would regularly walk miles to gigs carrying equipment on their heads. In late 1972, he quit Momodu's band and his civil servant job. 1973 saw the group become a rather shambling garage band using a locally built amp that was powered by flashlight batteries. Despite these shortcomings, the Traditional Sound Makers impressed Decca West Africa enough to sign them. They released the single "Agiode Ofe Emo Mie Ise." It did well enough at radio and on jukeboxes to garner the band an advance to buy gear. Their debut album, Ikkhayeapeya Iyowame, appeared in December. At that time, American soul music was very popular with young people. Oshoma mixed his own approach with the traditional Estatko highlife sound, along with emerging reggae, rock, and funk. He also drew inspiration from Fela Kuti, whose Afrobeat was the hottest music in Nigeria. Oshomah's popularity soared and soon eclipsed even Momodu's. His fame spread further when he joined the stable of the juju-oriented label Shanu Olu in 1978. Over the next six years, he issued a five-volume series of eponymous albums that received strong national distribution and airplay and sold briskly. He left the label after 1986's charting Message to My People. Oshoma continued producing and recording for an assortment of regional labels, including his own. In 1993, he began his decades-long, ongoing series of themed releases with Conscience. Oshomah remains busy and in-demand. Given the sheer number of his releases on so many different labels, no complete discography exists -- even he cannot recall exactly how many records he's made -- although he claims the total to be around 150, with one of the most recent including 2021's Grace. During the new century's second decade, Luaka Bop label manager Eric Welles-Nyström was traveling to Nigeria frequently to visit legendary Nigerian funk musician William Onyeabor, whose collected recordings the label anthologized, boxed, and reissued. He would buy local and rare African LPs from a favorite Lagos dealer. One of these trips netted an album by Oshomah. The entire office was knocked out by its radical originality and Welles-Nyström set about finding him in 2018. They signed a deal the following year. A compilation of Oshomah's formative tracks recorded between the mid-'70s and the mid-'80s was released in September 2022 as The Muslim Highlife of Alhaji Waziri Oshomah. Between 1978 and 1984, Oshomah issued five "volumes" of assorted tracks -- some of them appeared on the 2022 compilation. In 2023, Luaka Bop released Vols. 1-5 (1978-1984), a five-LP box set collecting his mid-career output chronologically. It also includes a copy of The Journey So Far, a limited-edition book written and designed by his children, to celebrate the artist's life and career.
© Thom Jurek /TiVo