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Nigerian music is extremely varied, and includes dozens of styles of folk music as well as pop forms like Afrobeat and highlife. Out of all the African countries, Nigeria has perhaps the most advanced recording studio technology and commercial opportunities for its performers, and has produced more superstars than any other country on the continent, with King Sunny Ade and Fela Kuti being the most well-known worldwide.
Over four hundred ethnic groups are native to Nigeria, and many more have immigrated there in recent years. The Hausa of the north are known for complexly percussive music and the one-stringed goje fiddle, as well as a praise song vocal tradition. Music is used to celebrate births, marriages, circumcisions and other important life events. Hausa ceremonial music (rokon fada) is well-known in the area, and dominated by families of praise-singers, most famously including Narambad. The kakakai, an elongated trumpet, is the most distinctive instrument, along with tambura drums. Rural Hausa music includes dances like asauwara (for young females) and the spirit possession dance bori. Hausa folk music has produced popular entertainers, including Dan Maraya (known for his one-stringed lute, the kontigi), Audo Yaron Goje, Muhamman Shata and Ibrahim Na Habu (known for his kukkuma fiddling).
The Igbo people live in the southeast of Nigeria, and play a wide variety of folk instruments. The most widespread is the thirteen-stringed zither called an obo. There are also slit drums, xylophones, flutes, lyres and lutes, and more recently imported European brass instruments.
The Yoruba have an extremely advanced drumming tradition, especially in the dundun hourglass tension drums, used in ensembles to make music also called dundun. The leader of a dundun ensemble is the iyalu who uses the drum to "talk" by imitating the tonality of Yoruban. Yoruban music has become the most important component of modern Nigerian popular music, as a result of its early influence from European and Brazilian forms.
In the 1920s, the first stars of palm-wine had emerged, most especially Baba Tunde King. King probably coined the word juju, a style of music he created, in reference to the sound of a Brazilian tambourine or perhaps to the term's use as an expression of disdain by the colonial leaders (any native tradition was apt to be dismissed as mere juju nonsense). By the early 1930s, recording had begun and more celebrities emerged, including Ojoge Daniel and Speedy Araba. This early pop music was called juju, and has remained one of the most popular genres in Nigeria throughout the 20th century.
Following World War 2, Tunde Nightingale's s'o wa mbe style made him the first superstar of juju, and he introduced more Westernized pop influences to the genre. During the 1950s, recording technology grew more advanced, and instruments like the gangan talking drum, electric guitar and accordion were incorporated into juju. Much of this innovation was the work of IK Dairo & the Morning Star Orchestra (later IK Dairo & the Blue Spots), which formed in 1957. Dairo became perhaps the biggest star of African music by the 60s. In 1963, he became the only African musician ever honored by receiving an MBE from the United Kingdom.
Among the Igbo people, Ghanaian highlife became popular in the early 1950s, and similar guitar-band styles from Cameroon and Zaire soon followed. Bobby Benson & His Combo were the biggest Nigerian highlife band of the decade, and was followed by Jim Lawson & the Mayor's Dance Band, who achieved national fame in the mid-70s. Lawson's death in 1976 occurred at the height of his fame, as well as the biggest success for Nigerian highlife, Prince Nico Mbarga and Rocafil Jazz's "Sweet Mother", a pan-African hit.
Ebenezer Obey formed the International Brothers in 1964, and his band soon replaced Dairo as the biggest Nigerian group. They played a form of bluesy guitar-based music that included complex talking drum-dominated percussion elements. His rival was King Sunny Ade, who emerged in the same period, forming the Green Spots in 1966 and finally finding fame with the African Beats after 1974's Esu Biri Ebo Mi (1974). Ade and Obey raced to incorporate new influences into juju music and gather new fans; Hawaiian slack-key, keyboards and background vocals were among the innovations added during this period of rapid change. Songs also changed from short pop songs to long tracks, often over twenty minutes from beginning to end. Fela Kuti, who would soon emerge as perhaps the most renowned Nigerian musician, began performing in 1961 but didn't create his distinctive Afro-beat style until being exposed to Sierra Leonean Afro-soul singer Geraldo Pino in 1963. A brief period in the United States saw him exposed to the Black Power movement and the Black Panthers, an influence that he would come to express in his lyrics.
The late 1960s also saw the appearance of the first fuji bands. Fuji was named after Mount Fuji in Japan, purely for the sound of the word, according to Sikiru Barrister. Fuji was a synthesis of apala (a type of praise song of Yoruban origin) with sakara, a tambourine-drum. Fuji has been described as juju without guitars; ironically Ebenezer Obey once described juju as mambo with guitars (theoretically making fuji equivalent to mambo). The first stars of fuji were Haruna Ishola and Ayinla Omowura. Sikiru Barrister was the next big star, and remains perhaps the most popular fuji performer to date. He began his career in the early 1970s with the Supreme Fuji Commanders, and was followed in the 1980s by burgeoning stars like Baba Alatika and Barrister Wasiu. The 1970s also saw Fela Kuti begin his period of greatest fame, as well as his harassment by governmental authorities who disapproved of his highly-critical lyrics.
In the early 1980s, both Obey and Ade became international stars. In 1982, Ade was signed to Island Records, who hoped to replicate Bob Marley's success, and released Juju Music, which sold far beyond expectations in Europe and the United States. Obey released Current Affairs in 1980 on Virgin Records and became a brief star in the UK, but was not able to sustain his international career as long as Ade. Ade led a brief period of international fame for juju, which ended in 1985 when he lost his record contract and his band walked out in the middle of a huge Japanese tour.
By the end of the 1980s, juju had lost out to Yo-pop. Yo-pop, or Yoruban pop, was led by Segun Adewale, a pop superstar for much of the 80s and 90s. Adewale began performing with Prince Adekunle but found his fame with Shina Peters in a group called Shina Adewale. This partnership did not last long, however, and both soon found more fame as solo performers. Shina combined juju with Afrobeat to form Afro-juju Shina's 1989 Afro-Juju Series 1 launched a national craze called Shina Mania, but his critical success did not last long and the whole Yo-pop field soon died out in favor of fuji music, though Adewale Ayuba sparked a late 90s revival with a juju-fuji fusion after releasing 1997's Fuji Dub:Lagos-Brooklyn-Brixton.Folk music
Popular music
By the beginning of the 20th century, Yoruban music had incorporated brass instruments, written notation and new Brazilian musics, resulting in the Lagos-born palm-wine style. Palm-wine can also refer to related genres in Sierra Leone and Ghana, where the genre remains more popular and more internationally well-known, but it originally applied to a diverse set of styles played with string instruments (especially guitars or banjos) with shakers and calabashes accompanying.
