Kumi Guitar
Despite the dominance of other genres in Ghana’s music scene, highlife musician, Kumi Guitar says the development serves as no threat to highlife music.
His comment is on the basis that highlife has served as the backbone of Ghana’s music industry as artistes who veered away from it to other genres eventually returned due to the sweet melodies the highlife genre possess.
Speaking on Radio Univers’ mid-morning show, Brunch2Lunch, Kumi Guitar told host, Abrantepa that highlife is still vibrant and appealing.
“None of the genres is a threat to highlife. I see highlife to be an old man sitting in a lazy chair looking at the other genres play on the compound. At the end of the day, one gets hurt, comes to grandpa and gets treated. He joins again. Most people go into other genres and come back to sing highlife. R2bees started doing hip-hop. When they did highlife, you saw what happened. I think they even did better with highlife,” he said.
Kumi Guitar revealed that he quit rap for highlife although he performed creditably well with rap music in school. According to him, he was called ‘Nightmare’ but met Kwabena Kwabena after his decision to do highlife and the latter proposed that he used his real name ‘Nana Yaw Kumi’ instead since ‘Nightmare’ was ‘’a wild name’’ for a highlife musician.
His name was again changed to ‘Kumi Guitar’ when he started working with his former manager, Mark Okraku-Mantey.
“I really studied what I wanted to do before I joined [highlife]. I used to rap but when I came out of school, I noticed if I really want to be a musician, it’s not just about singling. That’s when I told myself to learn how to play an instrument,” he noted.
Kumi Guitar has dropped a single ‘Obra’ produced by Appietus.
