Biography
Under the leadership of highlife vocalist Prince Nico Mbarga, Rocafil Jazz ranked among Nigeria’s most impactful ensembles across the 1970s and early 1980s. Their album Sweet Mother, built around the ten-minute midtempo title track, endures as one of the highest-selling recordings in African history. Nigerian literary critic Chikwenya Ogunyemi observed that “‘Sweet Mother’” is more widely recognized than the Nigerian national anthem. Its power to unite listeners might even prompt one to favor it over the official anthem. In the years before juju and Fuji rose to prominence, the band’s mix of tribal rhythms and Western pop harmonies ruled Nigerian airwaves. They adhered closely to a guitar-band reworking of West African hard-driven rhumba. As http://www.afroplus.com noted of the six-piece band, it “swings together with sweet, machine-like precision.”