KOO NIMO: GHANA'S FOLK HIGHLIFE GUITAR

John Collins with Koo Nimo

Listen: Music Clip 1 | Music Clip 2

Koo Nimo, a stage name meaning ' Kofi who has taken the blame for something he hasn't done, (given name Daniel Amponsah) is for Ghana the equivalent of Segovia for Spain and John Williams for England; in short a red-hot finger-picking guitarist. Although he began playing this instrument with concert party guitar bands towards the late 1960's he went unplugged and since then has focused on a rootsy form of highlife that some people call 'palmwine' music. He was born in 1934 in Fuase near Kumasi and his father was both a guitarist and a trumpeter in the village brass band. Koo Nimo began playing the organ at chapel by the time he was six and in 1940 he went to school in Kumasi where he had to spend hours listening to Back and Beethoven by German missionaries who wanted to help him as they 'detected something musical' in him. His musical career really began when he went to Adisadel College in Cape Coast between 1949 and 1952 when he began playing guitar and helped form a school highlife band. In 1958 Koo Nimo met the Ghanaian pathologist Professor Laing who bought him a classical nylon-string guitar and Koo Nimo began to take classical guitar lesson from the artist/musician/dancer A.M. Opoku. Koo Nimo's style of playing although in a traditional vein is eclectic. He uses Spanish guitar picking with all fingers instead of the thumb and fore-finger of the West African guitar. He plays classical pieces and sometimes Brazilian bossanovas. Besides being Ghana's Segovia-like guitarist, Koo Nimo has been on the Executive of the Musicians' Union of Ghana MUSIGA, an advisor for the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, and a member of the Ghana National Folkore Board of Trustees. In the mid-nineties he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi. In 1998 he went to the University of Seattle to teach for two years and from there went on to the University of Michigan. He has since settled back in Ghana where he teaches at the African Cultural Studies Centre at Kumasi University.

Ghana National Folklore Board, 1997