On a visit to Ghana in 1993, I spent a day with the legendary palm wine guitarist Konimo in Kumasi. At one point, he made a point of showing me and playing an unfamiliar string instrument called the seprewa. He told me it was a cousin of the kora, and the Akan root instrument of the highlife sound. Before there were guitars in the ceremonies and watering holes of the Akan kingdom, there was the seprewa. In sixteen years since, I have never seen or heard the instrument again, so it was a surprise to come upon this group, which combines two seprewas, electric and acoustic guitars, and a beguiling array of percussion instruments as backing for a set of lilting, dreamlike highlife songs. When it was a commonplace instrument, the seprewa was not generally an ensemble instrument, and seprewa-guitar combinations have never been prevalent, particularly given the instrument’s idiosyncratic tonal system. So the music on Seprewa Kasa is not so much a revival as an imagined, and magical, musical world.
The spark for this project came when Kari Banaman, a guitarist with the legendary highlife fusion band Osibisa, heard the seprewa played at a world music festival in Switzerland in 2002. He went to Ghana, joined forces with university instructors and seprewa aces Osei Korankye and Baffour Kyerematen. Korankye has played seprewa since he was twelve, and in his hands, the instrument approaches the fluidity of the Mande kora, although it has less strings. Some of these eight pieces have the distinct flavor of the sensuous sichi highlife sound, romantic and irresistibly sweet. Others hew closer to rootsy highlife. We hear two different seprewas, one warm and rounded like a nylon string guitar, the other more twangy, like a banjo. Banaman mostly plays acoustic guitar, but when he pulls out the electric, as on the sublime closer “Barima Ye Na,” the highlife connection springs to life.
The musicianship is superb os these jewel-like performances, from the soaring vocal harmonies to spare, grounding percussion, and lacey, rhythmic string interplay. Crucially, there is also a looseness and ease in the performances, a complete absence of fussiness, most notably on the title song: Seprewa speaks, guitar answers! With all the great acoustic African releases that have come to market in the past decade, it is amazing that no one thought of this sooner. This utterly unique CD is nothing short of a revelation for lovers of acoustic string music. Kudos to these fine musicians for putting the venerable seprewa back in the limelight after all these years!
On a visit to Ghana in 1993, I spent a day with the legendary palm wine guitarist Konimo in Kumasi. At one point, he made a point of showing me and playing an unfamiliar string instrument called the seprewa. He told me it was a cousin of the kora, and the Akan root instrument of the highlife sound. Before there were guitars in the ceremonies and watering holes of the Akan kingdom, there was the seprewa. In sixteen years since, I have never seen or heard the instrument again, so it was a surprise to come upon this group, which combines two seprewas, electric and acoustic guitars, and a beguiling array of percussion instruments as backing for a set of lilting, dreamlike highlife songs. When it was a commonplace instrument, the seprewa was not generally an ensemble instrument, and seprewa-guitar combinations have never been prevalent, particularly given the instrument’s idiosyncratic tonal system. So the music on Seprewa Kasa is not so much a revival as an imagined, and magical, musical world. 