A meditation on morning ablutions, African jazz, and the soul’s peculiar requirements

Photograph of Fela Kuti

By V. L. K. Djokoto

The morning arrives like an uninvited guest—impertinent, insistent, entirely unconcerned with whether one has made adequate preparations for its arrival. One opens one’s eyes to find the day already in progress, the light slanting through the curtains at that particular angle which suggests that decisions must shortly be made, that the horizontal position cannot be maintained indefinitely, that consciousness, having been reluctantly achieved, now demands some form of purposeful deployment.

It is at this precise juncture—this liminal moment between the kingdom of sleep and the republic of obligations—that one faces a choice of rather profound implications, though it masquerades as mere habit. What shall be the first sound to greet one’s properly awakened consciousness? What music shall one permit to colonise those virgin hours before the world has had its way with one?

I propose, with the fervour of the recently converted and the conviction of one who has experimented extensively with alternatives, that one ought to begin with African jazz. Not as background accompaniment to one’s morning rituals, mind you—that would be rather like using a Kente cloth as a dishrag—but as the very substance of those first conscious hours, the foundation upon which the day’s architecture shall be constructed.

The Trumpet Speaks at Dawn

Picture, if you will, Hugh Masekela’s trumpet entering your consciousness at half past six in the morning. That singular tone—bright as new brass, melancholy as exile, defiant as a raised fist—cutting through the grey half-light of an Accra morning. There is something magnificently improbable about it, something that refuses to behave as morning music ought to behave. It does not soothe; it awakens. It does not ease one gently into consciousness; it announces that consciousness has arrived and expects to be taken seriously.

This is what separates African jazz from its more decorous cousins. It possesses an insistence, a vitality that will not be relegated to the background. When Masekela plays, one cannot simply nod along politely; one must either engage fully or admit defeat and turn it off entirely. There is no middle ground, no comfortable compromise. Rather like life itself, when one considers it properly.

The man spent decades in exile—decades!—carrying his trumpet from Johannesburg to London to New York and back again, and somehow that journey, that displacement, that refusal to be silenced, lives in every note he plays. To begin one’s morning with such music is to begin it with a reminder that beauty can emerge from sorrow, that sophistication can coexist with soul, that one need not choose between thinking and feeling.

The Lagos Morning

Or consider Fela Kuti at seven in the morning—an hour at which most people are still negotiating with their alarm clocks, still hoping that perhaps today the laws of time might be suspended in their favour. Fela does not negotiate. Fela does not compromise. Fela arranges twenty-seven musicians into a configuration that ought not work, that violates numerous principles of conventional arrangement, and somehow produces music that is simultaneously cerebral and visceral, political and danceable, angry and joyful.

His compositions sprawl across twenty, thirty minutes—entire symphonies disguised as songs, doctoral dissertations hidden inside grooves. The horns build and build, the percussion maintains polyrhythms that would require a mathematics degree to notate properly, and Fela’s voice cuts through it all with observations about corruption, about power, about the daily indignities of post-colonial existence.

This is not comfortable music. It is not designed to ease one gently into the day’s tedium. It is designed to remind one that tedium is not inevitable, that one need not accept things as they are, that music can be both beautiful and dangerous, ornamental and functional, like a very sharp knife with an elaborately carved handle.

The Johannesburg Reverie

Abdullah Ibrahim—formerly Dollar Brand, before he reclaimed both his religion and his name—plays piano as though he is simultaneously remembering and inventing, as though each note exists in multiple temporal dimensions at once. His music sounds ancient and futuristic, rooted in Cape Town’s District Six yet reaching toward something universal, something that transcends geography entirely.

“Water from an Ancient Well,” he titled one composition, and the phrase captures something essential about his approach. He is drawing from sources that predate jazz, that predate colonialism, that predate the very notion that African and European musical traditions should be considered separate entities. His left hand maintains modal patterns that could be traditional Xhosa music or could be Thelonious Monk—or perhaps, more accurately, reveals that these were never as distant as we imagined.

To listen to Ibrahim at dawn is to encounter time itself rendered strange and negotiable. The music moves slowly—achingly slowly by contemporary standards—but it is not boring, not for a moment. It is simply operating on a different temporal plane, one where patience is not merely a virtue but a prerequisite for understanding.

The Eccentric Mathematics of African Rhythm

There exists a peculiar mathematics to African jazz—peculiar, at least, to those trained in European conservatories, who imagine that rhythm is something one simply counts. Four beats to a measure, they announce confidently, as though this settled the matter.

But listen to Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa” at eight o’clock on a Tuesday morning, and explain to me precisely where the downbeat falls. Go ahead, I’ll wait. You’ll find it, eventually—Dibango is not trying to confuse you—but you’ll also find three or four other rhythms operating simultaneously, each with its own logic, its own centre of gravity, and somehow they all cohere into something that makes you want to move, even though you cannot quite explain why or how.

This is the gift—or perhaps the curse—of African musical thinking: the understanding that multiple truths can coexist simultaneously, that contradiction is not a problem to be solved but a resource to be exploited, that the space between beats is as important as the beats themselves.

Beginning one’s morning with this realisation—that the world is more complex than simple counting would suggest—strikes me as rather useful preparation for navigating the day ahead. Reality, after all, rarely presents itself in four-four time.

The Addis Ababa Mystery

And then there is Mulatu Astatke, who took Ethiopian traditional music and jazz and combined them into something that sounds like neither and both, like a message from a parallel universe where history unfolded differently, where African musical traditions had developed without interruption, where the pentatonic scales of East Africa met the harmonic sophistication of bebop on equal terms.

His music possesses an otherworldly quality—hypnotic, circular, built on vamps that repeat and repeat until repetition ceases to be repetition and becomes something closer to meditation. It is music for thinking, for contemplation, for staring at one’s ceiling and considering the rather arbitrary nature of the boundaries we draw between categories, between traditions, between what is African and what is not.

Listening to Astatke at nine in the morning—assuming one has not yet been required to perform useful work—is to encounter music that refuses to hurry, that insists upon taking its time, that treats Western notions of efficiency with the contempt they so richly deserve. There is something magnificently impractical about it, something that resists commodification, that cannot be reduced to background music for one’s commute.

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Against the Tyranny of Productivity

This is, perhaps, the essential argument for beginning one’s day with African jazz: it represents a magnificent waste of time, in the best possible sense. One cannot listen to it whilst simultaneously checking one’s emails, updating one’s social media presence, consuming one’s breakfast in efficient fashion. It demands attention—not in a bullying way, not through sheer volume or aggressive arrangement, but through its essential nature.

We inhabit an era that has declared war on contemplation, on slowness, on any activity that cannot be measured, optimised, converted into data points and quarterly reports. Beginning one’s day with music that refuses such conversion is therefore an act of rather pointed resistance.

When one sits with Fela’s twenty-minute compositions, or Abdullah Ibrahim’s modal explorations, or Masekela’s trumpet meditations, one is asserting that not everything must be productive, that beauty justifies itself, that the soul has requirements that cannot be satisfied through efficiency and optimisation.

The Colonial Gaze, Inverted

There is also the small matter of cultural hierarchy to consider. The world—or at least those portions of it that produce music criticism and distribute awards—has maintained a rather curious fiction: that sophistication in jazz can only be properly achieved in New York or Paris, that African expressions of the form are charming but somehow less serious, ethnographic curiosities rather than genuine artistic achievements.

This represents such a comprehensive misunderstanding of both jazz and African musical traditions that one hardly knows where to begin correcting it. Jazz is African music, full stop. That it developed most visibly in America does not alter its essential character, its rhythmic foundations, its improvisational spirit—all of which can be traced directly to West African musical practices.

When African musicians take up jazz, they are not borrowing a foreign art form; they are reclaiming an inheritance. And they do so with a sophistication that puts most Western jazz to shame, precisely because they understand both traditions intimately, because they can hear the African elements that American musicians often miss, because they bring to the form resources that Europeans simply do not possess.

Beginning one’s morning with African jazz is therefore not merely an aesthetic choice but a correction of the historical record, a small assertion that excellence is not geographically bound, that our continent has produced and continues to produce cultural work that demands to be taken seriously on its own terms.

The Accra Dawn Chorus

And what of our own city’s contribution? Accra may not possess the international reputation of Lagos or Johannesburg in jazz circles, but we have produced musicians who understood something essential: that highlife and jazz are not separate traditions but variations on a theme, that the sophisticated arrangements of E.T. Mensah’s orchestra or the contemporary work of our local jazz practitioners represents the same impulse toward complexity, toward beauty, toward music that thinks as well as feels.

To begin one’s morning with these local masters is to root oneself in place, to assert that one need not look abroad for models of excellence, that sophistication can emerge from one’s immediate context. There is something rather satisfying about this—about recognising that the music playing in the club down the road last Tuesday evening might be as worthy of serious attention as anything emerging from more celebrated venues.

The Accumulation of Mornings

What happens, then, when one does this daily? When one establishes this peculiar practice of beginning each morning with African jazz, with Masekela or Fela or Ibrahim or Dibango or Astatke?

Something rather subtle begins to occur. One’s ear changes. One begins to hear complexity where one previously heard only noise, to perceive structure where one imagined only chaos. One develops patience—real patience, not the performative sort—for music that takes its time, that refuses to hurry, that insists upon being met on its own terms.

One also begins to question received narratives about African cultural production, to recognise that the absence of international recognition does not indicate absence of achievement, that our continent has been producing sophisticated cultural work all along whilst the world’s attention remained obstinately fixed elsewhere.

These are not trivial realisations. They accumulate, morning by morning, until one day one discovers that one has been fundamentally altered, that one cannot return to one’s previous assumptions, that the world looks different because one has learned to listen differently.

A Concluding Eccentricity

So then: tomorrow morning, when consciousness returns and the day makes its inevitable demands, consider this peculiar proposal. Before you reach for your telephone, before you begin the frantic scramble toward productivity, before you surrender to the day’s mediocrity, put on some African jazz.

Let Masekela’s trumpet wake you properly. Let Fela’s horns remind you that complexity and joy are not opposites. Let Abdullah Ibrahim’s piano suggest that time need not be linear. Let Manu Dibango prove that rhythm is more interesting than you imagined. Let Mulatu Astatke demonstrate that sophistication can emerge from tradition rather than representing its opposite.

This will not make you more productive. It will not help you achieve your quarterly targets. It will not optimise anything whatsoever. But it will remind you that you possess a soul, that beauty exists, that African cultural achievement is real and sophisticated and worthy of serious attention, that the morning hours deserve something better than immediate surrender to the day’s tedium.

That strikes me as rather worth having, this daily reminder of what matters. And if, over time, these mornings accumulate into something larger—if they shape you into someone who carries a bit of that music’s complexity and vitality and refusal to compromise out into your daily encounters—well, that would be something worth having achieved indeed.