Sakara music is a form of popular

Nigeria Nigeria ( ), , ig, Naìjíríyà, yo, Nàìjíríà, pcm, Naijá , ff, Naajeeriya, kcg, Naijeriya officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf o ...

n music based in the traditions of

Yoruba music Yoruba music is the pattern/style of music practiced by the Yoruba people of Nigeria, Togo, and Benin. It is perhaps best known for its extremely advanced drumming tradition and techniques, especially using the gongon hourglass shape tension drums ...

. It mostly in the form of praise songs, that uses only traditional Yoruba instruments such as the solemn-sounding goje violin, and the small round

sakara drum The Sakara drum is one of the four major families of Yoruba drums of Nigeria. The other families are the Dundun/Gangan or talking drum, the Batá drum and the Gbedu drum. Each family includes drums of different sizes, with the mother drum (iya ...

, which is similar to a tambourine and is beaten with a stick. Sakara music overlays the nasalized, melismatic vocals of Eastern Africa and Arabic on the traditional percussion instruments. The music is often brooding and philosophical in mood. One of the first performers of this type of music in

Lagos Lagos (Nigerian English: ; ) is the largest city in Nigeria and the second most populous city in Africa, with a population of 15.4 million as of 2015 within the city proper. Lagos was the national capital of Nigeria until December 1991 fo ...

was

Abibu Oluwa Abibu Oluwa was a Nigerian musician known who was an early exponent of the Yoruba musical genre, Sakara. He is regarded as the first breakout start of musical genre music. Oluwa was prominent in the late 1920s and 1930s when he recorded for Odeon, ...

, who started playing in the 1930s. On his death in 1964 his place in the band was taken by Salami Alabi (Lefty) Balogun (October 1913 - 29 December 1981), a

talking drum The talking drum is an hourglass-shaped drum from West Africa, whose pitch can be regulated to mimic the tone and prosody of human speech. It has two drumheads connected by leather tension cords, which allow the player to change the pitc ...

mer, who released over 35 records. Other members of the band included Baba Mukaila, and Joseph (Yussuf) Olatunju. Yusuf Olatunji (alias Baba l’Egba), who died in 1978, did much to popularize the musical genre and released many records on the Phillips Nigeria label. A street in

Abeokuta Abeokuta is the capital city of Ogun State in southwest Nigeria. It is situated on the east bank of the Ogun River, near a group of rocky outcrops in a wooded savanna; north of Lagos by railway, or by water. , Abeokuta and the surrounding a ...

is named after him. Sakara music had considerable influence on other genres, including Jùjú and

Nigerian Hip Hop Hip hop music has been popular in Africa since the early 1980s due to widespread African American influence. In 1985, hip hop reached Senegal, a French-speaking country in West Africa. Some of the first Senegalese rappers were M.C. Lida, M.C. Sol ...

Fuji music Fújì is a popular Yoruba musical genre. It arose from the improvisational wéré music, also known as ajísari (meaning "waking up for sari"), a genre of music performed to wake Muslims before dawn during the Ramadan fasting season. Alhaji Si ...

is a mixture of Muslim traditional

Were music Were music () is an indigenous Yoruba music, which, like ajisari, is a way of using music to arouse the Islamic faithful to pray and feast during Ramadan festival in Yorubaland. Ajiwere or oniwere means "one who performs were music." Unlike aji ...

with elements drawn from Sakara and

Apala Apala (or akpala) is a music genre originally developed by the Yoruba people of Nigeria, during the country's history as a colony of the British Empire. It is a percussion-based style that originated in the late 1930s. The rhythms of apala grew ...

music.

References

Nigerian music Yoruba music African popular music Popular music {{Africa-music-stub