Prince Nico Mbarga & Rocafil Jazz

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Prince Nico Mbarga & Rocafil Jazz · Prince Nico Mbarga was a highlife musician with two passports, one Cameroonian and one Nigerian. He was born in 1950 in Abakaliki in Nigeria, the son of a Nigerian mother and a Cameroonian father. He grew up in Ikom, where his father was a sawyer. His passion for highlife began when his father brought home a second-hand Philips radio. The sounds of Taxi Driver by Bobby Benson struck him. His father came from a long line of xylophone players and taught him the instrument. Mbarga, however, wanted a sound closer to the Western instruments of highlife, and built a xylophone himself from dried banana skins and bark.

Music and breakthrough

After his father's death life became hard. He sang in bars, often without being paid. During the Nigerian civil war in 1967 he fled to Mamfe in Cameroon. There he worked as a band boy for a Congolese group, carried instruments to gigs and got to know Congolese rumba. He taught himself conga, bass guitar and the Congolese finger-picking style on electric guitar. In 1970 he crossed the border, by a bush path, into Nigeria, and ended up in Onitsha.

Influence

With his band Rocafil Jazz he recorded Sweet Mother. The song is his best-known and is described as the best-selling song ever by an African artist. It appeared in 1976, on the album Prince Nico Mbarga And Rocafil Jazz. Later came Cool Money (1979) and Let Them Say (1982), among others. Mbarga died in 1997. Sweet Mother is an ode to the mother, a theme that speaks to everyone in West Africa.

Listening

• 
  Sweet Mother · Prince Nico Mbarga & Rocafil Jazz, 1976
  Apple Music ↗

Discography

Studio albums

• 1976Prince Nico Mbarga And Rocafil Jazz
• 1977Prince Nico Mbarga & Rocafil Jazz
• 1979Cool Money
• 1982Let Them Say
• ?Sweet Mother