AYINLA OMOWURA — A MAESTRO INDEED
Growing up, I used to marvel at the joy that came over my dad whenever he whipped out any of Ayinla’s vinyl records and played it. He would sing along and sway slowly to the ‘annoying’ songs of that man who always wore expensive-looking agbadas on his album covers. Sometimes he would waltz with my mum making us kids giggle. On such occasions which weren’t few, I would much prefer to hear the strings of KSA and bubbly tunes of KWAM 1 and Sir Shina Peters. He also introduced us to the almighty Fela, Rick James, Linda Clifford, Evelyn King, Kool and the Gang, of course, the ever-present Michael Jackson, and so on. But I knew Ayinla was supreme in my father’s playlist.
That early introduction to a rich variety of music through vinyl — and the radio (at a period when radio was becoming plural in Lagos and Nigeria) — is what I attribute as the reason for my eclectic music taste. But guess what? I’ve become an ardent Ayinla fan. Somewhere in my mind, the Ayinla repertoire was latent, lurking for the ripe time to burst on to the scene and never leave just as it was with the man himself — he was fully active for only about ten years but the legacy of his artistry will perhaps be eternal.
Somewhere between the closing years of the last century and the new millennium when the seeds of today’s globe-trotting Nigerian afro-pop music were being sown by the likes of The Remedies, Plantashun Bois, Trybesmen, Maintain, and so on, I fell in love with Waidi Ayinla Yusuf Gbogbolowo (Eegun Mogaji himself). It was unexpected. I was returning home from school one afternoon, and as I got off the bus, somewhere on Iju road, I heard (from the ever-present roadside speakers of cassette sellers) the confident voice of the maestro accompanied by the unmistakable fixture of his songs — the shekere, all suffused by the calming effects of the admixture of the talking drum and all the other instruments that made Ayinla’s brand of Apala an extraordinary work of art.
That afternoon I was transfixed and momentarily transported back in time to our old living room. Now the words stood out clearly and made a lot more sense. It was excellent Yoruba music — the right sound accompanying deep reflections, proverbs and admonitions. I could be forgiven for not enjoying Ayinla earlier. I was a child and Hadji Costly’s music was not child’s play — atari ajanaku ki seru omode.
Over the years, I have come to equate Apala to Country music — Ayinla is the Yoruba version of Don Williams, Kenny Rogers, George Strait, Willie Nelson, etc. They tell stories, he speaks proverbs, they play the guitar, he shakes the shekere; they’re proud of Texas, Tennessee, or Nashville, he’s proud of Abeokuta, Idi-Oro, and Yorubaland in general. Beyond that Anigilaje used his songs to educate his teeming listeners about government policies when radio and TV were the main modes of mass communication, it was an unusual innovation. The refrain e fara mo Mobolaji in his Orin Owo Ile Eko (1973) was a plea to his Lagos-based fans to adhere to the new housing rates introduced by Mobolaji Johnson, the first governor of Lagos.
Ebenezer Obey’s Egba (Awa L’omo Abeokuta) is Egba’s informal anthem, Fela is the city’s biggest music export, and Ayinla, the third leg of a fantastic tripod, is the seal of excellence that Abeokuta is, and can be, in music and whatever field of endeavour that its sons and daughters operate in. No true Yoruba music hall of fame would be complete without these three maestros.
Ayinla — omo Wuramotu — must have had an incredible work ethic to have released twenty albums in ten years, while two were released posthumously. It is anybody’s guess how large a body of work he would have created if he had lived for another ten or more years. His mastery of Yoruba and his delivery in the sweet Egba inflection are outstanding particulars of his artistry. It would not be far-fetched to conclude that his premature death put paid to the expansion of Apala — a genre that had just himself and Haruna Ishola — as the most visible and the most successful. Unfortunately for the genre and for music, Haruna Ishola also died a few years after Ayinla.
Tunde Kelani — another Egba colossus — finally brought Ayinla to the world with the excellent eponymous biopic. It’s a fitting tribute to a superb musician who was proud of his mastery and plied his trade at an insurmountable pedestal.
