EMMANUEL NII OKAI QUARTEY

Highlife trumpeter, Achimota music master and the heartbeat of Jamestown's Homowo

Nobody in Jamestown remembers exactly when Nii Okai Quartey got his first trumpet, only that by the time he was twelve the fishermen on the beach had stopped asking him to be quiet and started asking him to play.

Born in 1939 into a Ga fishing family, Emmanuel was the son of a net-mender and a fishmonger. A music teacher at his primary school heard him copy a bugle call by ear and wrote a letter to Achimota School, which offered him a place in 1953. There he learned to read music, to play in a proper brass section, and to hide a cheap Besson trumpet under his bed so that he could practise at dawn without waking the dormitory.

In 1959 he joined the Accra Rhythm Aces, a highlife band that played the dance halls of Accra and toured Lagos, Abidjan and Freetown over the next quarter-century. He was the band's first trumpet and its quiet conscience, the one who made sure the younger players were paid. In 1978 he returned to Achimota as music master and taught there for twenty-one years, conducting the school's brass ensemble, and playing with the Aces at weekends.

He married Comfort Adjeley Tetteh in 1964. At home he loved kenkey with fried fish and shito, the Sunday service band at Ebenezer Presbyterian, and the annual Homowo festival, which he never missed in eighty years. His old trumpet hung above the sitting room door, polished weekly, though nobody ever saw him polish it.

He died peacefully at home in August 2019, a few weeks before Homowo. He leaves his wife of fifty-five years, his children and fourteen grandchildren, and a generation of Ghanaian musicians who started on a school trumpet.

“A trumpet is just a loud way of saying thank you.”