Peter Somuah, Trumpet / Anton De Bruin, Keyboards / Marijn van der Ven, Bass / Danny Rombout, Percussion / Jens Meijer, Drums
In 2022, Peter Somuah won the prestigious Edison Jazz Award with his first album ‘Outer Space’. Somuah gave us an ambitious biographical mosaic in his memorable ACT debut album ‘Letter to the Universe’ (2023), a cosmopolitan fusion of his many influences, which led the respected German broadsheet the Süddeutsche Zeitung to note that the disc "gave proof of the complexity of jazz as a world language."
With his follow-up album, "Highlife" (November 2024), Peter Somuah has returned to his origins and to his first musical love. He has been playing ‘highlife’, the iconic music from his homeland – which is strongly rumoured to be joining UNESCO’s worldwide Intangible Cultural Heritage register in 2025 – ever since childhood. "Highlife has fundamentally influenced the way I play the trumpet, the way I listen to music and compose," says Somuah. It is also reflected in his very own trumpet sound: the sometimes radiant, sometimes nuanced and brittle tone that he heard as a young man on the records of highlife icons such as ‘ET Mensah’ or ‘The Ramblers’. Now he sees himself as a connector between two worlds which are clearly related: he has one foot in modern jazz, the other in a traditional highlife bar.
