The Vodafone Ghana Music Awards is slated for tomorrow night, May 7, 2016 and the event promises to award the biggest talents of Ghana’s music industry.
The awards ceremony dates back to the year 2000, and was then instituted as the Ghana Music Awards. This year’s edition is the 17th and theme for 2016’s event is “Let the music play… LIVE”.
Why the focus on live music, though? What could have inspired such a theme?
All over the world, musicians have embraced the concept of live music, where their performances are concerned, regardless of the audience’s size or the specifics of the event at which they are to mount the stage. In fact, some Ghanaian musicians have said that they are at their best when they succeed at incorporating live music into their performances. The ever-explosive Stonebwoy is one such artist.
Now why would a performer migrate from the easier, quicker, less stressful space of singing-over-a-beat or miming-over-the-original-track to the more complicated and more expensive arena of playing live?
Our first point is one that’s almost impossible to explain – the feeling of playing live music – being a part of a moving, blending, progressive, dynamic and emotive journey of sound.
Eric Clapton describes the experience of playing live music as going ‘straight to his nervous system, making him feel ten [feet] tall.’
Beethoven called live music ‘the mediator between the spiritual and [the] sensual life.’
Playing music live is a team effort that makes musicians smarter, sharper and, indeed, more masterful at their craft. It requires one to concentrate on pitch and key, rhythm, tempo, note duration, quality of sound and so on. The need to not only listen to what you are playing, but also to the individual heartbeats of sound of each member of the group, helps to grow and nurture the mind in ways that many a musician are yet to fully appreciate.
Then comes that all-important opportunity to connect with the fans and to enable them to experience and to appreciate you and your talent through different realms of musical spirituality that they had probably never imagined.
So if you are a musician, who is worth your salt, the question is:
Do you Play LIVE and flaunt your talent by adding lines, hooks and rhythm that don’t exist on the original CD, but that make the track more enjoyable?
Or do you play back your CD and sing along or ‘perform’ to the beat, so that your audience might as well have listened to you in their cars or at home?
Well, we dare say that at the 2016 VGMAs, you patrons should expect to witness the best , the worst and the most horrible live musical performances that the Ghanaian music industry has to offer.
Of course there will be awards too, and you can go ahead and judge the speeches that these winners will give.
Let us hope that no one goofs.
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By: Jeffrey Owuraku Sarpong/citifmonline.com/Ghana