Bimbo Esho is a Music archivist, and the Managing Director of Evergreen Musical Company and Evergreen Music Heritage Foundation, she shared her update about the activities of the premier Music collector with our team.
Can we meet you?
My name is Bimbo Esho, and I am the managing director of Evergreen Musical Company.
Could you update us on your programs?
I will say we have started mildly. The reason is that we were planning all the activities before we lost our chairman, and we have to respect the dead. As we are in the New Year now, we are starting from where we stopped.
Growing up did you have passion for this job or Baba coerced you into it?
I, as an individual growing up, I love things around arts and the creative environment. It’s something I grew up naturally with: Branding, printing, graphics, and anything that has to do with arts, music, and sculpture. It’s something ingrained in me that got much more recognized with time and with a father that was in the same creative environment, it made the whole thing much more interesting.
Will it be right to say that your father’s shoes are too big for you to fill?
That’s why a lot of people believe that the shoe will be very difficult to fit in, just like every icon that left a big legacy for their children. Fortunately for me, I was close to my dad and we almost started it at the same time. When he began his interest in music we started at the same time, by then I was in school and he told me some of the things he had, his Ideas and we were in it for more than 18 years before his demise.
I was able to learn the ropes and see the good and bad side of the business. I learnt about his relationship with people and I was able to learn about the business also. The key thing about the business I was able to see and learn but that’s not all. What I think is the most important thing is taking it to the next level and that’s where we are now. We decided okay, Dad it is high time we infused something in the business and I think the business grew bigger than both of us.
We decided to establish a foundation so that people can have access and we found out that a lot of people: Students, lecturers, media, and different categories of people seem to want to have access to these materials. So, we opened a foundation which we have started and we said we were going to put these things out to the public and it has metamorphosed to something bigger than all of us.
What new things are you infusing that’s different from your father’s idea?
In the days of my father, the kind of music that was in vogue had a different appeal. It had its appeal to the generation of those days that’s using music as an example. The kind of music my father’s generation listened to appealed to that class of people.
This is my generation and I have to be able to bridge the gap between my father’s generation and mine. It’s very easy because you can feel with this generation how music has changed. It’s basically to merge both and come out with something solid because you have two generations, me and my father which also includes the generation unborn.
So, the question is, how do you understand them and what are the things they want to listen to? You have to be a bridge and give the two generations what they want and merge it. To merge it; you have to make it a more contemporary art, make it like a fast tempo. This is a generation that wants everything fast and this also appears in their music.
What kind of musicians are you looking to keep their works, because your father was a high-life musician? Are you looking at keeping the totality of the music genres?
My father’s first love was highlife. He also had an interest in other music, but what became a signature tune for him was Highlife. Today, we are a foundation beyond one genre of music. We have Apala, folklore, reggae—Nigerian reggae—Sakara, juju, fuji, and many others.
What we are trying to do is build a kind of Music Empire. You have to leave sentiments aside and see yourself as an institution. Being an institution means working with and involving different music genres and traditions.
We have Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba, and other languages, and you have to cut across different ethnic groups because that’s what makes you a real music collector. That was his kind of collection, which had all kinds and genres of music. His passion, just like we all have our passion, was obvious: He loved highlife music. Beyond that, he was a collector of all kinds of music.
So, we are running every kind of music now
One of the things you mentioned is developing young minds to be what they want to be. What do you mean by that?
One basic thing I learned from my dad’s footsteps is that he developed a lot of young minds. One is this man you brought because I knew them while growing up. When you see young people, you find out that a lot of them may not know how to get to the point they desire.
Giving a helping hand to one person is one of the biggest things you can do for humanity because such a person could have missed the road and deviated to another thing. Those are the kinds of things we look out for. Someone like me, somebody brought a lady for us to help, and I saw that this lady’s WAEC had all As’.
I said no, she is not for that purpose and even if she is for the purpose, she will be with us but she will go to school. When you see people who are intelligent and should not be in certain positions, you try to help them grow and once they grow you have saved society
