To Teddy Kpakpo Addo, the year 1957 does not only remind him of Ghana’s independence but his first step into the world of music as well.

He had just landed a job as a clerk at the General Post Office, as Ghana Post was then known. Around that same time Nii Aryee Kushie Hammond had formed his All Stars dance band and rehearsal were on every evening in Teddy’s family house at Jamestown a suburb of Accra then considered as the nerve centre of entertainment in Accra.

The presence of the band obviously stirred up the musical inclinations in the youngman who joined the group and started learning how to play the trumpet.

Two years later he was a leading trumpeter of the band featuring at all its engagements.

‘My interest in music kept growing and I started appreciating jazz music more than all others. I therefore decided to join Joe Kelly’s band which in those days was the topmost Jazz band in Accra and in 1959 I was playing trumpet for the group.’

According to him, in those days, especially the early 1960s, music for pastime was the in-thing and just as demand for music and dance were high so did dance band and dance halls sprout.

But there were classy bands such as Uhuru, Ramblers, E T Mensah’s Tempest band and a few others.

In 1965, as a result of Sammy Abbot leaving the Uhuru dance band the chance fell on him and he grabbed it.

Teddy Kpakpo Addo recalls that when he communicated his intention of joining Uhuru to Dan Tackie, leader of the Farmers Council and one of the best saxophonist, he tried to persuade him to stay but he would not miss the God sent chance.

In 1967, Chubby Checker, the American twisting was visiting West Africa and Uhuru was billed to provide him with backing. It gave me my first international exposure and stirred up the desire to make it on the international front.

‘Luckily Uhuru again had the chance to tour Europe, I enjoyed the trip very much but I left Uhuru immediately after this because I had an offer to become the leader of Expensive Stars, the resident band of the then Star Hotel.’

After four years with Expensive Star Teddy travelled to Spain where he practised professionally as a freelance. Two years later he became a member of a Switzerland based Afro-rock group Cohana.

‘Cohana was a thriller. Everywhere we went the audience was very big and I started to get the real feel of what the big stage could do to a persons ego.’

One year later he was in London playing for another Afro rock group Kabala that took the world by a storm around the same time that Osibisa held the world spellbound with their kind of music.

Kpakpo Addo thinks there is no place like home. He is in the country to put finishing touches to a house he is building at Aburi where he intends to settle with his black American wife Janet Michael Addo, an educationalist.

Kpakpo’s musical life after Kabala was to settle down with Obo Addy a master drummer to play for kukrudu yet another afro rock group in Portland Oregon.

Lately however he formed his own band called the Telegraph.
‘It has been on and off because of my decision to come home but there is a major concert slated for Portland in connection with the launch of my wife’s book on the Joseph Project.’

Important Ghanaian artists like Eddy Quansah, Pat Thomas, Obo Addy, George Darko and Gyedu Blay Ambulley are all billed to perform on the launch.