Peter Somuah trumpet · Anton De Bruin keyboards · Marijn van der Ven bass · Jens Meijer drums
In 2022, Peter Somuah won the prestigious Edison Jazz Award with his debut album, Outer Space. With his memorable ACT debut, Letter to the Universe (2023), Somuah presented an ambitious biographical mosaic—a cosmopolitan fusion of his many influences—which led the respected German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung to note that the album “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 roots and to his first musical love. He has been playing highlife, the iconic music of his homeland—widely rumored to be added to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage register in 2025—since childhood. “Highlife has fundamentally influenced the way I play the trumpet, the way I listen to music, and the way I compose” says Somuah. This influence is also reflected in his distinctive trumpet sound: sometimes radiant, sometimes nuanced and brittle, inspired by the recordings he heard as a young man by highlife icons such as E.T. Mensah and The Ramblers. He now sees himself as a bridge between two clearly related worlds: with one foot in modern jazz and the other in a traditional highlife bar.
