At PGM live on Feb. 22nd, the event organisers had pulled an audience to Junkyard in Abuja for an evening of music with Black Magic headlining. He was going to be supported by Cef, The Isomers, and Kaline. The advertised show time was 4pm, and on-purpose, I got there late — 5:30pm — because Abuja event organisers and poor time management have become a standard complaint in my event reviews.
Showing up late did not change this. The event started at about 8pm.
The Isomers opened the event and put up a good fight against the poor sound, managing to deliver a decent performance. They could have been better, but there’s not much they could have done when a crucial element of live music performance was failing. The sound improved a little before Cef followed after them, then Kaline, and eventually Blackmagic, who showed up at midnight, 30 minutes after I had left, and about 2 hours after Kaline finished performing. There was a DJ who brought his A-game during the 2 hour interlude before Blackmagic showed up, but that didn’t change the fact that this event had started four hours late, and still kept an audience waiting an extra 2-hours for the headliner. Abot 60% of the initial audience was gone by the time I was leaving.
When Cef took to the stage, garbed in a white native with no shoes, I noticed his dreadlocks were shorter than they used to be. I hadn’t seen Cef perform in a long time and over the last two Tamerri festivals, his performance craft had dwindled greatly. His captivating performances were bereft of everything that made them beautiful. Over the last two years, the shoeless priest had lost his connections to the deities.
Something was different today though, it wasn’t just the shorter dreads, there was an aura about Cef, there was something nostalgic about when he spoke into the mic. I could feel a force pouring out gently from the stage. I hadn’t seen Cef — the real Cef — in 2 years, all I had experienced was a ghost of his former self, too intangible to convey his power across the stage. This though, was not the apparition whose performances had dampened my spirits in the last two years.
He began to do a freestyle mic check, just like I remembered it, spurting tunes into the mic in gibberish, gibberish morphed into lyrics, a ritual that connected him and the band that was playing while transporting the audience into his territory. He had begun to ferry his listeners across his sound waves, and I knew it.
Cef spent his performance set swaying from one end of the stage to another, singing with intensity, invoking power with each tune and step. I made my way up front while he was singing “Angeli” because this was the Cef whose performances enthralled me. He was generating enough energy on that stage to send power surges across Junkyard’s open field. The force rising on the stage was nearing peak levels when he invited Bobby Ibo to join him on stage. Bobby kicked a rap verse and Cef finally hit the Zenith of the build-up with chants of “I’m gonna be okay, I’m gonna be just fine”. The instrumentalists followed his rise shortly after, burying everything underneath the waves of crashing cymbals and booming basses.
Whenever I see Cef bare feet, it looks like he can feel the earth, he is eccentric and his eccentricity flows through in a manner that is not invasive. If Cef were a priest, he would be a medium for Ala.
Ala is an Alusi — an Igbo deity. Her power and jurisdiction is far reaching, she is goddess of Earth, fertility, creativity, and she rules the underworld.
With the loss of his ability to have captivating performances, Cef was trapped in the underworld in my mind. I was delighted to witness his resurrection. Ala will be pleased to have his bare feet charting musical courses across her Earth.