Kokoroko

Kokoroko: Tuff Times Never Last

Read "Tuff Times Never Last" reviewed by Frank Housh

by Frank Housh
July 19, 2025

Kokoroko's sophomore album is cool. Cool as the other side of the pillow, cool like floating on top of the deep blue ocean, cool like the Fonz. Kokoroko may be properly classified within the “Afrobeat" jazz subgenre which mixes West African rhythms with jazz harmony. Its sound also includes a heavy dose of “highlife," traditional Ghanaian music that adopted instruments from colonial military bands. It was brought to America by jazz great Randy Weston in his 1963 album ...

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Beyond Afrobeat: Kokoroko's World of Black Music

by Peter Jones
March 19, 2022

London-based octet Kokoroko has been led by trumpeter-vocalist Sheila Maurice-Grey since she formed it in 2014 with percussionist Onome Edgeworth. The band's original idea was to update Afrobeat for a 21st century audience, inspired by the likes of Ebo Taylor, Tony Allen, and Fela Kuti. It was the extraordinary public reaction to their first release--a single track on the Brownswood Recordings sampler We Out Here in 2018--that catapulted them to fame: “Abusey Junction" has received 48 million YouTube views to ...

Album Review

Kokoroko: Kokoroko

by Chris May
February 24, 2019

If you ask an Afrobeat fan to name their favourite bands--excluding lineups led by Fela Kuti during his lifetime--the probability is that their top five choices will include Seun Kuti's Egypt 80 and Femi Kuti's Positive Force, both based in Lagos, along with Dele Sosimi's Afrobeat Orchestra, based in London. Other credible outfits have emerged, but none which has so far seriously challenged that tripartite ascendancy. London trumpeter Sheila Maurice-Grey's Kokoroko is an outfit to watch, however, combining, as it ...