The Brass Still Knows the Way Home

On a Tuesday in Accra, I pulled a 1974 sleeve from a brown-paper stack and found its colours still arguing: orange against yellow, teal refusing to sit still. The record was modest; the jacket was not. It announced a room, a band, and a night out before the needle touched the groove.

A sleeve was a small public square

That is the lesson of the old highlife jacket: music could be described with a few hard plates and one generous line. The printer let the orange drift past the key, left the board showing at the corners, and trusted a title wide enough to carry from Osu to Kumasi.