BIX TOP ACT • Peter Somuah Group

The trumpeter Peter Somuah, who comes from Accra in Ghana and currently lives in Rotterdam, is a bridge builder between cultures and continents.

"Jazz at its most international", remarks the BBC. For the cosmopolitan Peter Somuah, musical influences from geographically distant cultures are always just a step away. This is exactly what his new album Walking Distance (March 2026), released by ACT, is all about. Peter Somuah learned to play by listening incessantly to his trumpet heroes Miles Davis and Roy Hargrove. Somuah captivates with his warm and melancholic sound as well as his rhythmic dexterity, reflecting his artistic socialization amidst the musical styles of West Africa. He touches his listeners and gets them grooving.

In 2022, Peter Somuah won the prestigious Edison Jazz Award with his debut album "Outer Space". In 2023, Peter Somuah released his ACT debut album "Letter to the Universe". It was an ambitious biographical mosaic, a cosmopolitan fusion of Somuah's many influences - and for the Süddeutsche Zeitung "proof of the complexity of jazz as a global language."

With the follow-up album "Highlife" (November 2024), Peter Somuah returns to his origins and his first musical love. "Highlife has fundamentally influenced the way I play the trumpet, the way I listen to and compose music," says Somuah. And he does this together with a band made up of Dutch musicians. "My fellow players didn't grow up in Ghana," says Somuah. "But that doesn't matter at all. More important is their deep passion for highlife and Afrobeat and the feeling they have developed for this music."

Line-up: Peter Somuah (trp); Anton De Bruin (keys) Marijn van der Ven (b); Danny Rombout (perc); Jens Meijer (dr)