My earliest musical influences were Blues and Jazz guitarists like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, B.B. King, Joe Pass and Wes Montgomery and guitar-based pop music bands of my childhood and youth such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.
My initial classical guitar influences were the recordings and concert performances of great guitarists like Andres Segovia, Julian Bream, John Williams and the Venezuelan classical guitarist Alirio Diaz. I also studied Ghanaian and West African guitar styles with the great guitarist and exponent of Ashanti and Ghanaian music, Agya Ko Nimo, in Kumasi in Ghana.
I play and have performed in the past works by composers such as J.S. Bach, D. Scarlatti and S. L. Weiss, works by the Spanish romantic period composers such as Isaac Albeniz and Enrique Granados, Latin American composers such as Heitor Villa-Lobos ( Brazil), Antonio Lauro ( Venezuela) and classical guitar composers such as Fernando Sor, Francisco Tarrega , and Agustin Barrios.
I have visited, as part of my work as an economist and management consultant , Latin American countries like Costa Rica, Panama, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico and have interacted and performed with local musicians picked up musical ideas along in these and other countries I have visited. I also perform my own compositions which fuse Ghanaian and West African styles with other types of music such as Classical and Jazz styles to create my own unique style.
I first became interested in Brazilian guitar styles when I first heard, as a teenager, my father’s records of the Brazilian guitarist Baden Powell’s. I have over the years played compositions by Brazilian guitarists and musicians such as Luiz Bonfa , Paulinho da Viola, Paulinho Nogueira, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Sebastiao Tapajos, Baden Powell, Garoto, and Vinicius de Moraes.
Besides music , I have had another interesting career as an economist and management expert in business, trade and export development in regions such as the Caribbean and Latin America, Middle East, Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia.
Much of this experience has involved strategic planning covering change management, business growth, SME competitiveness building, intellectual property and the accompanying institutional and legislative frameworks for private sector development and business environment reform.
At the private sector-level I have been, for much of my career, engaged in analyses, formulation and implementation of practical export strategic marketing and business development planning for exporting SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) and at the public sector level the work has covered issues such as Trade and Investment policy, international market access.
Beyond these, my other passion is literature and reading and writing in general. I write about global economic affairs the general contemporary affairs of the continent of Africa and my native Ghana
