Iye Echa

I am excited to announce the release of my first non-fiction book! While I'd love to share the challenges of publishing a book while also working on its translation, I will save that for another time. For now, I’m thrilled…

We were playing at the Hilversum Afrika Festival, and I was excited to watch a group of Surinamese musicians perform. Their performance was a captivating blend of poems, rhythms, and songs. Although I arrived a bit late, I was immediately…

When I was little, I often changed the lyrics and melodies of pop tunes and created my variations. It did not occur to me that I was improvising. In retrospect, I was practising without actually practising. I later enhanced the…

“Get the job done” is my motto for working on music.  I call this the 50% process. It means I try to get anything up to a 50% threshold, then abandon it or continue to work on it if motivated.…

I designed several websites in the past, only to delete them again. The current website is my third.  I hope I will keep this one for some time. Why?

As a musician/artist, having a website makes you appear serious and…

Afrobeat, a term coined - I believe - by the late Fela Kuti, is today used to refer to any music from the African continent. And that is unacceptable to me. Using Afro-beat to refer to music from the continent…

One thing that astounds me about being a musician is performing solo. Why does this seem baffling, you may ask? After all, musicians practice their instruments alone or solo. I guess this comes from the perfectionism associated with being a…