One Year After: The Melody Lives On – A Daughter’s Symphony In Tribute To Chief Femi Esho

 

By Tayo Mabeweje

 

Like a master conductor who once led the orchestra of Nigeria’s musical heritage, Chief Femi Esho now plays his eternal solo among the stars. But even in his silence, the echoes of his life’s composition continue to reverberate — through reels of highlife classics, timeless vinyls, and, most enduringly, through the daughter who keeps the tempo of his vision alive.

“Music is life itself,” Louis Armstrong once said. “What would this world be without good music? No matter what kind it is, it soothes the soul.” For Chief Femi Esho, music was not just life — it was legacy, ancestry, and identity.

Bimbo Esho, his daughter and heir to this sacred baton, did not just inherit archives — she inherited a purpose. “Daddy didn’t just love music,” Bimbo recalls, “he lived it, like oxygen in his veins. Every beat he preserved was a heartbeat of our cultural soul.”

She now walks in his rhythm — preserving not just sounds, but stories. She has become the griot of our time, digitizing dusty vinyls and reanimating voices that once risked fading into silence. “To him,” she says, “every forgotten saxophone riff or highlife lyric was a thread in Nigeria’s cultural fabric. I can’t let that tapestry unravel.”

Bimbo speaks often of sacred nights at home, when her father would play rare tracks long past midnight. “It wasn’t noise,” she muses, “it was spiritual — like prayers in melodies.” On one of those nights, she remembers him rediscovering a long-lost I.K. Dairo piece. “He wept,” she says. “That’s when I truly understood — Daddy wasn’t collecting music. He was communing with ancestors.”

In this new movement of her life, Bimbo has stepped into her father’s rhythm with grace. Through Evergreen Musical Company, she has become a curator of time, threading modern technology with ancient sound. “He once told me,” she says, “‘If you can give music a second life, you give memory a heartbeat.’ That’s what I do, every day.”

Bob Marley once said, “One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.” For Bimbo, the music does hit — and yes, it hurts — but in its embrace, she finds purpose.

At his first-year remembrance, musicians and admirers would gather not in mourning but in chorus. They will not whisper farewells — they will sing full-throated praise. One legend once said, “Chief Esho didn’t save music — he saved us.”

Now, when Bimbo curates a concert, launches an archive, or simply sits with an old highlife LP, she feels his presence. “He is in the pauses, the crescendos, the refrains,” she smiles. “Daddy may no longer speak, but oh — how he sings.”

As Duke Ellington once said, “A problem is a chance for you to do your best.” And in the ache of absence, Bimbo is doing just that — her best, for the best of us.

So, one year after the maestro’s final bow, his music — and his mission — continues.

Because the melody lives on.

Tayo Mabeweje, a music researcher and commentator, writes from Abeokuta, Ogun State.