Music of Tuesday, 10 April 2007

Source: ghanamusic.com

Kofi B, Praye and Samini Cry Foul Over Ghana Music Awards Festival 2007

For seven years running, the Ghana Music Awards Festival has become the most glamorous musical event on the entertainment calendar.

This started as a day's event but has now grown into a musical festival which is celebrated before the end of the first quarter of every year hence the name "Ghana Music Awards Festival".

Organized by Charter House since its inception, this award has been designed to appreciate and reward musicians who have excelled within the period of contention.

Though the production of the event improves every year, some of the musicians who this event is meant for, do not seem to be happy with their placements in the categorization process and some other occurrences.

This year's edition of the Ghana Music Awards Festival 2007, dubbed "The Golden Jubilee Edition: was launched on Thursday March 29 at the Coconut Groove Regency Hotel to officially outdoor the event and to openly uncover the various categories and its nominees.

Unlike last year or any other year, what was known as the media launch has been changed into a launch party, the Gospel fest (Gospel Rock Show) which was part of last years activities have been taken off due to poor attendance and the date of the event has been shifted from the traditional March to May because of the Ghana@50 celebrations and engagements. Significantly, the public voting process has changed from the postage system to SMS texting via mobile phone.

Already there are matters arising on the upcoming event. According to Kofi B, who refused to go to the stage when all the nominees were called to come on stage, he does not understand why the only song which was nominated from his well packed album titled "The return of Kofi 'B'" was "Akua Ataa" even though songs like "Koforidua flowers", "Sika Adwa", "Come back" and other songs on the same album are equally good or event better and popular.

Kofi said he had this same painful experience with the awards, when he released "Mobrowa". Though Kofi hadn't seen the best music video category yet, he made it clear that he will be very surprised if his "Akua Ataa" video is not nominated or better still does not win the award for that category.

Meanwhile Castro of OM Studios who is also the manager for Praye said he is rather shocked with the turnout of events with respect to Praye's nomination and the song that was nominated. Explaining; Castro said Praye released an album titled "The Bomb" which has popular songs like "Whats your problem", "Jacket", and "My wife" which undoubtedly falls within the year in contention but unfortunately did not get any nomination with this album.

Rather a single Praye did on the Appietus compilation titled "Makoma" has been nominated in all the hiplife categories. "This means the real album of my boys have been ignored though it qualifies which automatically implies that they have been denied of the hiplife album of the year and other categories they deserver with their own album. I think this is a blander that will forever make the awards questionable if not corrected", Praye's manager emphasized.

In Samini's camp, they do not agree with the organizers for choosing "Odo" as a reggae song for the reggae song of the year category,

According to his management "Odo" is not a reggae song, the only reggae song on his "Samini" album is "Music" which features A. B.