The Nigerian Bookstore That Has Hosted Iconic Live Music Performances

Depending on who you ask, Jazzhole is a vintage bookstore, a record and vinyl shop, or one of the rarest places that still embodies the grounded charm and character of 2000s Lagos. Someone else might describe it as an unintentional archival centre bearing witness to decades-long changes Lagos has seen or the best place to get the kind of books that don't get stocked at many other bookstores in Lagos. In truth, Jazzhole is all of those things and more. 

Nestled on the ground floor of a modest building on Awolowo Road, Ikoyi, Lagos, Jazzhole was founded in 1991 by Kunle Tejuoso, who still runs it. Jazzhole’s interior has been largely the same for over a decade now. Inside, the expansive, open-plan space is lined with rows and rows of books — from literary fiction to poetry books, special anthologies and rare magazines. Next to these are ceiling-high shelves packed with vinyl records — reggae, highlife, funk, and contemporaries along with cassette tapes and vinyl players. 

At the furthest corner of the store, a tiny cafe bar juts out from the wall, facing another splendid row of rare books on a range of subjects from nature writing to science. And adjacent to that bar is something akin to a stage, a modestly lit clearing that has served - throughout the existence of Jazzhole - as a performance corner, a space for live music, and a platform where some of Nigeria’s biggest music stars either got their start or have had a memorable performance.

“The idea for the store was music on one side and then integrate it with a bit more intellectual matter,” Tejuoso tells OkayAfrica. “So my mom (who owned Glendora Books) was [selling] more best-selling fiction novels; I wanted to step up a bit and have books on design, journals. That was what we were trying to do.” But Jazzhole, as Tejuoso would come to find, would become for many people a place to linger, discover, and find new ways of connecting with people. And for some of Nigeria’s finest alternative artists, it would serve and still serves as one of the best places to stage a performance.

One such performance was by Asa, who offered to perform there just as her career was blowing up. “She came here and offered to do a gig as a way to give back, which we were very appreciative of at the time,” Tejuoso tells  OkayAfrica. We are sitting right in front of the cafe for our conversation, our table set a few steps away from where Asa’s performance took place many years ago. As Tejuoso, who has worked in music as a producer and managed acts like Fatai Rolling Dollar, remembers it, the line outside for the event extended down the road. “I made the dumbest mistake of making the ticket as cheap as possible. Everything was packed up in the shop.” He remembers it as “a great time;” the space was choked full with people and the energy was incredible. People were everywhere, even on the bar table.

Other artists from Ayetoro to Keziah Jones, Beautiful Nubia to Nneka, Efya to The Cavemen. have all performed at Jazzhole as well. The booking model isn’t standardised (artists who are visiting Lagos or passing through the store usually offer or are asked if they’d like to stage a performance); they don’t have a live music programming calendar, as performances aren’t a core offering of Jazzhole’s business. According to Tejuoso, Jazzhole is still primarily a bookstore and a place to discover the best of world music. Still, its mutability has lent Jazzhole a prestige beyond a space that houses interesting books and records. For many of the artists, it is not just a place to have made the store their stage; it is a space that actively shapes and contributes to culture.

A shifting legacy

There is a throughline in the artists who have performed at Jazzhole, a throughline that runs all the way back to the core of what Jazzhole represents. These artists, like the books and records Jazzhole stocks, are wildly original, entirely themselves and with practices that push ideas around art and music forward. Because Jazzhole often hosts artists operating outside the mainstream, it has become a space that hosts originality, a space concerned not only with what is popular but with what is interesting. This is particularly evident in the feeling of organized chaos that Jazzhole embodies. As Tejuoso aptly phrases it, “I don't like looking so clinical, like how the other bookstores look. I  like the busyness and randomness of the place ”

This makes sense when one considers the story behind why Jazzhole was founded. “I'd always worked in my mother's bookstore called Glendora; I grew up working in a bookstore, having books all over the place,” Tejuoso shares. Jazzhole grew from Tejuoso’s love for books before evolving into a mission to make African music available and easy to discover in one place. At the time Jazzhole began, Tejuoso was a huge fan of Jazz music. “When we were much younger, it was regular R&B. The whole different phases, but ultimately, as we matured, it was jazz, traditional jazz, not the smooth, funky jazz, just straight jazz.”

He was also deeply interested in African music, which was hard to find because there was no internet or easy ways to discover it. The local stalls that sold music specialised only in Nigerian music, mostly highlife and Fuji. “I wanted to have music from across the globe. Music from Algeria, Brazil, from the African diaspora. You could hardly find African music apart from maybe music from Ghana, or maybe Congo music, which is what Nigerians always had drawn to. There were key distributors at the time in the UK and in Paris, so I would go there and they would get a kick out of it, that I’ve come all the way to buy our own music,” he explains.

Throughout the years, Jazzhole has succeeded in bringing people closer to music, with its legacy evolving as the times change. It predates this new age where an influx of multi-use cultural spaces are popping up all over the world, and precedes this time where music performances are constantly being reimagined in Nigeria. There is no doubt that Jazzhole’s most enduring legacy will continue to be its role in facilitating the discovery and expression of music that may be hard to find anywhere else. And for Tejuoso, every artist who has made Jazzhole a performance space has brought in something special by way of their artistry. He describes it quite fittingly, saying, “We try to showcase things that we feel might be special.”