Sound Café and Spencer Momoh find a common rhythm at Sharrow Festival 2026

Olamide Sax takes on most of the melodic parts on the saxophone, Akinseye Oke, the ensemble's curator, plays the bass, and Og Nana contributes harmonic colour on keyboard. Tosin Arotiba, known professionally as TDrumz, provides the rhythmic foundation on the drum kit, while Spencer Momoh, professionally known as Spencer Percussions, completes the arrangement on the djembe. It is five musicians, each with a different role, whose success depends on their ability to bring those individual differences together.

Sound Café was well suited to perform at the 2026 Sharrow Festival in Sheffield. The festival, running since 1997, brings music, dance, food, workshops and local organisations together in one place. Its return this year carries extra weight after funding problems forced the cancellation of the 2025 edition, with volunteers and supporters working to bring it back.

That same spirit of bringing different communities into one space runs through Sound Café itself. Under Oke's direction, the Sheffield-based platform has created room for African and African-diasporic music, drawing partly from the communal experience of music he grew up with in Nigeria. At Sharrow, this wasn't a Nigerian band showing up to represent African culture. It was musicians sharing that culture through music, the same way the festival brings its communities together without needing to explain itself.

The ensemble is well put together for a reason. Olamide Sax has the kind of presence that draws the eye, with the saxophone performing a warm, expressive sound. Underneath him, Oke's bass provides rhythmic and melodic support, while Og Nana's keys add further colour. TDrumz supplies the backbone that lets the others move freely. Momoh's place within this arrangement is the most interesting.

Sound Café already has a drummer, and Afrobeats already has plenty of rhythm. A second percussionist risks making the music busier without making it better. The djembe raises a further risk. It's an instrument people quickly associate with West African music, which means it can end up included simply to make a performance sound more "African." Momoh avoids both traps by giving the djembe a real musical purpose rather than a symbolic one.

His technique shows in how he uses different parts of the drum to change the sound and strength of each strike. Fuller strikes mix with sharper accents; faster sections give way to calmer ones. He doesn't stay with one pattern simply because it works. His playing shifts with the music around him. His strongest quality is judgement: knowing that good percussion isn't about filling every available space with sound.

His relationship with TDrumz makes this clearest. A drum kit and hand percussion can easily crowd each other if both musicians try to do too much. Here, they have different jobs. TDrumz holds the main rhythm together while Momoh works around him, sometimes strengthening an accent, sometimes adding texture. That division gives Olamide room to stretch his melodies, while Oke's bass keeps the sections connected and Og Nana's keys add depth. What makes the five musicians work isn't simply individual ability. It's that they listen to one another.

Momoh's work with Sound Café isn't about playing traditional percussion on its own. It's about finding ways to bring the rhythmic possibilities of traditional African instruments into contemporary live music. That requires understanding his own instrument while knowing how to work alongside bass, keys, saxophone and a modern drum kit. At Sharrow, his ability to adapt mattered as much as his technique.

The djembe's history reaches back long before Afrobeats. Across West African musical traditions, percussion has served celebration, ceremony, communication and entertainment. But it would be too easy to suggest Afrobeats simply grew out of traditional African drumming. Its sound has been shaped by highlife, fuji, hip-hop, R&B, dancehall, electronic production and more. Momoh's performance shows how an older instrument can hold a place in contemporary music without being trapped in the past. He does this not by making the music sound deliberately traditional, but by finding the instrument a modern role. Alongside keyboards, electric bass, saxophone and a drum kit, the djembe keeps its own sound while becoming part of something new.

This is what makes Momoh more than someone providing extra percussion behind the lead musicians. His djembe changes the texture of the band. Take it away, and Sound Café would still have rhythm, but the music wouldn't feel the same. The difference between his hands on the djembe and TDrumz on the kit gives the performance another rhythmic layer, and Momoh knows how to make that difference useful rather than distracting.

Olamide Sax remains the main melodic presence, and Oke provides the curatorial direction, but what makes Momoh interesting, even from the edge of the stage, is what his performance says about collaboration. He brings an instrument with a long West African history into a modern ensemble and knows how to make it work with the musicians around him.

Technique gives a percussionist the ability to play more. Musicianship is knowing when more is actually needed. At Sharrow, Momoh showed both. More importantly, he showed the growing identity of a percussionist who can carry the traditions behind his instrument into contemporary collaboration. That's the place he's looking for the instrument in the UK. The djembe didn't have to dominate Sound Café's performance to matter. In Spencer Momoh's hands, it simply had to belong.