It might be an exaggeration—hyperbole if you will—to claim that no one has ever shaped Nigeria’s live music and cultural space quite like Muyiwa Majekodunmi did with Jazzville. But it does not feel entirely untrue.
From the 1990s into the early 2000s, Jazzville, the brainchild of Majekodunmi, was the beating heart of Lagos’s creative life and a meeting point for Lagosians across divides, drawing people from both the Island and the Mainland, and reflecting the city’s cosmopolitan spirit. It hosted moments that connected the city to a wider musical history, including tribute events that honored global figures like Nina Simone, cementing its place as both a performance space and a cultural archive.
I never experienced Jazzville in its heyday. By the time I came to understand the full significance of what the space represented, the curtain had already fallen; and, at the time of authoring this story, the iconic building at 21 Majaro Street, Onike, Yaba, stands on the brink of demolition. What I know of it, however, comes from fragmented stories about an old, once-vibrant jazz club in Lagos where live music felt alive and immersive every Friday night.
Beyond those fragmented stories lies a clearer picture of what Jazzville became. It was not just a venue for live music, but a cultural incubator where careers were tested, formed, and sometimes defined. Artistes who would later shape Nigerian music passed through its stage at different points in their journeys, from early experimentation to professional grounding. Among them was Asa, whom Majekodunmi managed before her rise to global recognition.
But Asa is only one name in a much longer lineage. The list of those who passed through that stage and went on to define Nigerian music and culture reads like a roll call: Ras Kimono, Mike Okri, Femi Kuti, Lagbaja, Darey Art Alade, Cobhams Asuquo, Kola Ogunkoya, Beautiful Nubia, Yinka Davies, alongside actors, comedians, and journalists whose careers were significantly shaped within those walls.
Yet for all of Jazzville’s cultural impact, and the many influential artistes and moments it produced, its founder remains disarmingly humble about the scale of his own contribution. “The building itself is just the hardware,” Majekodunmi told me, seated on a chair on the verandah of the Jazzville building, wearing glasses and a black shirt printed with The Last Tango design—the final gathering at Jazzville before the building’s anticipated demolition—appearing tired but composed.
“What truly matters is the software. What happens inside: the experiences, the people, the music. That’s the real identity.” For over three decades, that identity shaped the city’s creative consciousness and, by extension, the wider Nigerian cultural landscape in profound ways that are still being fully reckoned with.
The Origin and Golden Age of Jazzville
Muyiwa Majekodunmi is not a man who planned his way into history. That much is clear in how he describes his approach to life: “I tend to live like Jazz,” he says. “You start playing, and you don’t always know where it’s going until it finds its rhythm.”
Jazzville was born in January 1990 on Majaro Street in Yaba, a suburb on the Lagos Mainland. But the story of how it came to be is not so much a founding narrative as a series of unplanned turns of events, strung together by instinct and divine nudging. Majekodunmi had spent years telling friends he wanted to start a Jazz club, with a loose plan to open by November of that year.
Then, after one of his annual birthday gatherings, he recalls, a guest stopped him at the gate. “Someone said to me, ‘Majek, thank you, we had a fantastic time. We are coming back next week.’ And I told them, ‘You’ll have to bring your own drinks.’ Then one of them said, ‘Why not just start the jazz club next week?”
That simple exchange was all it took to set Jazzville in motion, with no marketing strategy and no official press release. A friend gave him about ₦9,000 to get it started. Another friend who owned a studio supported him, and the idea quickly began to take shape.
Early visibility came through Classique Magazine, owned by May Ellen Ezekiel Mofe-Damijo, which covered a significant event at the venue and introduced it to a wider audience. From there, the space found its own momentum. The U.S. Embassy began bringing jazz musicians through cultural exchange programs, and the French Cultural Centre followed. What started as a birthday barbecue had become, within a few years, one of the most culturally significant venues in West Africa’s most populous city, built entirely on the strength of what happened inside.
Yet Jazzville’s appeal was not the result of a meticulously curated concept, but something harder to define and therefore more powerful. Majekodunmi had grown up listening to jazz; his father loved it, and jazz-focused radio programs presented by Benson Idonije and Lindsay Barrett had filled his childhood with sound.
He had spent time with older cultural figures such as Steve Rhodes and Chief Taiwo Okupe, and observed spaces like Jazz 38, founded by Tunde and Frances Kuboye, and Art Place, founded by Art Alade. All of these influences had sedimented inside him, waiting for the moment he would pour them into something of his own. But even as the name Jazzville might suggest otherwise, the space was never simply about jazz. It became a platform for different forms of expression — music across genres, spoken word, comedy, painting, and more.
It was this openness that turned Jazzville into something closer to a living archive than a venue. Tucked at the back of a two-story residential building, with a wooden bookshelf packed with books at the entrance, a bar to the left, and a stage with instruments at the front, every performance happened at close range. There was no distance between the musician and the audience. You felt it in the room. The music ran from roughly 7 pm to 11 pm, sometimes stretching into the early hours, and the atmosphere was, as Majekodunmi has described it, in one word: “electric.”
But beyond its physical intimacy, Jazzville was defined by a set of unspoken rules. “What I tried to control was not so much the sound as the atmosphere and the kind of people who came in,” Majekodunmi says. At the entrance, a sign read: “If you want to have a great time here, leave your ego at the door. You could pick it up on your way out.” There were no VIP sections, no hierarchies, no dress codes. It was a deliberate rejection of the nightclub culture he had never been comfortable with.
Behind those unspoken rules for creating a community built on love and without discrimination stood a man who saw his work as fulfilling a higher calling. “Creativity, to me, carries a piece of God,” he says. “That’s why I have so much respect for people who can write, sing, draw, or create in any form. My role has always been to give that talent a platform and bring it to life. I may not be able to sing, but I can recognize talent and say, ‘Come, I have something for you,’ and then help amplify it.”
It was this instinct to recognize talent and give it a home that drew people from across Lagos’s creative circles. Respected journalist, art curator and culture advocate Jahman Anikulapo was among those Majekodunmi personally invited at the very beginning. “He simply invited us, writers, people in advertising, PR, and media,” Anikulapo recalls. “We came, and it felt like home. For some of us, our careers as reporters and journalists were even shaped and formalized here. At times, we would sleep here, and his mother would serve us pap or sometimes tea.”
That detail captures something essential about Jazzville that no formal description quite can. It was, for many of the creatives who passed through it, a home. “A night at Jazzville was not a club,” Anikulapo says. “It was a creative community. People came in as comedians, painters, writers, even though music often dominated, it was really a creative hub. As long as you had talent and something to show, you had a place there.”
The Legends, the Nights, and the Cultural Impact
Few moments in Jazzville’s history carry the weight of the night Fela Anikulapo-Kuti performed live on its stage. When asked about the most unforgettable moment in Jazzville’s history, Majekodunmi does not hesitate. “The day Fela came is probably the most unforgettable moment for me. That was around 1993 or 1994. He came for about four or five consecutive Fridays.”
The first visit was by invitation. But what Fela said upon his arrival revealed something about what Jazzville had become. He walked in, looked around the room, and said: “Hmm, I didn’t believe a place like this exists in Lagos.” For a man who had spent decades building his own alternative universe at the Afrika Shrine—a space that was itself a rejection of mainstream culture—the acknowledgement carried deep significance.
The following Friday, Fela returned and performed without invitation, and he came back for four consecutive Fridays after that. Majekodunmi would later visit Fela at home before his death in 1997. By then, the musician was ageing and increasingly tired. He apologized for his absence from Jazzville. “I miss the place,” he told Majekodunmi.
That a man of Fela’s stature would find something at Jazzville worth returning to week after week speaks to the particular alchemy Majekodunmi had created. And Fela was not alone. Jahman Anikulapo recalls another night with a similar quality of wonder: “It would be the night Fela and Steve Rhodes performed on the same stage. It was around 1995. It was just a moment of wonder to see these two great masters live together on stage. It was very memorable.”
What made those nights possible was the specific atmosphere Majekodunmi had built and fiercely protected. “Electric. It was electric, an atmosphere of joy, communal, unpretentious, laid back and down to earth,” he says.
There was a section to the right of the stage that regulars called “Area Boys Corner” — a rowdy, affectionate contingent who would banter with whoever was performing, trading jokes and challenges across the invisible line between performer and audience. “If you come to Jazzville to perform, the guys at the corner will banter with whoever is on stage,” Majekodunmi says, laughing. “It was fun and a cultural thing.” On any given Friday, you might find yourself seated beside a Nollywood star, a journalist, a painter, or a musician.
The room also drew people beyond Nigeria’s creative circles. Ike Imo, a Nigerian lawyer who attended Jazzville regularly, recalls another dimension of the experience: “Jazzville was the place where you could rub shoulders with decision-makers at various foreign embassies, who came to unwind on a Friday evening after an exhausting week of work in Lagos.” It was that kind of room where the informal and the influential sat side by side, neither announced nor distinguished.
For musicians, the experience carried a different weight. Majekodunmi describes Jazzville as functioning like an unconscious dress rehearsal. “Every Friday felt like an unconscious rehearsal for many musicians. People would come through, perform and, from there, they would start getting booked for weddings, events, and other gigs.”
Mike Okri’s story is perhaps the most instructive of all. Majekodunmi encountered him again a few years ago at a performance at Freedom Park, where Okri, spotting him in the audience, paused to acknowledge him publicly. Turning to the crowd, he said, “This is Majek, who revived my career through Jazzville.” Majekodunmi recounts the moment with characteristic understatement. He is not a man given to self-praise, nor one who seeks recognition for his role in the careers that passed through his space.
![His hands rest beneath his chin; fingers interlaced with the quiet certainty of a man standing at the threshold of a new chapter. The monochrome portrait draws you into the fine textures of his face: the softened curls, the thoughtful gaze behind dark frames, the calm that comes from a life lived in rhythm with art and community. It’s a fitting echo of Muyiwa Majekodunmi’s reflection: “If anybody had told me I would be doing this [last tango] today, I would have said it was a lie… But today is mainly about my children… In a way, this feels like a dress rehearsal for my next phase.”](https://i0.wp.com/thenollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0695.webp?resize=864%2C1080&ssl=1)
Eleven years after what became a defining success for Jazzville, Muyiwa Majekodunmi decided to shut it down in 2001. Of course, it would be difficult to imagine why a booming cultural hub like that would close. But Majekodunmi was simply done and ready for a new phase of life. “By then, I was already feeling tired — physically, emotionally, and spiritually,” he admits. “The late nights, the lifestyle, it all began to weigh on me.”
The closure, when it came, left a mark on Lagos that those who experienced Jazzville still feel. Centers like Segun Taiwo’s Ayota Arts Centre in Ajegunle and Jazz 38 in Ikoyi have also faded into memory. In 2005, four years after Jazzville shut down, Majekodunmi reinvented the space as Praiseville — a blend of club and church, which he describes as a “Clurch.” Like Jazzville, it is built on openness: no rigid hierarchy, no strict programming, no restrictions. People gather to worship freely, in the same spirit of expression that defined Jazzville, but with a stronger focus on music that edifies God.
“I go to church, but I often find it restrictive,” he explains. “Everything is very programmed. So I created something different here. People worship here freely. Healings take place here, and deliverance takes place here as well.” What this means, more than anything, is that the restless spirit that created Jazzville had not been extinguished. It had simply taken on a new form.
Twenty-one years after Jazzville evolved into Praiseville, the historic building has been marked for demolition, and its occupants now face relocation. It is a development that underscores a recurring and troubling reality in Lagos — that long-standing cultural institutions can be displaced with little warning, leaving behind memories but no replacements and little acknowledgement of what has been lost.
The question of whether Jazzville deserves preservation as a cultural landmark is one Majekodunmi gently deflects. “It’s not for me to champion that,” he says. “It is for the people who experienced the place to decide what it means to them.”
It was, in part, to let the people speak that The Last Tango: Jazz Ville Meets Praise Ville – The Secular Meets the Sacred was convened — a farewell gathering that drew a cross-section of Nigeria’s cultural elite to the weathered two-story building where flowering vines crept over the balcony railings and plants spilt from every corner.
Among those in attendance was Nigerian dancer and singer, Yeni Kuti. Also present were Steve Oluseyi Ayorinde, former Commissioner for Tourism, Arts and Culture in Lagos State; veteran Nollywood actor Segun Arinze; filmmaker Femi Odugbemi; theatre practitioner Segun Adefila; Pascal Ott; and Gloria Rhodes, daughter of the legendary Steve Rhodes, whose ensemble once graced the same stage, and many others from across Nigeria’s cultural scene.
The mood was mostly nostalgic, but electric in the way that only rooms filled with shared memory can be. Performers and audience exchanged energy across the line that separates stage from floor, each feeding the other in the manner that had always defined Jazzville’s best nights.
The enigmatic Yinka Davies delivered with her rich, commanding vocals. The veteran singer and vocalist, Maureen Awobokun, offered a beautiful rendition that drew the crowd inward. Centy Jack moved across the stage with a Michael-Jackson-esque energy that briefly made the audience forget that anything was ending.
The Nollywood actor Segun Arinze, better known for his commanding screen presence, delivered a smooth, tender rendition of Lionel Richie’s “Stuck on You” that earned a standing ovation. The majestic Mandy Brown performed her classic hit, “Taxi Driver,” with a sweetness so melodic it seemed to float just above the crowd. And then there was Gaise Baba, the Afro-Gospel artiste, who opened with Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” and closed with his own viral hit, “No Turning Back,” sending the room into a frenzy.
But it was the moment of silence that followed that, for lack of a better word, cut deepest. In the middle of the concert, Nigerian lawyer, author and historian Ed Emeka Keazor asked the room to observe one minute of silence for the legends who had once performed at Jazzville but were no longer alive. The room complied without hesitation. And in that silence, the full weight of what this place had meant—to Nigerian music, to Nigerian culture, to the individuals whose lives were shaped within these walls—settled over everyone present.
When the music resumed, Gloria Rhodes and Majekodunmi shared the stage—two people connected across generations by the spirit of the place they had both called home. She turned to the audience and said simply, “Jazzville was home. We all had a good time.”
Majekodunmi watched it all with the same calm that has defined everything he has ever built. When I asked him what comes next, he did not reach for grand declarations. “If anybody had told me I would be doing this today, I would have said it was a lie,” he admits. “But today is mainly about my children. They want to experience what Jazzville was like, and they are working on a documentary about it. In a way, this feels like a dress rehearsal for my next phase.” It was a response that speaks to the spontaneity with which he operates.
As for what comes next, the answer remains, for now, an open question. There are talks of relocation to another space where the spirit of Jazzville can take root again. Culture advocate Anikulapo, for one, is confident it will. “I don’t think Jazzville is going down,” he says. “I think it is simply being relocated to another space. If you allow people to keep sharing their experiences of this place, we will never really leave here.”
Majekodunmi’s children are also working on a documentary that will preserve the story of what happened on Majaro Street for those who were never there. Whether a new space eventually emerges, or whether Jazzville lives on primarily in memory and film remains to be seen. What is certain is that the question of its future will not be answered by one man alone, but by the community of people who experienced it and remain invested in what it becomes.
The hardware, as Majekodunmi has always maintained, is just the building. The software— the experiences, the people, the music, the careers launched, the lives redirected—that cannot be demolished. It lives in Asa’s voice on a global stage. In Mike Okri’s gratitude at Freedom Park. In Jahman Anikulapo’s memory, and that of many other journalists and reporters who authored the stories that gave Jazzville its name.
Jazzville lives in a sixteen-year-old Onyeka Nwelue reciting a poem on that stage, finding in it the launch pad that would carry him toward a career in film and literature. It lives in the Area Boys Corner, and its rowdy, affectionate banter. In the nights Fela, Steve Rhodes, and many other legends walked through that door.
The curtain has fallen on the Jazzville edifice. But, if Majekodunmi’s thirty-five years of cultural work and stewardship have proven anything, it is that the spirit of Jazzville— and all its iterations—has never needed a particular building to survive.