The near-death experience that made me a musician
Life Changing
BBC
4.6 • 804 Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2021
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tony Kofi is the fifth of seven brothers and was raised by his Ghanaian parents in Nottingham in the late 1960s.
At secondary school Tony was turned down for the music course he wanted to do, told he wasn’t focused enough, and directed to do woodwork instead. He stuck with woodwork as he was really good at it, and left school at the age of 16 to become a carpentry apprentice. A few months in, working on a house construction, he fell from the roof arch to the ground floor where he landed on his head. Tony says he experienced the fall in slow motion and he had clear visions of unknown faces and places and saw images of himself playing an instrument. During his recovery it was that image which kept coming back to him. Tony made the decision to quit his apprenticeship and announced his intention to become a musician. He bought a saxophone and taught himself how to play by ear, before earning a full scholarship to the prestigious Berklee College of Music in the US.
Scroll forward many years, Tony is now a highly-acclaimed jazz saxophonist and credits the fall with turning his whole life around.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Eleven climbers appeared to have died on the world's second highest mountain K2. |
| 0:06.0 | It was one of the deadliest days in mountaineering history. |
| 0:10.0 | Rock falls, avalanches. |
| 0:11.0 | Huge pieces of ice. All are big enough to kill you. |
| 0:14.0 | He just flew out into Devoid and he was gone. |
| 0:17.0 | How did it all go so wrong? |
| 0:19.0 | And is it really worth risking death to feel alive? Why would somebody |
| 0:23.5 | pay to go to a place called the death cell on a vacation? Extreme, peak danger with me, |
| 0:29.9 | Natalia Melman Petrazella. Listen to the full series now first on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:40.1 | Hello and welcome to life-changing, where we hear about truly transformative moments in people's lives. |
| 0:46.7 | My seventh and last guest in this series is called Tony Kofi. |
| 0:51.0 | Tony was brought up in a big family in Nottingham in the late 60s and 70s, and he may very well have stayed there had he not had an extraordinary experience when he was 16, something that led him to take a new and unexpected path in life, which he stuck to ever since. |
| 1:08.6 | Take me back to your household. Now, you have got, I think you've got six |
| 1:13.3 | siblings. Yes. But six brothers. All boys, including myself. What was that like? It was great, |
| 1:22.2 | actually. I really, really loved having that many siblings and being able to play with them and, you know, |
| 1:31.5 | hang out with them and sometimes get beaten up by them, you know, but a lot of times getting |
| 1:39.0 | protected by the older ones. |
| 1:40.9 | I was going to ask, where do you play football? |
| 1:42.6 | Oh, play football. |
| 1:43.5 | Yeah. |
| 1:43.7 | Where do you come in the order of brothers? |
| 1:45.4 | I'm fifth. |
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