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CD Review
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Afropop Worldwide, CD Review >>
Here’s an invigorating entry in the growing African blues sub-genre. Maverick UK producer/guitarist Justin Adams has been Robert Plant’s guitarist in recent years, and he produced all three albums by desert rock trail blazers Tinariwen of Mali. The Soul Science project came about when Fulani griot and ritti (traditional African fiddle) player Juldeh Camara telephoned to say he was a fan of Adams’s Desert Road solo album. The two got together for a jam, and the rest is history. Some songs use programmed beats from those early jams, but the group eventually grew to a trio with the addition of Salah Dawson Miller, a percussionist schooled both in blues and North African music.
What really sets this album apart is the amalgam of Adams’s cool, confident take on rock, with Camara’s wailing chops and spectacular rich and emotive ritti sound. Few African blues tracks rock as hard as the edgy, searing, backbeat-driven “Ya Ta Taaya (I Want to Stay Fresh).” Bo Diddley in the bush! Camara’s ritti voice is his strongest suit, although he sings with gruff, earthy authenticity. When he sings and plays in unison, as on “Naafigi (Hypocrite),” each sound intensifies the other, and the result is both quintessentially African and entirely at home in the blues context.
Some of the tracks favor a softer, acoustic sound, like the chugging “Ngamen (Let’s Dance)” and the intimate, “Me Wairi Bainguray Am ( I Miss my Family)” tracks on which Camara sets aside his ritti to play gologo (West African banjo). Adams weaves the more familiar banjo into the mix on a funky groove called “Yo Lay Lay,” and he sings with a little growl in his voice on an ambling, 12/8 shuffle called “Blue Man Returns.” At its best, though, this trio rocks, whether in slow blues mode (“Subahanalaii”), ambling into Amadou and Mariam territory on “Naafigi (Hypocrite),” or on the trance riff “Naya,” reputed to have inspired young Gambian girls to fall into wells as they respond to the song’s call to “shake your bodies.” This is a deep and natural coming together of sensibilities, remarkably free of artifice.
Contributed by: Banning Eyre 05/23/08 >> go there
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