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CD Review
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Afropop Worldwide, CD Review >>
I fell in love with juju music about twenty years ago when I lived next door to a Ghanaian taxi driver in East Oakland. On his days off, he would relax on his front porch to the sounds of Ghanaian and Nigerian pop music blasting from the stereo inside the house. Alongside the sounds of highlife, there was a healthy smattering of songs from juju master King Sunny Ade. I fell in love with Prince Nico’s “Sweet Mother” (one of THE great pop tunes) but King Sunny Ade’s cassettes which I dubbed from my neighbors vinyl began to blare from my car stereo – this stuff is not background music and it takes a sizeable decibel level to truly appreciate this intensely layered music. If you have not heard King Sunny Ade (also known as KSA), you must remedy the situation and while the re-release KSA’s Seven Degrees North by Blue Moon/Mesa is good news, juju is LIVE music. So check out the link to KSA’s tour schedule and do your best to make one of the remaining shows.
With another month left on his current tour of Canada and the U.S., KSA hit The Independent in San Francisco on Friday June 19, 2009. A small club, this venue has featured alternative music acts – of one stripe or another – since the mid ‘80s when the Viz, a Black neighborhood bar, started to book new wave and punk acts. Several ownership and name changes later, The Independent, remodeled with a less sprawling layout (now all dance floor), was a perfect setting for the master of juju—small enough to feel intimate, large enough for the crowd to move. At ten p.m., KSA took the stage with his pared-down fourteen-piece touring group and held court for the next two hours. The rhythm patterns laid down by the talking drums (dundun) form the base for the multi-rhythmic texture that is an essential component of juju. Constant rhythmic motion, intensified by contrasting musical timbres, drives the music. The “melody” instruments – guitar, bass and keyboards – are there more for texture than for melodic or harmonic duty. Those duties are carried by the vocals: Sunny Ade’s piercing high tenor and the tight four-part harmonies provided by his back-up singers. The sound is as sweet as South African iscathamiya but with more rhythmic drive. The music never rests on the beauty of the vocals; it is always moving forward. And there is always movement on the stage: KSA and his back-up singers dance and gesture; the guitar player moves to the center of the stage for a short solo; the twin female dancers take the stage; sticks and hands strike drumheads.
Friday at The Independent was the first time I experienced KSA live and it was one of the best shows I’ve seen in quite a while. I left happy. It was an evening of great music but it was not the transcendent experience that my first listening to KSA’s early ‘80s recordings JuJu Music and Syncro System had been. The same can be said of Seven Degrees North (originally released in 2000), which is back on the market after eight years. It’s a solid effort, excellently recorded, good songs, and a full KSA band (23 pieces), including pedal steel guitar to his band (woefully missing on this tour). The standout track on the cd “Ariya” is a nearly perfect juju track, which is reason enough to pick it up. If you do not have any KSA in your listening collection, Seven Degrees North is a good place to start.
06/29/09 >> go there
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