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West Africa's royal beats
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Newsday, West Africa's royal beats >>
New Yorkers have the unique opportunity to bask in nostalgia for a time and place that most of them have never been - West Africa in the 1970s.
On Friday, Nigeria's King Sunny Adé performs locally for the first time in six years at Manhattan's Roseland Ballroom. Making the show a particular rarity is that he will be playing African-style, which is to say he and his African Beats will go deep into the morning hours.
In addition, Adé will perform at Joe's Pub next Sunday in what will be an even more unusual show: one composed solely of laid-back, acoustic palm wine music, the acoustic style that gets its name from the drink of choice in the small West African bars where it incubated.
In tune with this looking back, Adé's most-recent CD, released in 2003, "Synchro Series" (Indigedisc), reprises his sound from the time when he was at the brink of his international success.
Though Adé had been huge in Nigeria for years, he was touted as the next big thing with 1982's "Juju Music" on Island Records. At a time when African music was barely available outside the continent, Adé was lauded by critics, and his record company hoped he'd be the "new" Bob Marley, who died in 1981.
In a recent interview, Adé said his exported albums always had shorter cuts for marketing purposes, while his Nigerian albums would string five or six songs together. The title tune of "Synchro Series," for example, clocks in at 18 minutes.
When Adé rode that first wave of accolades across America, his live shows proved to be a perfect match for Grateful Deadheads, who loved to get lost in extended jams. Adé's music, however, was different: He performed with about 20 musicians, yet with no extended soloing; the music brimmed with rhythms, yet was always lighter than air and indefatigably sunny.
Though the honorific "King" was bestowed by his fans, Adé was born into a royal family and became estranged when it was discovered he was pursuing a career in music.
Adé said the break with his family was long-term, but he couldn't live that life. Even if he became a real king, he said, he would feel as if he were under "house arrest" if he were obligated to stay close to home.
A different-sounding look back comes with Luaka Bop's "Love's A Real Thing: The Funky Fuzzy Sounds of West Africa." The 12-song collection, though billed as psychedelic, is more acid rock than acid trip: short, punchy tunes as opposed to the sprawling sojourns made famous by the Dead and its jam-band progeny. The fuzz-tone power chords and cheesy organs will evoke memories of bands memorialized on the "Nuggets" collection from Rhino Records, such as The Electric Prunes.
The bands here are obviously influenced by American funk and Jimi Hendrix's electric-guitar explorations, but the songs retain a distinct African character. While Ofo and The Black Company sound like an American garage band circa 1968, albeit with polyrhythmic drumming, the collection also has Manu Dibango's "Ceddo End Title," a moody cut from a movie that is creatively constructed around the wooden xylophone-like balafon.
These songs neither came out of the blue nor were they simple knock-offs of Western sounds. Besides being just plain fun, they represent the soundtrack of a rising generation of West Africans who began to look beyond their villages and national borders. While it was a change from the music of their elders, it was not a complete break - one can hear the excitement of these young artists incorporating contemporary music with traditional.
If the world was as small then as it is now, these African artists probably would have been on the card at the Fillmore and would today be a source of nostalgia for those of us whose musical hearts were first touched during the wide-eyed experimentation of the '60s and '70s.
-Marty Lipp 04/24/05 >> go there
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