Customer Reviews

Live Live Juju

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I am blessed to have the company of musicians I highly respect in my band. Rarely, one of them recommends an album as so important we should have it in our collections. This is one of those albums. I have had it a month and it has stayed in rotation on my cd player; I have not taken it out.

All too often, "popular world music" means "music of other cultures as seen through Western eyes." Happily, this is not the case with "Live Live Ju Ju." Here, the roles are reversed - King Sunny Ade artfully reinterprets several Western musical styles, some which are Africaan-inspired (jazz, blues, raggae) and some that are not (Country-Western, Hawaiian slack-key guitar) - all through the eyes of an African and his impressive band. The songs here all offer just a taste of what this man can do in a popular context. The recording itself, made on the cusp of the CD age, sounds awesome, with every nuance sounding clear as a bell.

In the spring of 1983 I had the good fortune to see Sunny Ade and his African Beats live at the Wax Museum in D.C. with a date I'd brought up from Charlottesville. I knew of his music because the previous autumn his first U.S. album 'Juju Music' appeared and a musician friend told me about it, so I bought it and loved the sound. The Wax Museum concert was probably one of the best I'd ever attended, rating with those of Janis Joplin, Miles Davis, Jefferson Airplane, Thelonius Monk, Ravi Shankar, and Ali Akbar Khan. Essentially the same extended ensemble I heard that evening plays on this album -- three male vocalists/dancers up front, two rhythm guitars, two talking drummers (at opposite ends of the stage accentuating the effect of an increasingly heated conversation), two conventional rock-style drummers, two percussionists, a keyboardist, a bass player (maybe two?), and on lead guitar Sunny Ade. In all about 12 musicians. The talking drum duet that opens this album is one of the best drum 'solos' you'll hear (up there with Blackwell's on the legendary Atlantic 'Ornette' jazz album). After twenty minutes the whole audience (or as much as would fit) got out of their seats and moved close to the stage to dance houlder to shoulder as one by one various members of the audience were allowed to climb onto the stage to shower money over their favorite musicians or plaster onto their perspiring foreheads. After the concert someone came out on stage with a broom and swept up all the bills that littered the floor and everyone left in an elevated state of mind convinced we'd witnessed something great.

King Sunny Ade burst on the American scene much the way Marley did with his memorable Roxy concert, but unfortunately Ade has never been able to match the intensity of this performance in subsequent CD's. This is African guitar and drums at their very best, a kinetic whirlwind of rhythms that is riveting to listen to. Ade draws from a deep well of Nigerian music to put together a stellar concert that will sweep you off your feet. The music is chant-like, exhorting the audience to participate in the polyphony of sounds. It is very hard to stay seated. There is also a video of him and Ebenezer Obey for those who must see him to believe him.