King Sunny Adé was born in 1946 in Oshogbo, Osun State, Nigeria. He and his 20-piece African Beats hypnotize audiences with juju -deeply layered, percussive groove music. Juju started in the ‘20s as local bar music and developed over the years, absorbing new technologies and influences. In the ‘50s, amplification made it possible to combine acoustic elements, such as guitar melodies and solo singing frm the older palm wine music, with full-force ensemble Yoruba drumming to create the rich, dense sound of modern juju. The top ambassador of juju, King Sunny Adé sparked an international Afropop invasion with his sensational tours in the early 1980s. KSA, as Nigerians know him, was just 17 when he eluded the expectations of his courtly family to pursue music playing in Lagos highlife bands. Soon, he latched on to the juju craze, forming his first band, The Green Spots in ‘67. The group emulated the style of juju elder statesman, I.K. Dairo and his Blue Spots, but by the time KSA launched the African Beats in ‘74, he had overshadowed Dairo and gone head-to-head with Chief Commander, Ebenezer Obey.
Adé, with his percussive “synchro system,” and Ebenezer, with his melodious “miliki” system, drove juju music to unprecedented heights as they competed to update the sound. Ebenezer introduced the three-guitar lineup and the trap drums; KSA overlaid a pedal steel guitar, and later synthesizers. But juju’s core rested in percussion topped by eloquent talking drums, and in harmonized call-and-response vocals mixing Yoruba proverbs and Christian themes. Adé has a gentle, silky voice and diving, birdlike dance moves, which his four backup singers follow as part of the group’s masterful stage choreography. With a tilt of his guitar, Adé damps his musicians down to a tap and a whisper, only to have them surge on cue with a rally of drums, shakers, bells and tangling guitars.
Returning to the USA in 2000, Adé recalled the legendary 1982 tour when he first introduced his expansive music to large American audiences. “Then, I was a stranger,” he said, “but now, it’s like we are all part of a family.”
Adé’s triumphant air is all the more impressive when you stop to consider the broken dreams African musicians have left behind over those years. Many of Adé’s contemporary band leAdérs- Fela Anikulapo Kuti on Nigeria, Franco of Congo, Mahlathini of South Africa---are now dead. Others like Papa Wemba, Youssou N’Dour, and Salif Keita have transformed their music radically to conform with international pop standards. Still others have refused to do that and wound up back in Africa, forgotten by the world, or else at the mercy of independent promoters and small record labels. Adé has played his hand shrewdly and kept both his music and his global audience.
Born Sunday Adéniyi, the son of a Methodist minister, Adé left the religious path to pursue a musical career early on. He played highlife music at first, but switched to juju in 1964, shortly before the juju craze swept the country in the aftermath of the Biafran war. In that war, Yorubas, more associated with juju, triumphed over Ibos, more associated with highlife. Following in the footsteps of his musical hero, the late I. K. Dairo, Adé formed his own band in 1974. But he couldn’t just imitate Dairo’s sound. “That’s how juju music is,” he told Afropop Worldwide in a 1996 interview. “I had to modernize the music. Instead of using the same instruments as I. K. Dairo, I used other instruments, but the same sound; like he used accordion. I couldn’t get that particular accordion, so I used keyboard.” Adé’s biggest competitor in those days was Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey, and the ranks of both bands swelled as the two leaders vied to add more to their respective sounds. Obey swelled the guitar section three guitars and bass, and then Adé added the sound that would mark his band forever, a pedal steel guitar that could ride sweet, singing lines over the mosaic of percussive melodies and rhythms.
Few know this, but Adé actually played in the U.S. in 1974. “It was more or less cultural exchange,” he explained in 2000, “We played for Nigerians.” What Americans remember is the fully mature version of Adé’s band that tore up U.S. concert halls in 1982. By then, Island Records, in search of a new Bob Marley, had signed Adé and with the help of French producer Martin Messonnier, produced his first international album, Juju Music. The album’s lead track, “Jafunmi,” became an instant classic, a juju anthem that Adé still plays in every show, despite having over 100 albums to select frm. Messonnier didn’t change Adé’s sound, but he did encourage him to break his customary long strings of compositions into individual songs. As Adé explained in 1996, he never had a problem with that.
“In Nigeria, we got used to non-stop recording, about 18 to 20 minutes of music. But over here, the music should be track-by-track for the radio and the dance floor. It’s like making a dress. One by one, the different pieces are joined together, but you can still see the lines where they meet. So to record non-stop is very simple. To record tracks is also easy.”
Two more Island albums appeared, Synchro System (1983) and Aura (1984). On Aura, Adé lengthened the songs some and pushed the grooves harder, enlisting ex-Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen, and featuring an overdubbed harmonica solo by Stevie Wonder. That track, “Ase” hit the spot for many fledgling Afropop fans, myself included, but it failed to produce the sales Island was looking for. When Island then wanted to make more drastic changes to Adé’s sound, he balked. He gave the label some tracks to rework so they could show him what they had in mind. “But when they brought them back to me,” he recalls, “I couldn’t find my music. So we shook hands and we went our separate ways.”
The pressures of international success took its toll on Adé’s band as well. As in so many African pop success stories, Adé’s musicians wanted more money, and shortly before the Island deal fell apart, much of Adé’s band members jumped ship, forcing him to regroup. At first, you could hear the difference, but within a few years, Adé once again staged a crack team of musicians. For the next decade, Adé kept touring, but recorded no new music for the international market. Two live releases appeared, notably Live Live Juju (Rykodisc 1988), a Seattle concert recording featuring Adé’s boisterous, celebratory “Africa and America.” As satisfying as these live sessions were, American juju fans began to wonder if they’d ever hear new studio work frm the African Beats again.
Around this time, Adé announced back in Nigeria that he would do less stage shows and concentrate on records and films. As he explained in 1996, he faced furious public reaction. “The whole world turned it upside down and said that I was going to retire,” Adé explains. “I was being mobbed everywhere I went. I got more than 200,000 letters. Even school children marched to my house to protest.”
In 1995, Adé found a sympathetic American manager, Andrew Frankel of Graviton. Adé signed with Mesa, and produced three excellent recordings, including the new Seven Degrees North, due out on June 6. The first of the Mesa records, E Dide/Get Up, mAdé it clear that Adé was going to play pure juju music, without any electronic gimmicks or hip-hop ambiance. Frm the rapturous sensuality of “Orisun Lye” (“The Creator”) to the driving fortitude in the melodious “Enia L’Asho Mi” (“People Are My Garments”), the release matched the cool composure and rhythmic power of Adé’s Island releases. The new songs celebrated mothers, marriage, friendship, fidelity and God through Yoruba language proverbs and allegories, all delivered in Adé’s silky tenor voice backed warmly by a male vocal chorus.
The followup, Odu (1998) recorded at Dockside Studios in Maurice, Lousianna, was equally strong, and with Seven Degrees North, recorded at Blue Jay Studio in Carlyle, Massachusetts, it is abundantly clear that Adé’s career, music, and band are now on solid footing. These ten tracks sound as good as anything in Adé’s enormous catalogue. The signature talking drums crack and tumble, especially, on the percussion-rich “Ariya”; the five guitars tangle and blend like the flavors in a savory stew on “Solution-96,” and that trAdémark pedal steel adds just the right tang on “Ogidan O Ni Se Barber.” Adé’s own chattering Telecaster riffs, and his dry, whispery vocals filled out by a supporting chorus are undiminished.
By sticking to his guns and sitting out the world beat fusion trend, Adé has ended up on top in the difficult international pop game. More impressive still, back in Nigeria, he’s survived and even managed to play a constructive role throughout one of the most tumultuous periods in modern Africa. “We are in transition now,” Adé said in 2000, referring to his country’s first democratically elected government in decAdés. “We were ruled for 35 years by the military. We were almost thinking militantly in our heads. Along the line, we are still having problems, border clashes, ethnic clashes, religious clashes.”
Adé has generally avoided politics throughout his career, but he has always provided a strong moral voice through his often religious lyrics. In 1997, Adé brought together 32 Nigerian musicians to record a record against ethnic violence called “The Way Forward.”
“We sang it in different languages,” said Adé. “We have over 220 languages in Nigeria, so we synthesized the English and surrounded it with Hausa frm the north, Yoruba frm the west, Ibo frm the east, and other languages. We said, ‘This Nigeria belongs to us. We need to salvage it together. It’s me and you who fought this independence. So why are we now fighting each other?’”
Adé has also taken the lead in a struggle that affects his country’s musicians in particular, rampant music piracy and the complete failure of radio and television entities to pay mechanical royalties to artists. As the new head of Nigeria’s musicians’ union, Adé has been leading the charge to educate politicians and the public, and to pass legislation codifying the rights of the nation’s musicians. “Three years back, we had almost 100% piracy on music in Nigeria,” Adé explained in 2000. “Today it has been reduced, but still we have a long way to go.” As the owner of three record labels, Adé has dogs in this fight. His optimism that musicians will win might seem nave coming frm someone else. But watching Adé onstage at SOB’s in the spring of 2000, hunching into his trademark bird posture to cradle his guitar and shimmy amid that majestic frontline of Afropop survivors, just as he did twenty years earlier, you realize that this is not a man to under estimate. In his quiet, sure-footed way, Adé does just about anything he likes.
Source: wikipedia
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