King Sunny Ade and his Afrobeat orchestra on tour (and on disc)

yknow I've been thinking I wanna get Juju music… but being that it's Island's "we need another Bob M" gambit, is there any sense that it's somewhat cleaned up, sell-outish, for the international market? or would the below be better for a beginner?

https://www.allmusic.com/album/best-of-the-classic-years-mw0000018870

https://www.allmusic.com/album/the-king-of-juju-the-best-of-sunny-ade-mw0000367899

best of the classic years is great too. I just love the dubby early 80s electronic production flourishes on Juju Music. I have a strong aversion to "cleaned up" intl market sht but just listen to it and I'd be shocked if you deem it as such.

All three of his Island albums — Juju Music, Synchro System (my favorite) and Aura — are great, as are the compilations Best of the Classic Years and Gems From the Classic Years. Of the three Island records, Aura is the most "let's make this guy a pop star" — Stevie Wonder plays harmonica on it, and some of the tracks have a very electro/hip-hop sound. (There were even 12" dance singles issued.)

I don't find anything particularly "cleaned up" about it, and I think it's worth questioning the assumption that something exclusively for an African audience would be less "cleaned up" than something aimed at the international market. There's a ton of afropop from the 80s that was primarily marketed within its home country that sounds much "cleaner" to my ears than this record.

That said, I found the Classic Years to be an easier gateway for me back in my college days as a guy whose musical trajectory was classic rock/grunge/hardcore---> jazz ----> rare funk and soul ---> fela

fwiw, some commentary from the wiki article on this very subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juju_Music

When Adé agreed, he was teamed with Martin Meissonnier, a French record producer who advised that the typical long song structures of Nigerian music would not work for Western audiences. Accordingly, Adé divided a number of his Nigerian hits for international release, a task he found unchallenging. He later explained 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".

...

Although Meissonnier altered the song structure, he did not alter Adé's style.[7] To Westerners, Adé's music seemed eclectic, with reviewers of Juju Music commenting variously on the mingling of "the spacey mixing techniques of Jamaican dub" into Adé's "Nigerian polyrhythms",[8] and—even more minutely—on the "echoes of old reggae in its lean guitar riffs, salsa in its Yoruban drum patterns, country in the steel-guitar playing, dub in the music's wide-open holes, folk and calypso in its gentle singing and the Grateful Dead and jazz in its long jams"

^^ this

Re Juju

Juju is a great one no matter what, I mean

Completely agree about the Island records. I love Juju Music the most, the dubby production is super sweet. Aura kind of shades into 80s Miles territory for me -- not a bad thing, but not as smooth as Juju Music or Synchro System. Glad to have the recommendations for the compilations -- I've never heard em.

ok, so I'll get Juju music, but if I wanna get one comp that covers the pre Island shit, which should I get?

Start with Best of the Classic Years; Gems From the Classic Years is a sequel that covers the same era.

If you find a used vinyl copy of Aura, buy it.

A lot of the non-Island albums from the very late 70s and early to mid 80s are fantastic and, while not too dissimilar from Juju Music in basic sound, in a lot of ways are more enveloping listens than the Island albums: The Golden Mercury of Africa, The Message, Check ‘E’, Iyinle Odu, Bobby, Ajoo, Explosion, Togetherness, Sweet Banana.
And that’s not even all of them.

I mean at some level they’re somewhat indistinguishable but that also means you can’t really go wrong. My favourite is Bobby for what it’s worth.

Agreed, Bobby is great. Also a big recommnedation for Searching For My Love.

Having never heard of King Sunny Ade and having no context or knowledge of these kind of sounds, hearing him appear on UK TV around 1982 or 83 (on The Tube) was a genuinely mind blowing musical experiences that left me totally gobsmacked and altered my musical taste forever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGmbyRaauog

Revisiting his discography, I find Aura to be his best album. It's not on spotify but the full thing is on youtube. If you haven't heard it please do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_5DDEqghhA

Stevie Wonder plays on the first track too!

It's on Spotify as a twofer with Synchro System: https://open.spotify.com/album/7lGreFI4eAftRKMnXKKjLD?si=kKmnMAhSS9mwpc0Iezy5xA

Aura is so good, in my slsk folder I split it from the Synchro System twofer - which although the latter is good enough, Aura is a standalone classic that shouldn't be twofered!

i agree aura > synchro system, tho it was received poorly at the time in the uk and sold poorly, hence island's quitting the project iirc

the uk constituency for "world pop" in the mid-80s (not that it was called this yet) was often shamingly authenticist and often actually quite patronising in its attitudes -- and i think KSA's filt-tilt exploration of the potential of the most up-to-date new-pop studio tech distressed this crowd w/o finding crossover support elsewhere. it's a pity bcz i think there was a fruitful tension between the collective rhythm-base of juju and the digital clocktime precision of how the studio tech tended to understand its cuts and edits -- i wish he'd been able to explore it more deeply

have been trying to fill out my KSA collection and ordered one of the earlier LPs on discogs. seller sent the wrong disc by accident. so i got this instead:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt5aKIhzgfo&feature=emb_title

it's ... so fucking awesome.

sry

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt5aKIhzgfo

uncle toye ajagun "vol. 3" 1976

a lot more low end on the LP than here btw

Don't know that name but like his juju in the video

Total newbie here. Picked up "Bobby" on a chance and it's really hitting the spot for a mellow yet uplifting listen. Feel like I could leave it on loop forever and not get tired of it. Where should I go next?

Perhaps try some of the other albums from around that era. I’m particularly partial to ‘Explosion’ (that and ‘Bobby’ are my go-to picks) but ‘Iyinle Odu’, ‘Ajoo’ and ‘Togetherness’ are also great albums from that time. The only issue is that it can be difficult to keep them separate in yr head.

Thanks Tim F - I'll seek out "Explosion" once "Bobby" runs its course (that could be a while yet!).

Fela documentary on BBC2 today:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000pr2n

folks: vols. 9 & 10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7vZ5yzYboA&

meant to post here the other day and forgot. haven't read the thread (will do so eventually) but wanted to chime in with my preference for the "african beats" records, vols. 7 and 9 & 10 (released i think as a 2xLP). those and the green spot band "master guitarist" series 1-6 are my favorite KSA. reverb-drenched guitars, hypnotic unison vocal lines, and dense percussion grooves that link multiple tunes over a side-long track: that to me is the essential king sunny. i do like the stuff on island / mango, of course

these sides just seem to go on forever. and the chiming, cascading guitar lines ... just straight into my veins please, yes, don't care if the guitars are out of tune tbh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLDSHSjfTas

I feel like the sunny ade thread should have a “NO FELA” sign like the “no stairway” sign in Wayne’s World.

I for one I’m happy I was alerted to this doc this way - in which KSA was namechecked btw, so full circle

fwiw, I never heard the guitars as "out of tune," I just kinda assumed they were not in just temperament and probably tuned by ear closer to the way the instruments in the precursors of juju music were

I'll forever praise the wonderful bout of enthusiast record collectors' Blogspot-site vinyl rips in '08 or so - I discovered Adé's African-made records that way. I was not bowled over by 'Juju Music' but these side-long jams I totally got down with it. 'Bobby' is my go-to album too, closely followed by this one: https://groovemonzter.blogspot.com/2009/01/king-sunny-ade-private-line-side-one.html

One of these days I'm finally going to check out 'Aura'. I've heard good things about that one.

xp to man alive, i'm talking specifically about the guitars on vol. 7 and in a few other select spots. to my ears there's definitely something going on that isn't sitting right, but that's not something i hear in all of KSA by any means

otm re: blogspot era

I was at the Musical Instruments Museum in Phoenix (highly recommended) a couple years ago with my parents and it has a display of one of KSA's outfits and a blurb about him. My mom is a total square and not into music more than the average person so I was pretty surprised she knew who he was. I guess then he did have a brief moment in the international spotlight before my time.

another favorite that i first came across in the blogspot years:

Vol 4 Late General Ramat Muritala Mohammed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iON5zP-wnAY

great fuzz @ 22:47 !

whoa yeah! and the wah-wah before that likewise!

i'm here to ask ilxors if they would be interested in / post in a thread devoted to juju / yoruba music.

or whether there's already a suitable thread for the purpose of posting youtube rips of uncle toye ajagun, admiral dele abiodun, prince adekunle, choice KSA deep cuts, etc

Um yeah, I totally would

Chief Ebeneezer Obey, chief stephen osita osadebe etc.

One of the stupidest things among many stupid things I did in college was to take an Africa in WWII class, do badly in it, and then, for my final paper, try to write about juju roots and palmwine music in wwii, a subject for which there were almost no sources available whatsoever, even from ILL. I think I walked away with a D in that class. I was really not in my right mind at times.

Sorry about the grade, and you not thinking about how hard it would be, but I like the idea.

But yeah a juju thread would be ok

Did the juju/yoruba thread ever get off the ground? No results from my searches. I'd be very happy to get some 'if you like KSA you'll like this' recommendations.

no idea. the highlife/igbo (but not just that) thread has seen a significant revival in the past 24 hours however!

https://www.elderscornermovie.com/

I liked this Elders Corner film doc on old school Nigerian musicians (which I have touted on other threads)

It has juju and afrobeat and highlife

Thanks. Will dig in. How would you define Sunny Ade's sound (and Chief Ebeneezer...)?