Tag: Juju music

From I.K Dairo’s refreshing contribution, to King  Sunny Ade and Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey, the legendary ying-yang of Juju music, Dami Ajayi traces the evolution of a genre which spanned the oil boom of the 70s as well as the 90s, a draconian period of economic austerity occasioned by military rule in Nigeria

T he night had begun harmlessly like many busy nights are wont to. I was already in bed at 10 p.m, two hours after dinner, engaging in banter I knew will end mid-way, with me drifting off. Just as sleep was kicking in, a phone call disrupted things and less than one hour later, I was driving down to a nightclub on the Island in the company of a few friends.

The situation that required urgent nocturnal intervention was the matter of a visiting Cameroonian friend yet to satisfactorily explore Lagos night life and he was due to leave in a few days. A few friends and I thought it will be inappropriate for him not to have a feel of Lagos nights. The music and myth—and what you read in Playboy Magazine—are not quite enough to have a full grasp of the inexhaustible Lagoon city.

It is 5 a.m and we are outside a nightclub in Victoria Island. Drenched in sweat, we are carrying the club’s stench with us. We had different ideas as to our next destination. There was a camp of hungry people considering a hot breakfast of Amala and Abula. And there were those who wanted to return to the warmth of their beds. In spite of the thinning dark sky, the clouds were heavy and a humid wind foretold an early Saturday morning downpour.

Moments later, we were walking into the street opposite Club 57 at Awolowo Road Ikoyi. A vibrant sound erupting from a live band led our footsteps. The place was called 100 Hours and in that early hour of the morning, it was living up to its name, jamming some proper juju music. The culprits of the sound was an all men band led by a female singer sitting on bar stool and crooning a cover of one of King Sunny Ade’s hit songs.

Warm seats welcomed us and an efficient clearing of our table full of bottles informed us that those we replaced might have just left. A blue scrawl on a white board introduced the band to us: Ayo Balogun and the Harmonic Voices.

They were clearly a disciplined band, hitting drums, strumming guitars and parting songs with such vibrancy even though they must have been performing for close to six hours. Ayo Balogun did not look like a 58 year old, sometimes she stands to stylishly stretch her feet and at other times dances to give sublime instructions to her band.

She was playing Juju music and her set-list was clearly unrehearsed as improvisation was key.  In doing covers of different popular juju and highlife songs, her approach was heavy on fast-rhythm percussion and the weakest link of the rhythm seemed to be the pianist. In between the bawdy juju lyrics that glibly described voluptuous bodies and promises of sexual satisfaction, she would sing gospel songs of thanksgiving.

My friends including the drowsy ones were alive once again and they remarked, whilst we waited for our order of amala and gbegiri soup, that this would have been a more rewarding experience than a night of hip-hop and dance. One glance around the bar reveals that the patrons comprised mostly of folks in their forties or on the wrong side of thirties at the very least.

One cannot contest that the new wave of hip hop music is quite sweeping and its consequences on other music genres, especially indigenous ones, is almost parasitic. However this statement is remarkably inaccurate in a sense especially if one remembers the timeline of Nigerian music production and the hiatus between the reggae-inflected boom of the 80s to the resounding silence of the 90s occasioned by the military rule and its attendant censorship.

In a newspaper interview, Queen Ayo Balogun who was then the president of the Juju Musician Association at time of the interview corrects some notion about the perceived fetishness of juju music ascribed to its name. Juju, to the layman, is voodoo or jazz. The mere mention of juju may bring to the mind, frenzied incantations, craven images as well as other fetish paraphernalia. Ayo Balogun opined that Juju music had nothing to do with voodoo or black magic; that it rather had everything to do with making music that speaks to social conscience and good citizenry.

The origin of the name juju is an interesting one. Early juju musicians played an array of instruments majorly drums, guitars and their voices. It was not unusual for singers to sing and beat the tambourine. And sometimes in the heat of the groove, they would throw their tambourines high in the air and catch. The translation of the verb throw in Yoruba is “ju” and Yoruba, being a tonal language, repetition is often used to lay emphasis, hence the doubling of the verb throw which is “juju”. This brand of music derived its name from the showmanship of performers who beyond singing throws the tambourine with the view to catch and thrill the crowd. Although the tambourine is not much a consequential instrument tied to the sound of juju music as a whole, it also gives insight to the roots of juju music especially in the early African church.

Juju music is believed to be a syncretism, a marriage between traditional practices and western instruments like highlife and in some places, it is believed to be highlife. The idea that highlife is actually a genre of music on its own is quite bothersome, especially as it is more of an aesthetic than it is a definitive sound. After the influential West African tour of Ghanian Highlife maestro, E.T Mensah in the 1950s, it became possible to musicians that a cocktail of their culture can be made using western instruments and highlife music of this era could be identified by the substrate of the culture from which it was drawn. The highlife of the Ijaws is markedly differently from the Yorubas and the Igbos too had their own sound.

In this same vein, juju music could easily be referred to as the south-western Nigeria’s derivative of highlife but again this declaration is problematic in its simplicity. Juju’s early precursors—ashiko as well as agidigbo—did not so much as have western influences in their sound. Those sounds remain distinctive today, even if its practitioners are aged and dying off.

It will not be unusual today to draw blanks when you mention the name I.K Dairo. The more likely response will be to mistake the father for his son, Paul Play Dairo, a decent Nigerian rhythm and blues singer who has scored quite a number of hits remaking some of his father’s old tunes.

Forty plus years after the Nigerian civil war and the boom of Juju music (along with oil sales in Nigeria),  the juju superstars that linger on our lips are King Sunny Ade(KSA)  and Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey, both  one-time apprentices of Moses Olaiya, the musician/comedian, and Fatai Rolling Dollar, the agidigbo music maestro respectively.

Their musical journey was that set for greatness even though they started from a humble scratch. King Sunny Ade, born into both royalty and poverty in Ondo Kingdom, had a love for music so intense that he was more willing to sing than to get a western education. His sojourn to Lagos led him to the highlife band of Moses Olaiya. He would break away from this apprenticeship to start his own band, first called Green Spots band, a name curiously reminiscent of the influential I.K Dairo. Ebenezer Obey’s journey is quite similar, even though it began about five years earlier than Sunny’s ; his apprenticeship with Fatai Rolling Dollar’s band culminated in his forming the International Brothers who became the Inter-reformers after they switched their initial style of music from juju-highlife to the definitive juju that characterized Obey’s oeuvre.

As time would have it, the rise of juju music coincided with the oil boom of the 70s, so that praise singing became a prominent aspect of the music. This ensured that KSA as well as Chief Commander, honey-tongued griots, became not only superstar musicians but millionaires. Hugely talented and prolific, it is best to imagine them as the ying-yang of juju music. Whilst KSA is the graceful entertainer with nimble feet, Obey’s music is more reflective and philosophical—both are accomplished guitarists. As one would expect of music made for dance, KSA’s music is sometimes fast-paced and suffused with innuendoes that conflate dancing prowess with sexual activities. Obey’s closest attempt to a booty call was from his early numbers and his most successful love song, Paulina is at once a sultry appeal and a lover’s prayer.

If the 70s was for oil boom and mirth-making, the 80s was a very unsettling period in Nigeria’s politics and economy, fraught with coups and countercoups. Music and precisely juju music was one of the casualties of this era, the tune of the music moved away from merriment to more reflective and meditative themes, however this was after KSA signed a deal with Island Records. In the wake of Bob Marley’s death, Island Record’s attempted to raise yet another global superstar and the easy charm and charisma of KSA had drawn them to his sound which they re-engineered into a sonic masterpiece which became characteristic of King Sunny Ade’s music. It is this remake that Rolling Stone Magazine referred to as “gently hypnotic, polyrhythmic mesh of burbling guitars, sweet harmony vocals, swooping Hawaiian guitar, and throbbing talking drums”

Names like Dayo Kujore, Mico Ade, Dele Taiwo cluttered the juju musicsape in the 90s, a draconian period of economic austerity occasioned by military rule. In the face of unrestrained hunger and hardship, by all means, culture is one of the early casualties. In this period ironically, juju music enjoyed the fresh breath of Sir Shina Peters(SSP). His triad albums Ace, Shinamania and Dancing Time were so successful in southwestern Nigeria that the widespread popularity trekked to Midwestern states and dared to cross the River Niger!

Shina Peter’s strategy to the juju of his forebears was quite enthralling. As with every genre of art, individual talent and insight was important and what Mr Peters did differently was to quicken the pace of juju music with a column of heavy percussion like the music had never had. His nimble feet and love for sexual innuendo was very reminiscent of King Sunny Ade but his percussion pattern was deliberately different. Even his snare drummer brought a distinctive sound that juju had never known. His percussion seemed to aspire to American rock music and Shina did not pursue this sound with guitar strums; he had little interest in the Hawaiian guitar that KSA had brought into juju music presumably after his contact with the sonic alchemy of Island Records. Shina Peters would go on to release a slew of albums and notably his climax was after “Dancing Time” with a music video with video clips of his huge concert at the Obafemi Awolowo University.

Since SSP, juju music has seemingly remained stagnant as a genre. The entire 90s did not produce one single enduring juju artist. By the mid-80s, fuji music was already growing in prominence. Fuji music finding its early origin in the wake-up music of the ajisaari amongst moslem Yorubas wrestled the baton of popularity with juju music. Interestingly, fuji music is the closest in equivalence to American hip-hop music. For one, fuji music was bereft of that subservience to forebears that juju embraced so tightly; young fuji turks were more Faulkerian in their attitude  to the reigning masters and even though fuji was not as sophisticated as juju in sound, it was widely embraced across South Western Nigeria.

That juju music has not produced a single influential practitioner since SSP is a reason to assume that the genre has remained stagnant for about two decades. This does not take away from the continual practice of this style of music by local bands and even by its former practitioners, or the thousands of LPs of the albums churned out still enjoying its fanatic audience till date, or that new school practitioners of afrobeats are pinching from the music and taking the substrate to their sonic laboratories to develop something which is at best referential.

From I.K Dairo’s refreshing contribution, to King  Sunny Ade and Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey, the legendary ying-yang of Juju music, Dami Ajayi traces the evolution of a genre which spanned the oil boom of the 70s as well as the 90s, a draconian period of economic austerity occasioned by military rule in Nigeria

The night had begun harmlessly like many busy nights are wont to. I was already in bed at 10 p.m, two hours after dinner, engaging in banter I knew will end mid-way, with me drifting off. Just as sleep was kicking in, a phone call disrupted things and less than one hour later, I was driving down to a nightclub on the Island in the company of a few friends.

The situation that required urgent nocturnal intervention was the matter of a visiting Cameroonian friend yet to satisfactorily explore Lagos night life and he was due to leave in a few days. A few friends and I thought it will be inappropriate for him not to have a feel of Lagos nights. The music and myth—and what you read in Playboy Magazine—are not quite enough to have a full grasp of the inexhaustible Lagoon city.

It is 5 a.m and we are outside a nightclub in Victoria Island. Drenched in sweat, we are carrying the club’s stench with us. We had different ideas as to our next destination. There was a camp of hungry people considering a hot breakfast of Amala and Abula. And there were those who wanted to return to the warmth of their beds. In spite of the thinning dark sky, the clouds were heavy and a humid wind foretold an early Saturday morning downpour.

Moments later, we were walking into the street opposite Club 57 at Awolowo Road Ikoyi. A vibrant sound erupting from a live band led our footsteps. The place was called 100 Hours and in that early hour of the morning, it was living up to its name, jamming some proper juju music. The culprits of the sound was an all men band led by a female singer sitting on bar stool and crooning a cover of one of King Sunny Ade’s hit songs.

Warm seats welcomed us and an efficient clearing of our table full of bottles informed us that those we replaced might have just left. A blue scrawl on a white board introduced the band to us: Ayo Balogun and the Harmonic Voices.

They were clearly a disciplined band, hitting drums, strumming guitars and parting songs with such vibrancy even though they must have been performing for close to six hours. Ayo Balogun did not look like a 58 year old, sometimes she stands to stylishly stretch her feet and at other times dances to give sublime instructions to her band.

She was playing Juju music and her set-list was clearly unrehearsed as improvisation was key.  In doing covers of different popular juju and highlife songs, her approach was heavy on fast-rhythm percussion and the weakest link of the rhythm seemed to be the pianist. In between the bawdy juju lyrics that glibly described voluptuous bodies and promises of sexual satisfaction, she would sing gospel songs of thanksgiving.

My friends including the drowsy ones were alive once again and they remarked, whilst we waited for our order of amala and gbegiri soup, that this would have been a more rewarding experience than a night of hip-hop and dance. One glance around the bar reveals that the patrons comprised mostly of folks in their forties or on the wrong side of thirties at the very least.

One cannot contest that the new wave of hip hop music is quite sweeping and its consequences on other music genres, especially indigenous ones, is almost parasitic. However this statement is remarkably inaccurate in a sense especially if one remembers the timeline of Nigerian music production and the hiatus between the reggae-inflected boom of the 80s to the resounding silence of the 90s occasioned by the military rule and its attendant censorship.

In a newspaper interview, Queen Ayo Balogun who was then the president of the Juju Musician Association at time of the interview corrects some notion about the perceived fetishness of juju music ascribed to its name. Juju, to the layman, is voodoo or jazz. The mere mention of juju may bring to the mind, frenzied incantations, craven images as well as other fetish paraphernalia. Ayo Balogun opined that Juju music had nothing to do with voodoo or black magic; that it rather had everything to do with making music that speaks to social conscience and good citizenry.

The origin of the name juju is an interesting one. Early juju musicians played an array of instruments majorly drums, guitars and their voices. It was not unusual for singers to sing and beat the tambourine. And sometimes in the heat of the groove, they would throw their tambourines high in the air and catch. The translation of the verb throw in Yoruba is “ju” and Yoruba, being a tonal language, repetition is often used to lay emphasis, hence the doubling of the verb throw which is “juju”. This brand of music derived its name from the showmanship of performers who beyond singing throws the tambourine with the view to catch and thrill the crowd. Although the tambourine is not much a consequential instrument tied to the sound of juju music as a whole, it also gives insight to the roots of juju music especially in the early African church.

Juju music is believed to be a syncretism, a marriage between traditional practices and western instruments like highlife and in some places, it is believed to be highlife. The idea that highlife is actually a genre of music on its own is quite bothersome, especially as it is more of an aesthetic than it is a definitive sound. After the influential West African tour of Ghanian Highlife maestro, E.T Mensah in the 1950s, it became possible to musicians that a cocktail of their culture can be made using western instruments and highlife music of this era could be identified by the substrate of the culture from which it was drawn. The highlife of the Ijaws is markedly differently from the Yorubas and the Igbos too had their own sound.

In this same vein, juju music could easily be referred to as the south-western Nigeria’s derivative of highlife but again this declaration is problematic in its simplicity. Juju’s early precursors—ashiko as well as agidigbo—did not so much as have western influences in their sound. Those sounds remain distinctive today, even if its practitioners are aged and dying off.

It will not be unusual today to draw blanks when you mention the name I.K Dairo. The more likely response will be to mistake the father for his son, Paul Play Dairo, a decent Nigerian rhythm and blues singer who has scored quite a number of hits remaking some of his father’s old tunes.

Forty plus years after the Nigerian civil war and the boom of Juju music (along with oil sales in Nigeria),  the juju superstars that linger on our lips are King Sunny Ade(KSA)  and Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey, both  one-time apprentices of Moses Olaiya, the musician/comedian, and Fatai Rolling Dollar, the agidigbo music maestro respectively.

Their musical journey was that set for greatness even though they started from a humble scratch. King Sunny Ade, born into both royalty and poverty in Ondo Kingdom, had a love for music so intense that he was more willing to sing than to get a western education. His sojourn to Lagos led him to the highlife band of Moses Olaiya. He would break away from this apprenticeship to start his own band, first called Green Spots band, a name curiously reminiscent of the influential I.K Dairo. Ebenezer Obey’s journey is quite similar, even though it began about five years earlier than Sunny’s ; his apprenticeship with Fatai Rolling Dollar’s band culminated in his forming the International Brothers who became the Inter-reformers after they switched their initial style of music from juju-highlife to the definitive juju that characterized Obey’s oeuvre.

As time would have it, the rise of juju music coincided with the oil boom of the 70s, so that praise singing became a prominent aspect of the music. This ensured that KSA as well as Chief Commander, honey-tongued griots, became not only superstar musicians but millionaires. Hugely talented and prolific, it is best to imagine them as the ying-yang of juju music. Whilst KSA is the graceful entertainer with nimble feet, Obey’s music is more reflective and philosophical—both are accomplished guitarists. As one would expect of music made for dance, KSA’s music is sometimes fast-paced and suffused with innuendoes that conflate dancing prowess with sexual activities. Obey’s closest attempt to a booty call was from his early numbers and his most successful love song, Paulina is at once a sultry appeal and a lover’s prayer.

If the 70s was for oil boom and mirth-making, the 80s was a very unsettling period in Nigeria’s politics and economy, fraught with coups and countercoups. Music and precisely juju music was one of the casualties of this era, the tune of the music moved away from merriment to more reflective and meditative themes, however this was after KSA signed a deal with Island Records. In the wake of Bob Marley’s death, Island Record’s attempted to raise yet another global superstar and the easy charm and charisma of KSA had drawn them to his sound which they re-engineered into a sonic masterpiece which became characteristic of King Sunny Ade’s music. It is this remake that Rolling Stone Magazine referred to as “gently hypnotic, polyrhythmic mesh of burbling guitars, sweet harmony vocals, swooping Hawaiian guitar, and throbbing talking drums”

Names like Dayo Kujore, Mico Ade, Dele Taiwo cluttered the juju musicsape in the 90s, a draconian period of economic austerity occasioned by military rule. In the face of unrestrained hunger and hardship, by all means, culture is one of the early casualties. In this period ironically, juju music enjoyed the fresh breath of Sir Shina Peters(SSP). His triad albums Ace, Shinamania and Dancing Time were so successful in southwestern Nigeria that the widespread popularity trekked to Midwestern states and dared to cross the River Niger!

Shina Peter’s strategy to the juju of his forebears was quite enthralling. As with every genre of art, individual talent and insight was important and what Mr Peters did differently was to quicken the pace of juju music with a column of heavy percussion like the music had never had. His nimble feet and love for sexual innuendo was very reminiscent of King Sunny Ade but his percussion pattern was deliberately different. Even his snare drummer brought a distinctive sound that juju had never known. His percussion seemed to aspire to American rock music and Shina did not pursue this sound with guitar strums; he had little interest in the Hawaiian guitar that KSA had brought into juju music presumably after his contact with the sonic alchemy of Island Records. Shina Peters would go on to release a slew of albums and notably his climax was after “Dancing Time” with a music video with video clips of his huge concert at the Obafemi Awolowo University.

Since SSP, juju music has seemingly remained stagnant as a genre. The entire 90s did not produce one single enduring juju artist. By the mid-80s, fuji music was already growing in prominence. Fuji music finding its early origin in the wake-up music of the ajisaari amongst moslem Yorubas wrestled the baton of popularity with juju music. Interestingly, fuji music is the closest in equivalence to American hip-hop music. For one, fuji music was bereft of that subservience to forebears that juju embraced so tightly; young fuji turks were more Faulkerian in their attitude  to the reigning masters and even though fuji was not as sophisticated as juju in sound, it was widely embraced across South Western Nigeria.

That juju music has not produced a single influential practitioner since SSP is a reason to assume that the genre has remained stagnant for about two decades. This does not take away from the continual practice of this style of music by local bands and even by its former practitioners, or the thousands of LPs of the albums churned out still enjoying its fanatic audience till date, or that new school practitioners of afrobeats are pinching from the music and taking the substrate to their sonic laboratories to develop something which is at best referential.