King of pop

Nigeria's answer to Michael Jackson is back in the USA

by Banning Eyre

It was 15 years ago that King Sunny Adé and his percussion-rich orchestra the African Beats first wowed American audiences with his Nigerian juju music. Bob Marley was gone. The safe pop formulas of the '70s were giving way to punk anger, the rebellious frenzy of British "two-tone" ska, and the whole bag of new-wave tricks. Driving and trancy on disc, colorful and expansive on stage, Adé and his band fed that era's hunger for bold new fixes.

So Adé became the ambassador of Afropop, and countless African stars followed through the door he had opened. But as chiming guitars, pummeling drums, and lavish African stage shows began to lose their novelty, he also became the first of many Afropop casualties in America. Finding that he did not sell at Bob Marley levels, Island Records unceremoniously dropped him after three albums in the early '80s. For a decade, Adé mostly stayed home. Two live albums appeared from Rykodisc and IRS, but they leaned heavily on familiar tunes.

Then last year, Adé re-emerged with E Dide/Get Up (Mesa/Bluemoon), a tight, snappy set of new songs recorded in Seattle. This summer, at age 50, he is back on tour, starting out his US visit with a recording session at Dockside Studios in Lafayette, Louisiana, and continuing on to play concerts coast to coast, including one at Mama Kin this Tuesday.

E Dide/Get Up matches the cool composure and rhythmic barrage of Adé's Island releases. Its songs celebrate mothers, marriage, friendship, fidelity, and God through Yoruba proverbs and allegories -- all delivered in Adé's silky tenor voice backed warmly by a male chorus. The band kick as hard as ever, building around the propulsive eloquence of the two talking drummers and extending to a solid team of percussionists, six guitarists, including two bass players, and Adé's signature, dreamy pedal-steel guitarist, plus a keyboard man. Champions of dynamics, this line-up can fall to a watch tick and a whisper, then surge to a roaring assault of ancient and modern sonorities. Songs evoke lucid moods: rapturous sensuality in "Orisun Lye" ("The Creator"), driving fortitude in the melodious "Enia L'Asho Mi" ("People Are My Garments").

When I reached Adé at Dockside, he explained that he's made more than 100 records in Nigeria. But when he records for the US market, he arranges his music differently. "I don't want to push my kind of culture on America. In Nigeria, we've got used to nonstop 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."

Such flexibility comes naturally to Adé, but don't get the idea he's ready to compromise his sound. The owner of two record labels, a film production company, and a successful nightclub in Nigeria, he has ruled the pop-music roost for so long in his home country that working in America has to rate as an amusement, not a necessity. He waited a decade to sign with another US label because the Island experience left a bad taste in his mouth. "[Island top man] Chris Blackwell wanted me to change my music to what he felt would be commercial. So I told his producer to mix one out of what I had recorded for them. But when I heard it, I couldn't find my music in it. I decided not to go for that."

Born Sunday Adéniyi, the son of a Methodist minister, Adé left the religious path to pursue show biz. Following in the footsteps of his musical hero I.K. Dairo, he reached such fanatic levels of popularity during the 1980s that when he announced five years ago he was going to do fewer stage shows and concentrate on records and films, he faced furious public reaction. "The whole world turned it upside down and said that I was going to retire. I was being mobbed everywhere I went. I got more than 200,000 letters. Even schoolchildren marched to my house to protest."

Protest is something Adé himself avoids. Even as Nigeria descends into its bleakest era of dictatorship and decay, he struggles to remain optimistic. In a new book, The Open Sore of a Continent, exiled Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka says that Nigeria is "primed for a campaign of comprehensive civil disobedience." But don't look for Adé on the front lines. "It's my loving country," he says, "apart from the economic and military problems." So he'll wait for the military dictatorship to pass rather than chant it down, but he does add a sly acknowledgment of Soyinka's call for collective responsibility: "If we allow the military to come again, then who are we going to complain to?"

Returning with his 22-piece band to play American stages, the ambassador of Afropop faces an easier challenge. "The ambassador is not a stranger anymore. He is family. You find that African music is everywhere now, so I really don't have to explain it like before. The music explains itself."

King Sunny Adé plays Mama Kin this Tuesday, August 27.