Synchro Feelings

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King Sunny Ade, "Synchro Feelings-Ilako," (download until 1/18/09), from "Synchro System."

Very rarely do I prefer versions of music from traditions that don't adhere to a 3-5 minute song format that have been edited, reduced, transformed, commercialized, or what have you, to the original versions. This is an exception.

I've owned--the best one unfortunately got stolen from my office in the radio station I worked in during college--a few of Sunny Ade's original African releases, LP's, and they were uniformly fantastic. A lot of his stuff has now been reissued in the "West," and it's worth the money for sure. Sunny Ade cannot make a bad record.

Different West African musics obviously, because West Africa is a big place, take different contours, and some forms fit more nicely into the expectations of the marketplace in North America. The reduction of music to the commodity form, originally shellac and then vinyl but by technical as opposed to musical necessity limited to two to three minutes for a long enough time (roughly the first half of the twentieth century) that musical forms themselves adapted to the technology and song itself shrunk to fit the size of the medium. Lots of great stuff came about because of this: you wouldn't have Duke Ellington's great 78's or the type of concision you get with a Cole Porter tune without at some level the time pressure of the technical medium of the 78 rpm single. Later, with the development of magnetic tape and the LP record, musicians seemingly "pushed the boundaries" of the medium and apparently began to harbor larger ambitions. Jazz musicians were first, with increasingly long performances on record in the 1950's and 1960's, the first "concept albums," like "Kind of Blue," and then album-length pieces like "Free Jazz." Rock musicians were slow to get the idea but came around with "Pet Sounds" and "Sgt. Pepper's." You know the story.

Really what was happening is that people made what seemed to be discoveries, but like Columbus in the Caribbean, in fact people were already there. Any society in that period--the heyday of imperialism in its classic form--where people in general were prevented access to modern technologies by the imperialists as a means of subordination and control, any society like that would, particularly in the British colonies, where the plan was to simply steal the stuff that was there rather than, on the French model, spread culture, retain indigenous musical form. The British weren't going to bother, in general, in trying to get Africans to stop playing their own music. If they paid up in kind or in labor, that was plenty. There are exceptions to this of course.

So you have in Nigeria in the late twentieth century, after independence, you have musicians, most importantly you'd have to say Fela Kuti, but also the whole crew of juju musicians, Sunny Ade but also Ebenezer Obey, whose sense of form was not culturally conditioned most importantly by the three-minute pop song but rather indigenous form, but who, in the context of independence, now had access to all kinds of culture--music from the United States, for example--that under the imperialists was denied.

Where Fela took this independence and went for James Brown, Sunny Ade incorporated electronics. It's not my original observation, but it should be stated clearly that the most important developments in electronic music in the late 20th century--insofar as they actually mean something to people in their lives around the world--came not from the "technologically advanced nations of the world" but from Jamaica. Lee Perry, rather than Kraftwerk (whose music I love, and who themselves always have taken the correct attitude toward their place in the musical world), is the father of techno.

Sunny Ade surely was not and is not the technical innovator Lee Perry is, or Kraftwerk, or Fela was in his different way. Sunny Ade offered and offers one thing above all, and that's raw quality. He is so exceptionally good as a musician, bandleader, melodist, recording artist, and performing artist, that he blows all competition away. I've seen Sunny Ade perform three times, all in the 1980's, and saw him on the "Synchro System" tour. Never seen a better show.

So the story behind this record, really more behind his previous, first US release, "Juju Music," is well-known but bears repeating. Bob Marley, third-world superstar #1, died, and Island Records lost a big money-maker. Looking for another to shake, they looked toward Africa. I don't know if Fela was approached but I can imagine he'd have nothing but disdain for the suggestion that he would follow Bob Marley or anyone else for that matter. Sunny Ade, then, was the choice.

He was not a good choice from a commercial perspective. Island put out three records. The first two, "Juju Music," and "Synchro System," took Ade's LP-side-long songs and cut the length to 4-5 minutes each, creating albums more or less in the form expected by the huge US market. "Juju Music" even included a song in English. But there is the obvious error in Island's thinking. Marley sang in English, and Sunny Ade sung in Yoruba. The big, white American audience can't deal with anything not in English. After a third record, Ade was cut loose.

The shocker, though, with his first two records in particular, was that though the songs were severely edited in terms of length to fit the target market's expectations, they were edited extremely well. That's the thing, I suppose. Another good example is Arthur Waley's translation and abridgement of "The Journey to the West," published as "Monkey." 2000 pages in an unabridged translation I read some years ago, 350 or so in Waley's version. But Waley's version works, absolutely. So too with "Juju Music" and "Synchro System," and to my ear a much lesser extent with "Aura." A piece well-abridged is legitimate. Very rarely does this kind of thing actually happen, but it happened with Sunny Ade. One has to think that it's Ade who deserves the credit and his producer Martin Meissonnier for knowing to stay out of the way.

Musically, I don't think I've heard a piece that makes me smile the way this does. There are about 20 musicians playing on this recording at the same time. Not a one steps on another's toes, and nobody is holding back. Try getting Americans to be as aware of each other.