News Article Courtesy AllAboutJazz.com <http://www.allaboutjazz.com/>


*Justin Adams: Soul Science CD*


Distorted Guitars, African Grooves, and Gritty Spike Fiddles: Justin Adams
and Juldeh Camara Unlock the Science of the Soul

Serif, a teenage boy from Gambia, was out collecting firewood in the bush
one day and suddenly disappeared. When his distraught family finally found
him six months later, he was up in a tree playing a golden ritti, a
traditional one-string fiddle. The ritti magically disappeared and the
family got their son back, but without his eyesight. The boy would
periodically vanish from time to time, slipping away to learn how to play
the ritti from the forest's djinn, spirit beings who had given the youngster
the gift of music in exchange for his eyesight.

While most griots are born into the profession, this is the legend of how
Gambian master musician's Juldeh Camara's father Serif came to be a famous
griot against his father's wishes. The younger Camara traveled the country
in a horse and cart with his blind father, learning the griot tradition from
him and playing by request from a very young age. Paired with the desert
blues guitar backing of British rocker Justin Adams, Camara lends his griot
skills to the album *Soul Science* (World Village), which recently won a BBC
Radio 3 World Music Award in the Culture Crossing category and is scheduled
for a US release of May 13.

The album came about after Adams received a phone call out of the blue.
Camara had been living in the UK working on various musical projects, and
had received a copy of Adams' album *Desert Road* from Zubop bassist Duncan
Noble. Highly impressed with how faithful the album stayed to African groove
sensibilities, Camara rang him up. Adams recalls, "It was quite amazing to
be phoned by this guy. He had heard my CD, as an example of somebody who had
been inspired by West African music and was doing something a bit different.
He took it back to Gambia and played along with it in his compound and
people really liked the combination." And though Adams didn't immediately
recognize Camara's name, it turns out that he had been listening to Camara
for years via a recording of traditional Gambian music. Continues Adams, "He
was effectively playing along with my music, which was a take on his music!"


For Adams, *Soul Science* gave him the welcome opportunity to channel
different sides of his musical personality. Years of playing guitar with
Robert Plant brought out the blues showman in him, loosening up his playing
style and giving him the authority to rock out when necessary ("I never
wanted to be Eric Clapton or Jimmy page," he says. "I wanted to be Joe
Strummer."). Adams' production credits with Tuareg electric guitar
heavyweights Tinariwen, as well as the all-night jam sessions in the African
desert with frontman Ibrahim Alhabib entrenched him in a genuine, more
intimate desert blues style rooted in African structures and rhythms. *Soul
Science* allows both branches of his musical passion to shine unabashedly.

Camara is an exceptionally diverse musician himself. A member of the Fulani
tribe in his homeland, he has studied the music and the instruments of
neighboring ethnic tribes. His mastery of the ritti - a sound similar to
what Adams also heard on the albums by Malian guitar legend Ali Farka Toure
- lends an ethereal and yet gritty quality to *Soul Science*, one that fits
in well with the album's raw aesthetic. The ritti's unearthly sound, at
times flutelike and at other times more like a human voice, conjures up
images of the wily forest spirits that are said to have aided his father. "I
remember seeing a documentary program, a tiny clip." says Adams. "There were
three Gambian guys playing these instruments. It sounded like Velvet
Underground, that John Cale sound. It was very funky."

Within half an hour of meeting each other for the first time at Adam's
garage studio, Adams and Camara already had their first track on the album
recorded. It's indicative of the raw, less-produced sound for which they
were aiming. Picture Bo Diddley in his garage in Detroit, or early cassette
recordings of Moroccan and Malian music. "How to get grit?" Adams jokes?
"Just turn it up to 11!" Half of the tracks on the album consist of rhythmic
percussion loops, rooted in faithful African rhythms, layered with Camara's
improvisations and Adams' guitar on top of that. The other tracks feature
the percussion mastery of Salah Dawson Miller, a traveled musician who was
deeply entrenched in the UK's Algerian community and a blues club regular
for many years. Miller, who Adams says has a real "rock-n-roll attitude,"
lends just the right kind of raw swing to the trio. It's an unusual combo, a
fact Adams admits. "I can't think of a lot of gritty electric guitar and
hand drum ensembles on the circuit. But it is good. We look pretty
interesting too!"

There's also a bit of the griot in Soul Science, like the lyrics in "Yo Lay
Lay" that tell about the slave experience but from the perspective of the
people that were left behind to deal with the traumatic loss. And then
there's the griot tendency to subtly criticize as in the whimsical
"Sanakubay," which gently pokes fun at other ethnic tribes. Sometimes it
even leads to a spot of trouble, like the time that Camara had to appear in
front of tribal elders to explain that he'd only written the melody for
"Nayo," the song that became so wildly popular that it sometimes caused
dancing girls to fall into the well.

Together, the three have an African groove symbiosis. Camara's playing,
which Adams calls as danceable as a Celtic fiddler's, is rooted in the
rhythms of his homeland. When Adams lays down a rhythm, Camara hears
something ancient in it, like the rhythm he recognized as a rain-calling
song in Subuhanalaii. "If I play a blues riff because I think it's close to
a Fulani sound," says Adams, "he is straight on it. He gets where it's
coming from."It suggests that there is a kind of science to what musicians
in Africa were doing even hundreds of years ago, coming up with combinations
of notes, rhythms, and scales that make the listener feel a certain way. "I
often find some cool and intelligent people who get put off African music
because they think it is just people dancing around in semi naked costume,
singing 'Oh mama Africa,'" continues Adams in describing the album's name.
"But if you play them the right stuff they realize it's very powerful. You
can't help it. It can take you. It's like a shared culture that has some
technique, a scientific technique almost, that can enter your body."

For all the seeming coincidence that came together in this album, it's an
ode to a mysterious, ancient and inexplicable science. And if there are
forest spirits driving this music, you can be sure they're wearing their
sunglasses and rocking out.

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