In Trance (2011)
7 tracks, 69 minutes
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Juldeh’s nyanyero was the first one-string fiddle I’d (consciously) heard, and it sounded crazy to me. I thought it was a flute at first, and sometimes it sounds like a natural trumpet, sometimes it sounds like a fiddle in the American or Irish traditions. But its sound is literally just horsehair on horsehair, one set stretched over a goat-skin covered calabash, the other into a bow. Yet out of that fairly simple instrument (there is only one string, after all), you get all these sounds, and a surprising range too. He uses his nyanyero as a solo instrument, and also to accompany his vocals in the traditional style of the Fula gawlo (griot).
And then you’ve got Justin Adams on electric guitar. Justin has been a staple on the world music scene for decades. He’s played with and produced everyone from Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart, Natacha Atlas and Sinéad O’Connor to Tinariwen, Lo’Jo, Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino and even the Emirati band Takht al Emarat. His own style is one of electric blues spiced up with sounds from across north-west Africa, such as the musics of the Tuareg, Songhai, Berber, Gnawa and Arab people.
Get these two musicians together and the music they make is immense. Their playing slots so well together: Juldeh bends his slightly more into the bluesy frame, Justin crafts his whole thing around Juldeh’s own tradition. The end result is something that is a rocking mid-point between the two, but with neither musician being overly precious about changing and evolving their own sound, either. Together, the duo had already had a couple of albums: their first, 2007’s Soul Science, was very organic and rootsy, an artefact of the musicians’ first meetings with all the excitement that comes along with it; the follow-up, 2009’s Tell No Lies, was a much more polished record that even strikes me as a little poppy in places and showed a progression in their collaborative songwriting. For In Trance, they took it to a different place.
In Trance is harder and heavier than their first two albums, and that’s also reflected by them taking on the name JuJu – signifying their new-found bandification alongside drummer Dave Smith (later of Fofoulah), percussionist Martyn Barker and bassist Billy Fuller. But as the name also implies, there is more a focus on trance for this album. Unlike the previous two, the pieces included here aren’t a neat four minutes – three even stretch out near the 15 minute mark. Instead, the tracks are much more open-ended, the music based on endless loops over which mutual improvisation takes centre stage. The pieces evolve in their performance in a way a little reminiscent of jazz fusion, although there is little jazz in the music itself, save maybe for a few rhythmic conceptions. At its core it is still really – totally – bluesy, and Juldeh’s Fula sound permeates it all in the best way.
The track ‘Deep Sahara’ is probably my favourite of this set of great tracks, and it really shows how the album works so well. It’s actually based on the track ‘Sahara’ from Tell No Lies, but its treatment here turns it into something from another realm. Starting with an Arabic taqsim-like opening where Justin and Juldeh take turns exploring the scales and flexing their muscles in anticipation of what’s to come, the song itself starts after about two minutes. It’s rocky with a slightly loping, Moroccan-like rhythm and, of course, as much blues as you could hope for. But then the ‘song’ portion only lasts for another two minutes. After that, it’s all groove. Juldeh takes extended solos on his nyanyero, occasionally sings around and in-between the melody left implied by the song, which comes around every so often but with no regularity. Throughout, Justin’s guitar, mostly playing rhythm, is slowly getting more and more distorted and psychedelic…and then towards the end, so slowly as you won’t even notice it until it’s on top of you, there’s no vocals, or guitar, or nyanyero, it’s just all drums: drum kit, bendir, tama, bringing the track to a banging end at almost 15 mnutes. What a great way to end a piece. It’s all appropriately hypnotic, and although its structure is unusual, nothing at all sounds out-of-place. And that’s the case for this whole album.
In Trance turned out to be the only album that they’d release as JuJu – not too long after it came out, the band were snapped up wholesale by Robert Plant to become his Sensational Space Shifters. The band’s original set-up was literally JuJu but with Plant on vocals and occasional harmonica – not a bad mix to be honest. And that’s the way the band continued: they toured around the world, released an album, members came and went. Juldeh eventually moved back to Gambia in 2017 and was replaced by English folk fiddler Seth Lakeman, taking with him most of the last remnants of the JuJu sound.
