There’s a Griot Goin’ On: An Interview with Justin Adams and Juldeh Camara

Juldeh Camara, Gambia’s leading virtuoso of an instrument called the riti, has one goal in life: To play with Madonna. During a transatlantic interview, Camara holds the phone up to a CD player, queues up her Madgesty’s “Hung Up”, and then starts playing along to the track on his riti, a one-string instrument that sounds like a shrill violin. It’s surprisingly effective. Camara’s riti mimics the song’s histrionic keyboard riff — a sample of ABBA’s “Gimme Gimme Gimme” — and improvises around it. “I tell you, this will be magical,” Camara says of his anticipated collaboration with the queen of pop.

Don’t be surprised if Camara gets his wish. After all, it took the Gambian musician three years to track down a phone number for Justin Adams, best known as Robert Plant’s guitarist for the better part of this decade. That persistence paid off. Camara and Adams have just released Tell No Lies, the follow-up to their acclaimed 2007 debut, Soul Science. Following a headlining slot at April’s WOMAD festival in Abu Dhabi — featuring Plant as an honorary band member — the duo has just concluded its first US tour.

Adams isn’t surprised to hear about his companion’s musical performance over the telephone. “He’s obsessed by Madonna,” laughs Adams. The guitarist recalls, too, being serenaded by Camara’s riti during that first phone call. Adams was immediately captivated by the sounds coming through his receiver and was intrigued about Camara’s status as a griot, a caste-like poet that continues oral storytelling traditions through song. “I heard through the grapevine there was griot interested in speaking to me,” says Adams. “It’s not every day that you get interest like that.”

In fact, Camara had been playing along to a copy of Adams’s 2002 album, Desert Road, for several years. Adams’s distinctive guitar style is so thoroughly influenced by West African guitarists that a blindfolded listener would be surprised to discover that the record’s Malian modes come courtesy of a man who once attended Eton, England’s most aristocratic private school.

Adams was familiar with Camara’s work, too, though he didn’t know it at the time. Following the introductory telephone call, Adams dug out an old compilation of Bill Laswell recordings in Gambia — 1990’s “Ancient Heart” — and was thrilled to discover that Camara was the riti player on the album.

For the duo’s first meeting in Adams’s garage, the British musician loaded up several African rhythm tracks on to his laptop. The musical alchemy was instant. “It’s jamming. One of us plays a riff, the other plays over the top,” says Adams. “The thing about our sort of approach to fusion, which makes it different, is that the basic building blocks are African,” says Adams. “We tend to take a rhythm that is a really familiar. We’re speaking the same kind of language.”

Both Soul Science and Tell No Lies are atypical of collaborations between African and Western musicians, which too often sound like two disparate seams zippered together. The guitarist prefers to avoid the World Music tag, however. “I feel more kinship with Clash and Rihanna than some sort of ambient flute music,” scoffs Adams. The guitarist admits to being surprised that he enjoys Rihanna and Black Eyed Peas (artists he’s picked up from his young son) for their rhythms. Tell No Lies won’t be mistaken for a will.i.am production — the CD should come packaged with an “organic” label — but the primal percussion by Salah Dawson Miller is suitably danceable. Indeed, the album boasts several great pop songs. The first single, “Kele Kele (No Passport, No Visa)”, is built on a Bo Diddley-like riff and the flirtatious backing vocals of Zanzibar’s Mim Suleiman. “Banjul Girl” is so exuberant it would spark a stock market rally if it was piped into Wall Street.

Blues and rock influences

The music’s more overt western influences, however, come from blues and rock influences. On “Sahara”, for example, swirls of gritty guitar gust through stereo speakers like a gathering sandstorm. “Fulani Coochie Man” is the sound of Muddy Waters turning a tribal compound into a Juke Joint. And the urgency of “Nangu Sobeh” is heightened by scorching slide guitar that makes the strings smolder like electric filaments.

Before embarking on sessions for Tell No Lies, Adams sought inspiration for the album’s sound and feel by compiling an iPod playlist featuring artists such as Led Zeppelin, Johnny Otis, and the Rolling Stones. “I love the kind of swagger and abandon of those records,” says the guitarist. “It doesn’t sound too considered.”

Also on the playlist: 1970s recordings from Nigeria and Senegal. Adams feels that many modern-day African records have become overly produced and clinical in a bid to cater to Western ears. That musical approach ties in nicely with the record’s lyrical themes about the importance of staying true to one’s roots. “I sing about [how] the youths must remember where their grandfather comes from,” says Camara in faltering English.

Such sentiments are especially important to the griot now that he’s living in England and married to a British woman. “Anyone who has been to West Africa can understand why he’d want to emigrate,” Adams elaborates. “You’d want to get out, but you’d also think, don’t abandon your culture. There are a lot of cultural riches in your country.”

Adams was adamant that Tell No Lies would hark back to the earlier, grittier style of African music that he first discovered during the 1980s. “What I like in African music is that it was more rock ‘n’ roll than rock ‘n’ roll. Rock ‘n’ roll was becoming a parody of itself. It wasn’t competing with new music I was hearing music from Algeria. That feel of abandon and trance. The spookiness. I loved the way a lot of African music was recorded in ‘70s and ‘80s, with amplifiers falling to bits.”

That ethos also informed Adams’s approach to producing a 2007 record by Tinariwen, the Malian desert blues group. Aman Iman: Water is Life was a breakout album for the one-time Tuareg rebels, now accustomed to having their guitars carted around by roadies rather than camels. The timing of Aman Iman coincided with acclaimed releases by artists such as Orchestra Baobab, Vieux Farka Touré, Toumani Diabate, Rokia Traoré, Etran Finatawa, and Amadou and Mariam. West African music has never had a higher profile.

“There are supporters in the media,” says Adams. “But it doesn’t really cut across to mainstream audiences. The bad thing is that it is such an uncommercial area.”

Even Tinariwen has to tour relentlessly to scrape by, says Adams. One bright spot is the festival circuit, however. This year alone, Adams and Camara have enjoyed prominent billing on stages from Auckland to Abu Dhabi. The latter concert was preceded by a week of rehearsals with Robert Plant, who was eager to raise a little Middle Eastern sand. “He just calls and says, ‘Do you fancy doing something?’” says Adams. “We get on well. He and I are the only two people I know obsessed by delta and Moroccan music.”

The duo’s setlist was augmented by mighty rearrangements of a few Plant solo career songs, Led Zeppelin classics, and cover versions of Dylan’s “Corrina Corrina” and Leadbelly’s “In the Pines”.

“He is a griot,” Camara effuses. “He is very open, sweet. The way he acts and the way he gives hug and the respect he gives to you.”

Next month, Adams will join Plant on stage at an all-star concert for the Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy charity at London’s O2 Arena, the venue that hosted the 2007 Led Zeppelin reunion. During the rest of the year, Camara and Adams will be on the road for long stretches. Asked what American audiences can expect, Adams’s answer is simple and direct: “some very raw, rocking music.”