Tell No Lies
Generally, I like fusion, the joining of styles from different parts of the world. Fusion food can be a joy, where flavours of one country play against the foods of another. When it works, it’s cooking that combines the thrill of discovery with the joy of the known and loved. But when it doesn’t work, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. I look at my the mac and cheese, crusted with a wasabi ginger coulis, and all I can do is wonder, “Gee why didn’t I just go out for sushi?”

If you combine colours carelessly, you probably wind up with a muddy brown. And fusion music, to which I am drawn and which I often love, runs that danger. Sometimes you can hear the separate sources, but the klezmer and the blues don’t add to more than they might have been separately. Sometimes Ry Cooder plays with a musician from elsewhere, and he fits in so smoothly that while I enjoy the music, I don’t know how it differs from what it started as. I have a Polish album of polka versions of classic blues songs, and while I suppose its very well done, it doesn’t leave me feeling that I ever need to hear it again. There’s a certain energy to the blues, as well as to polka, and nothing on that album leaves me feeling that this marriage was made in heaven. It wasn’t so much that it didn’t go anywhere, as that I wasn’t enjoying myself while it didn’t.

But sometimes the pieces do fit, and it’s pure magic. I was recently gifted with the album “Tell No Lies”, by Justin Adams and Juldeh Camara. The Guardian called Justin “the UK’s Ry Cooder” for his work at crossing musical borders. He’s a guitarist, and has played with Peter Gabriel, Robert Plant, and that crew. But he grew up in the Middle East and North Africa, with a father who was a British diplomat, so he developed a love for that music along with his love for traditional blues, the Clash, and loud rocky riffs. Juldeh is the son of a griot, a traveller who keeps alive the oral traditions of poetry, music, and truth-telling in Western Africa. In time Juldeg became a griot himself. He plays the ritti, a one-stringed African fiddle, and the kologo, a two stringed banjo. He heard one of Justin’s albums, phoned him up, and said, “I heard your stuff. The style you play is very very connected with my spirit.” And then he played his ritti to him over the phone. As Justin tells it, he “went crazy” and they’ve been jamming together ever since. Their previous album, their first together, won the BBC World Music award.

Before they collaborated on “Tell No Lies”, Justin put together a collection of western and African music he liked including tracks from Led Zepplin, The Clash, Muddy Waters, and Bo Diddley. And on the album you can hear those influences. There’s a punk like energy to “Kele Kele (No Passport, No Visa)” a song about African refugees who try to flee to Europe. Justin plays a fuzzed guitar, and Juldeh answers on ritti, which sounds like a harmonica sometimes. Remember the interplay between Muddy Waters and James Cotton, when they were inventing the Chicago blues? There’s an echo of that running through the song. And there’s a lot of call and response, a guitar line answered on ritti, or vocals.

Juldeh sings almost all of the album, in Fulani. There’s a booklet with translations, which are very bizarre. On the album you can hear what certainly sounds like rhythmic rhyming phrases, repeated in a chorus, the same language structure that we know from western music. But the translations are very flat prose, without repetition or rhyme. From “Kele Kele (No Passport, No Visa)” comes this: “You may be going through a hard time, but Africa, our motherland has a lot to offer, so be patient in your search for treasures. Visa authorities, allow me to bring the plight of my people in sweet melody, although you cannot grant everyone a visa, there must be a way to ease the pain, suffering and loss.”. It seems the translation too failed to successfully cross the border. But the rhythm dances around a Bo Diddley beat, the song has hooks you could you could do chin-ups from, so this may not be the album to spend time analyzing lyrics. But dancing? Definitely.

The next song, “Fulani Coochie Man” has a deep and powerful blues line from Justin, that gets answered on Juldeh’s ritti and it reminds me of an old line from Willie Dixon, “If it ain’t the truth, it ain’t the blues”. Perhaps that’s why the album is titled, “Tell no Lies”. This music feels real, at a deep and visceral level that goes beyond language, in a way that polka blues does not. It feels real because the elements that come from the western rock music, a music whose traditions I know is not adulterated or watered down. But the African music I don’t know has a power to it as well that is given equal space. It’s neither Vampire Weekend playing afropop, nor Youssou N’Dour, who sometimes plays Western style pop music in a way that wipes out the enormous power he can authentically generate on an album like “Egypt”.

This is what fusion can really be, when the disparate elements combine and become stronger because of the distance between them. This is an album that I love for way the familiar is paired and shadowed against the unfamiliar. “Tell No Lies” is released on Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records, this year celebrating their twentieth anniversary, and that’s appropriate for an album that I suspect many of us will be playing for a long, long time.