Over the past five years, Justin Adams and Juldeh Camara have made two albums and an EP together, but it’s only now that they’ve got round to doing what most bands can’t wait to do, which is give themselves a groovy band name. Even though I’m a poo-pooer of most band names (they’re usually either stupid or pretentious, or both) I actually rather like "JuJu". The double “ju” represents the first two letters of Adams’s and Camara’s first names, and the resulting word has a nicely sinister black-magic ring to it. It also has the onomatopoeic bonus of sounding like the band sounds, with their heavy cyclical rhythms topped off by the sustained voodoo scream of Camara’s ritti (a Gambian one-string fiddle) - like Hendrix rising from the dead – playing throughout every track.
Another thing that now makes this band seem more like a band in the rock'n'roll sense is the addition of Dave Smith and Billy Fuller on drums and bass respectively. What this effectively does is shift the music from the intimate to the epic; from “world music” polite to rock powerhouse. Some fans may miss the more subtle polyrhythmic sound they had with percussionist Salah Dawson Miller, but what they’ve lost in subtlety they’ve perhaps gained in accessibility.
When I saw them perform with this line-up at a small basement bar a few weeks ago, I could imagine rock festival crowds across the planet hearing this potent mix of Adams’s grounding blues/rock guitar and Camara’s powerfully Fulani-language vocals and dipping, diving flights of ritti, and not knowing what hit them. So are JuJu the future of rock'n'roll? I don’t see why not, if those festival crowds are open-minded and/or stoned enough. For what they’re doing here is not a million miles from some of the progressive/psychedelic rock you might have heard in the early 1970s (in a good way, I hasten to add).
Watch a video of JuJu performing “Nightwalk”
