Prince Segun Adewale - Play For Me (Audio)

Title:
Prince Segun Adewale - Play For Me (Audio)

Description:
Prince Segun Adewales Biography by: James M. Manheim (http://www.musicianguide.com/biographies/1608004201/Segun-Adewale.html) Often called the "Crown Prince of Juju" as he followed in the footsteps of the legendary King Sunny Ade, Nigerian bandleader Segun Adewale was one of most popular West African performers of the 1980s. Adewale served a long apprenticeship in several of the bands that developed the colorful juju style and brought it to international popularity. He gained widespread fame before juju's dominance was ended by the rise of the fuji style in Nigerian popular music of the 1990s. Adewale, was a member of the hereditary aristocracy of the Yoruba ethnic group. He was born in Oshogbo, Nigeria, in 1955 or 1956. His father taught him to play the guitar. Adewale attended local schools and was groomed by his family for a career as a doctor or lawyer. They ruled out a career in music, but Adewale's response was to leave home and move to the Nigerian capital of Lagos, where in the 1960s, juju music was taking shape from a rich mix of existing musical ingredients. Tribal drum rhythms were fused with guitars and other Western instruments, Adewale signed on with one of the early juju bands, Chief S.L. Atolagbe and His Holy Rainbow, and, after some lean years, was encouraged to stick with his music by bandleader and accordionist I.K. Dairo. Dairo instructed the young musician in the art of songwriting and in creating arrangements for juju's huge, kinetic ensembles of musicians and dancers. In 1973 Adewale formed a band of his own called the 'Superstars'. That ensemble released an album called 'Kogbodopa Finna-Finna' but broke up almost immediately. Late in 1974 Adewale joined another band that was a fixture of the juju scene, Prince Adekunle's Western Brothers Band. In 1977 he and another top musician in the band, Shina Peters, departed to form a group of their own, Shina Adewale and the Superstars International. Both musicians were considered young innovators, and while the well-publicized rivalry between juju's top stars, Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey and King Sunny Ade and His African Beat, gained international attention, Shina Adewale built an audience at home. In 1980, after releasing several albums, Adewale and Peters parted ways, each with his own vision of how to take juju to its next stage. Adewale formed a new band of 20 musicians, once again called the Superstars. Releasing several albums in short order, the band began to realize Adewale's new ideas. By their fifth album, 'Endurance', Adewale had dubbed his sound "yo-pop" (meaning "Yoruba pop") and was blending musical ideas of reggae, funk, and the old-fashioned Nigerian dance style of highlife into the basic juju sound. The biggest influence, however, came from rock, a music that previously hadn't played much of a role in Nigerian music. The first difference that a Western listener may notice when comparing Adewale's music to that of his contemporaries is the presence of speedy, agile electric guitars. Essentially, Adewale fully integrated lead, bass, and other guitars into juju's net of percussion rhythms. Yo-pop catapulted Adewale to the top of the heap in Nigerian music for a time. "All speed, thunder, and lightning," wrote the authors of World Music: The Rough Guide, of Adewale's sound, adding that "it found a huge young audience, especially in Lagos." Adewale also began to make waves among overseas Nigerian communities, and in 1984 he was signed to the Stern's Records label in the United Kingdom. His album 'Play for Me', which featured some English texts, was released in 1984 in the United Kingdom, and Adewale and the Superstars played several high-profile gigs there. In 1985 they performed three concerts at the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland, a huge, days-long event encompassing theater, music, and street festivities. By the early 1990s the decades-old juju tradition itself was under siege commercially in Nigeria from a new music called 'fuji', a percussion-centered style that carried overtones of Nigerian Islamic sacred music. Adewale promoted himself as a defender of juju and proclaimed another new style of his own, called 'peperempe'. Little was heard from him for much of the 1990s, but in 1996 he released an album, 'Here I Am in America', for a small Nigerian-American label called Celebrity Records. The following year he contributed to a compilation entitled Nigerian Artists for Peace. His place in the history of juju, a genre that did much to launch the whole idea of world music, has been secured, and he has left a large recorded legacy that, as of the early 2000s, mostly awaited rediscovery by Western lovers of African music.

Author:
planetolusola

Tags:
juju, yoruba, segun, adewale, naija, nigeria, lagos,