Chief Adjuah
Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning
Ropeadope Records
28 July 2023
Swapping your trademark trumpet for a homemade stringed implement might seem risky. But taking risks is what Chief Adjuah (aka Christian Scott) rather thrives on. Having pushed the boundaries of modern jazz, he now does the same with folkloric music from his native New Orleans.
Growing up, Adjuah was involved with his family’s custom of Black Masking Indians, in which outfits of beads and feathers are worn during the New Orleans carnival. This rite honours the ‘maroon communities’ where Africans fleeing slavery united with Native Americans. Adjuah has followed in his grandparents’ steps by becoming the big chief of a Black Indian group, the Xodokan Nation. Now with Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning, he presents a forceful, sometimes brutal, album filled with rhythms that overlap and overload the senses. It’s an immense work of art, a storehouse of tradition, a living archive of Adjuah’s people.
Seven different percussionists are credited, with devices including Dun duns, shekere and congas, though Adjuah uses a sampling pad too. He utterly commands this album with all its charms, incantations, rebellious rhythms, and street corner chorals. Offering comparisons is tough, but fans of Geoffrey Oryema, Lonnie Holley, Joshua Abrams and Gil Scott-Heron should get on board.
After some tinkle and twang from his newly invented Bow on opener Blood Calls Blood, Adjuah’s voice enters, baying and beseeching. ‘Dust off the bones/Defender of olaa returned/Skin of sunfire unburned’, he cries over rippling snares and the harp-like Bow. The track ends with a whoosh of murmurs, like a tribe of oak trees exhaling. If this suggests someone living close to nature, Adjuah’s music is as much the sound of seething cities as of the salty swamps.
Trouble That Mornin’ finds Adjuah ghost dancing through time and jumping over St. Louis cemetery. An urgent rhythm conjures deep apprehension, as does the full-throated melody. The basis of Xodokan Iko – Hu Na Ney will be familiar from dozens of slimy cocktail-pop versions, but Adjuah returns this piece to its Black Indian Creole origins. ‘Gonna shoot conna funna gonna shoot at dark boy’, he snarls into a gospel-pulsed backing.
The title track spans fifteen minutes and reveals Adjuah’s insurgent spirit over a rootsy insistent hustle. He spits fire at some ‘Death dealing terrorist bully pulpit profiteer’ but also pleads to a supreme Black mother goddess. Not unlike his fellow American poet Moor Mother, Adjuah’s variety of tonal effects is striking. This track becomes a procession to entice deities down from their sacred abodes, as if these ancestors have possessed Adjuah’s living body. Shallow Water then turns animist, where each line invokes a catchy call-response from the ensemble. It could be a pastor and his faithful sharing a fable about snakes and hawks above a volatile cauldron of beats.
On To New Orleans is a polyrhythmic dance fuelled by the knockings of sharpened wood. Adjuah’s acoustic instruments return for the literate ballad End Simulation, with its mournful images of crimson tides and cypress trees. It’s like a Louisiana take on trip-hop. ‘Where has my heart gone/Love’s been gone too long’ Adjuah sighs, the refrains melodious and sober. Ashé Chief Donald rings out like an anthem amid harmonious shouts from Adjuah like he’s rocking a street crowd. Hooky chants from the onlookers honour those who led the slave dances in New Orleans’ famed Congo Square.
There’s another singalong chorus on Golden Crown where Adjuah’s explosive slang depicts rising bayou waters and his own coronation as Grand Griot of New Orleans. The title track is reprised at the end in a raunchy thrash of beats, with a funky Adjuah sounding liberated in the final rites.
These songs are charged with meanings that the initiated will get, while the rest of us can merely intuit. You sense Adjuah’s physical being is tuned and vibrating like an instrument. His visionary voice enters the realms of a mythic otherness. Rarely have sound and heritage been so forcefully joined as on this divine ruckus of an album.
Order Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning via Bandcamp: https://christianscott.bandcamp.com/album/bark-out-thunder-roar-out-lightning