Los Angeles-based and New Orleans raised artist Chief Adjuah is a two time Edison Award winning and five-time Grammy nominated artist and producer. He鈥檚 most notably known as a trumpet player but on his latest record he steps away from the instrument to focus on the Adjuah bow, an instrument that he created.
Adjuah is on tour now and is performing two shows at Missy Lane鈥檚 Assembly Room in Durham on January 16. 瓜神app Music鈥檚 Brian Burns recently caught up with Adjuah to talk about his bow, and his latest record 鈥淏ark Out Thunder, Roar Out Lightning.鈥�
This is an excerpt of an edited transcript of that conversation. You can hear the full interview by clicking the LISTEN button at the top of this post.
You use the term "stretch music" to describe what you do. Can you tell us about the term and what it means to you?
We were trying to figure out how to develop sort of an ethno-musicological approach to limitless fusion and to try to figure out how to marry as many different musical vernaculars and languages into one common context. We would be on tour, and more often than not, when we were playing Europe, the younger musicians would come and they would call what we were doing stretching, and say "stretch music."
We didn't know what the hell they were saying. But it got to the point where we would be there so much that we got used to hearing the term and when were touring more in the States, people were saying that it was our thing. We loved what it said about the capacity and the possibility of the music.
You've invented several instruments, with the latest being the Adjuah bow. Tell us a little bit about the bow.
Man, the bow is so much fun. It initially started with me trying to figure out a way to create more 21st century instruments that have ancestral recall and methodologies that are written into the core baseline techniques for the instruments. We wanted to build a 21st century template of instruments that existed in antiquity as a means of jogging the memory of musicians and these cultures of music. It's a hybrid of three different cultures of double sided bows from West Africa. We wanted to try and build an instrument that was a composite of instruments from three different cultures, so that anyone that touches it from this culture has the ability to develop a baseline understanding or sensibility for the other predecessors.
