New Orleanian Chief Adjuah's music is at center of new ballet
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New Orleans native Chief Adjuah is traditionally a trumpet player, but he built his own instrument, Adjuah's Bow, for his latest album. Photo courtesy of Chief Adjuah
Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah has represented New Orleans on a global scale since he was a young musician, winning Grammys and performing internationally.
Driving the news: The New Orleans native returns home this week to perform alongside Complexions Contemporary Ballet.
- Choreographer, Dwight Rhoden, created a piece set to a track off Chief Adjuah's latest album, "Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning." The New Orleans Ballet Association-commissioned piece debuts Saturday.
- Chief Adjuah typically tours with an 8- or 10-piece band, but he'll play with a quartet that night.
We caught up with Chief Adjuah in this Q&A, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Where he went to school: "I went to McDonogh 35 and NOCCA, and then the Berklee College of Music."
What came first for this performance: the choreography or the music? "Dwight pointed to a couple of songs he really loved and wanted to create a composite over and express over, and they started building from there."
- "The great thing about this art is you can rehearse it a million times and when you get in the building to do it, something changes. It's hard to say exactly what it'll be until it is."
He's known for the trumpet, but he doesn't play it on this album. Why? "I created a new musical instrument called Adjuah's Bow … tied into the Maroon music and culture back home [in New Orleans], but also tethered to the forms that we now look at as the blues and music that evolved out of West Africa."
- "This instrument expresses in a way that is difficult not to hear its roots in it."
On how his music is labeled: It "started with people referring to my music as jazz and knowing the history of that word and how it was used to denigrate, it was always curious to me why people would double-down on something a community has expressed its disinterest in being labeled as."
- "Those [labels] are a particular kind of ownership and auction block."
The music he has on repeat right now: "I am listening to Sali Sidibe, a bunch of her music. Abou Diarra, Sekouba Traoré, Baaba Maal."
If he could book a festival: "The first group would be Charlie Parker's Quintet with Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet. The second band would be Jimi Hendrix with the Band of Gypsys.
- "The third group would be Freddie Keppard's band. He was the first major cornetist in music history, but we don't have any examples of his playing on recordings."
A memory of his first performance: "I played my first gig as a band leader at Snug Harbor."
- "Uncle Donald [Harrison] came and sat in and lit us up. I was 12 or 13."
- "Snug Harbor's fish Marigny, if I only get one meal before I go, that's what I want."
The food he'd fight for: "The fried crawfish tails at Sweet Lorraine's."
- "Paul Sylvester allowed me to cut my teeth in that club, and my mother also managed the club for a time, so I was there a lot in my formative years."
- "The kitchen there is pretty insane. If someone said you have to fight to have these crawfish tails, I would knuckle up."