Here is a favorite track from the sole LP that pedal steel guitarist Demola Adepoju released under his own name. Demola is probably best known in the US and Europe for his contribution to Paul Simon’s “Graceland” album, but he was famous in West Africa before he ever ventured out of Nigeria. Roger Steffens, the Reggae archivist and founder of KCRW radio show The Reggae Beat”, was a fan of Demola, and he introduced him to Paul Simon when Simon was scouting musicians to play on the Graceland sessions (he also made the initial introduction to Ladysmith Black Mambazo). Steffens, who was instrumental in promoting African musicians such as Fela Kuti and Miriam Makeba, considered Demola to be a musical original, sui generis. By the 1980s, Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey was locked into an intense rivalry with Nigeria’s other foremost Juju musician, King Sunny Ade. The two performers vied to introduce new sounds into the standard mix of drums and guitars, creating larger and larger “systems” with the addition of synthesizer and other exotica, and King Sunny found a secret weapon in the person of Demola Adepoju, the musician who introduced the pedal steel guitar into West African music. Demola was the son of a mission preacher. When he was growing up in the Yoruba city of Ife, his father used to listen to gospel music on Armed Forces radio and the Voice of America, where Demola first heard Country Music over the airwaves and became obsessed with the sound of the steel guitar. He told me when we visited his uncle there in 1993 that he built his first steel guitar out of salvaged guitar parts and gradually added various string benders of his own design. Demola didn’t own a commercially made pedal steel until he had already developed a “homemade” style. He almost never touched the volume pedal, and he favored using a lot of reverb and other signal processing, with very long notes and “washes”. Anyway, when he joined the African Beats, his pedal steel solos were sensational. https://youtube/watch?v=8AWVLK_B5fE
Posted on: Sat, 29 Mar 2014 19:35:46 +0000
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