As the scion of an illustrious clan at the center of Black New Orleans culture, Chief Adjuah knows first-hand that it’s never too early to start passing on the tradition.
The award-winning trumpeter, composer and bandleader who started his career as Christian Scott is back in the Bay Area with a band powered by 24-year-old Elé Howell, the latest step in a relationship that started when the drummer was in the first grade.
They’ve stayed in close contact over the years, and Adjuah started featuring Howell at his Stretch Music Festivals after the drummer moved to New York to study at Manhattan School of Music in 2016.
“I’m just floored at what he’s been able to put together, the languages of drumming he’s developed,” said Adjuah, 40.
The son of Bay Area tenor sax master Richard Howell, Elé first encountered Adjuah as a 6-year-old who was spending so much time at Yoshi’s that he knew the door codes to get back stage.
“I’d run around and bug everybody,” he recalled. “But Christian was super cool, just cracking jokes with me and he let me sit in with the band. He gave my parents his number and every time he came back to the Bay Area he’d check in. He was serious about his message and said ‘Call me if you keep on playing.’ So I did.”
After returning to the scene of that fateful first encounter earlier this week, Adjuah and Howell play at Stanford University July 15 with a group that also features guitarist Matthew Stevens, bassist Kris Funn, and percussionist Weedie Braimah. The concert is part of the Stanford Jazz Festival.
While not billed as his Stretch Music band, Adjuah’s group is steeped in his encompassing rhythmic framework that extends from the Caribbean and South America to West Africa and New York.
For Howell, Adjuah’s Stretch Music “fit perfectly with the progression of sound I was experiencing. I grew up hearing a lot of West African music. My idol is Youssou N’Dour from Senegal, so I’ve really connected with Weedie. He’s brilliant at breaking it down for me and sharing a lot of information.”
A master of the djembe (a skin-covered goblet drum) who’s performed around the Bay Area this year with vocal star Cécile McLorin Salvant, Braimah was born in Ghana, raised in East St. Louis and maintains deep roots in New Orleans. The Crescent City connection is where Adjuah’s Stretch Music concept starts.
It’s hard to exaggerate how deeply Adjuah is enmeshed in the cultural life of New Orleans. He was only 5 years old when he first joined the Guardians of the Flame Mardi Gras Indians banner led by his grandfather, Big Chief Donald Harrison Sr.
His grandmother, Herreast Harrison, was Guardians Institute founder and Grand Griot of New Orleans, and his uncle is alto saxophone jazz innovator and NEA Jazz Master Donald Harrison Jr., who’s now Big Chief of a Mardi Gras Indians “krewe” himself. As his name change indicated, Chief Adjuah is a chieftain of the Xodokan Nation, part of the Mardi Gras Indians movement through which the descendants of escaped slaves honor the Native Americans who helped them.
Over the past decade Adjuah has extensively documented an expansive body of Stretch Music, while also designing and playing several ground-breaking new instruments, like a double-sided harp called the Chief Adjuah Bow. In the New Orleans tradition, he approaches jazz as inextricably bound to a celebratory continuum of social and ritual music, a sound and sensibility that has attracted artists such as Prince, Thom Yorke, McCoy Tyner, Marcus Miller, Eddie Palmieri, and Mos Def (who’ve all featured him on projects).
“One of the really fun things about Stretch Music is that we have the ability to switch out three or four instruments,” Chief Adjuah said, noting that he’s made of point of pairing rising young artists, like Berkeley-reared flutist and vocalist Elena Pinderhughes, alongside veteran masters.
Always looking to explore fresh creative directions, he produced the acclaimed new album by performance poet aja monet, “when the poems do what they do,” which surrounds her expressive recitation with Stretch Music. He’s releasing a new album of his own in the coming months, “Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning,” a project that prominently features Howell.
“His new music is a beautiful progression of rhythm,” said Howell, who spent much of the past two years performing with saxophonist Ravi Coltrane’s new project Cosmic Music: Revisiting the Music of John and Alice Coltrane. “The Stretch sound is like this big blank canvas to apply all these different styles.”
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
CHIEF ADJUAH
Formerly Christian Scott
When & where: 7:30 p.m. July 15; Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Stanford University, part of the Stanford Jazz Festival; $30-$110, stanfordjazz.org
