Success can sometimes be a matter of timing and geography. If Abdul Tee-Jay had not been living in London in the 80s, when many western music fans first discovered African styles, then his career might have been different. As it was, he had left Sierra Leone to study economics in the US before moving to the UK, where he quit banking and formed his excellent band Rokoto. But he wasn’t taken as seriously as artists based back in Africa, and never received the recognition he deserved.
Times and fashions have since changed and Abdul Tee-Jay is still here in the UK, still plugging away, and still in remarkably good form. His last album, released over a decade ago, was an acoustic set in which he revived and updated the “palm wine music” he heard as a young boy in Freetown. It’s an easy-going style, popular at parties where cheap drink is provided by the fermented sap of the oil palm tree, and has obvious links to Caribbean calypso.
It can also be remarkably subtle and varied, as Tee-Jay proved. A cheerful, gangling figure in cap and glasses, he perched on a stool specially designed to include a pedal-operated foot drum, and launched into a set that showed off both his engagingly relaxed vocal style and excellent acoustic guitar work. Backed by his countryman Bunton Cole on congas, he started with his own songs, speeding up to a slinky dance style that showed how palm wine music influenced Highlife.
He included songs by the early heroes of the style, Ebenezer Calendar, and SE Rogie, giving them scat-jazz embellishments, and followed with an unexpected switch to desert blues, and an impressive tribute to Ali Farka Touré.
It’s surely not too late for Abdul Tee-Jay to be rediscovered.
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