When you listen to this album, it’s as if a door suddenly opened in what we consider rock music. Behind it a magical space in which the possibilities for development are multiplied. And suddenly what was previously thought to be the center of pop is just a small broom closet in a huge building. “Johnny!” shifts the listener’s coordinates – to Africa. And teleports him into a past that seems familiar again and again and that has never been heard before.
This is not only the case for Europeans. “People in Africa don’t even know it anymore,” says guitarist JJ Whitefield. The sound brings back the ecstasy that has stood the test of time under the ruins of the decades. The Africa that is revealed here is a vision made of rock. Energy discharges that break the moment out of time. “Johnny!” is the name of the band, and “Johnny!” is the name of the album that has now been released on the Los Angeles-based label Now Again. It is inspired by Zamrock, a sound from Zambia in the seventies, but leads far beyond national borders: to Ghana, Germany, the Netherlands. To Munich. JJ Whitefield lives there as Jan Weissenfeldt when he is not on tour.
After talking to him, it takes a while to mentally organize the projects in which he is currently involved and which have made him the musician who is a central point of contact when it comes to the rock sound of Africa. With the Poets of Rhythm he started the retro funk soul wave in the nineties and is currently a guitarist embryo and cherishes his project Karl Hector & The Malcouns. Weissenfeldt is one of those musical personalities who, in a constant process of transforming their own art, let music flow through them.
Weissenfeldt already played with Jagari, a forgotten Zambian rock star
In the documentary “Witch – We intend to cause havoc” from 2019 you can see him with a band from the Netherlands on stage together with Jagari. He is a mythical figure of Zamrock and was the singer of the band Witch, the only survivor, actually once a superstar in Africa, and is tracked down here on film and brought back into the spotlight. Zamrock – that was the Zambian idea of the seventies to join the international rock scene, the Stones, Led Zeppelin. And because, fortunately, there was still no internet and the global reproduction of the same, digitally preserved, they reinvented rock for themselves with what they had and knew – and rhythmically more complex. African rhythms, if you can say so broadly, often work with polyrhythmics, the superimposition of different beats, which a normal brain pretty quickly reaches the limits of its capacity. The off-beat of our pop music is, says Weissenfeldt, what “the cosmopolitan” can still understand.
Jagari wasn’t the first forgotten African musician Weissenfeldt helped bring on stage. Ebo Taylor was the name of the central figure of Afro-Beat, with whom he toured Europe and went to the studio. And, to get back to the current album, Taylor’s son Henry is part of the new group as keyboardist and singer, which is the album “Johnny!” recorded. Together with percussionist Eric Owusu, who also comes from Ghana, the Indonesian bassist Tomi Simatupang and Weissenfeldt’s old drummer friend Bernd Oezsevim. Henry lives in Ghana, the others are scattered across Germany, but mobile working is no problem for Weissenfeldt. They also recorded during tour breaks for Ebo Taylor. Later on, Weissenfeldt changed almost all guitar sounds. “My tastes also change every day, with everything I hear,” he says. Oh yes, As a plate archaeologist and collector, Weissenfeldt sits at a never-ending source. That trains the ear for subtleties. If you hear the inspiration for Johnny !, the Zamrock, you notice how central the sound of the electric guitar is. They are fuzz sounds, as they formed the rock sound from the sixties – the very special sound of transistor distortion, still loved effect devices today, which among guitarists is a matter of belief and culmination point of endless attempts at optimization. The fact that it is so strikingly catchy in African rock of the seventies is primarily due to the scarcity of funds, which also forced musicians to pursue an entire career with an effects pedal.
In Ghana people like to use counting rhymes for lyrics
The new album is not a sound museum for historians, but a new creation of repressed feelings. So you hear “Make it right”, a big, rolling throw of longing. With “Kokoko” a memory of Jimmy Page and his Celtic-acoustic moments emerges, to which the funky wah-wah waves of the electric guitar surprisingly fit. “Yendi Agoro” is a different idea from punk, with a guitar that bites its way through the song as a wild creature in company with the singer – and despite all the rude meanness, the groove of the number is swinging. “Agyenkwa” has two faces: the dreamy one with a chorus guitar and voices of gentle soul, and the angry one, mouth open in a roaring grimace.
The songs were often created out of jam sessions, and as a jam they also recorded the things. The decision for this sound character takes the live performance into account right from the start. That cannot be taken for granted, because a studio tempts to do handicrafts, which, non-reproducible, become independent art. But Johnny! rely on the immediate stage energy and appearances, which also have to be financially stuck. Flying in musicians from Ghana costs money. The singers often found the lyrics to themselves while playing the instrumental numbers. You are in Twi, Ga and Fante. Weissenfeldt had it translated, and the content surprises after all: “Ghanaians love to use something like counting rhymes.” They still exist, the cultural differences that make life interesting in the first place. If you get involved, you will be drawn into another world. The western name of the Ghanaians is one thing, the other is their Ghanaian name – it is the day of the week of their birth. This is how the sound of Johnny feels! first get close to. But there are 5000 kilometers as the crow flies between Munich and Accra.