Emmerald: How did you all get started working as Boozoo Bajou?
Boozoo Bajou: We met through a friend we both knew. We worked on
three or so studio sessions, just to see if we can collaborate with
our music. It was really perfect, but a little slow to develop. It
took us about six months to produce just a couple of tracks, but we
kept working and producing track by track.
Emmerald: Were those first tracks you worked on on Satta?
Boozoo Bajou: Yes.
Emmerald: You guys are originally from Nuremberg, Germany and are
still based there. How did you all get into Jamaican dub music and
that New Orleans-sounding groove?
Boozoo Bajou: We were always interested in American music and found
it more exciting than the music we had in our hometown. Where we were
living, there's a lot of folk music and it's not that interesting.
There were lot of American soldiers around and so there were a lot of
radio stations based in the south of Germany playing American music
like blues, soul and stuff like that. We met a lot of American and
Black American musicians. We played in bands, and over the last few
years, we've been playing in soul and funk bands. We were always in
contact with those musicians and that music. And we traveled a lot
and found a lot of record stores in America that have some good music.
Emmerald: What were some of the first musical experiences you had?
Boozoo Bajou: My first musical experiences were with my father
because he is a composer, a conductor and a piano player. His music
is very avant garde, very very complex. After the second World War,
he played in the clubs with jazz musicians. And so I grew up in
musical school and in high school studying classical piano and drums.
We both played in rock bands and punk bands before we played in soul
and funk groups. I took drum lessons about fifteen years ago when I
was really into jazz.
Emmerald: Do you play your own instruments or do you work with
other musicians?
Boozoo Bajou: I try to play a lot of instruments but it's not always
possible to get it right, so we have a good friend of ours that plays
guitar and we have other musicians as well that we work with. We
record each instrument one by one. It's like recording the whole band
in the studio but we work with one instrument and a musician and we
keep with that for a couple of days. Then we look at it, checking
what can we put on next, and that's how the song grows.
Emmerald: What are some differences and similarities between your
new album Dust My Broom and Satta?
Boozoo Bajou: The main difference is that we worked more with singers
and we tried different tempos and Satta was more focused on one flow
and one vibe. We'd been working with that sound and that flow of
tempo for such a time and we wanted to change a little to reflect some
of the other interesting things we'd worked on. We really wanted to
work with a couple of singers because we did some remixes for singers
before and it was really interesting. We tried to keep an eye on the
musical elements around that. We didn't want the focus to be solely
on the music, but we also wanted the music to be important as well as
the singing. We worked on the music first, then put the singers on
and worked at it again. We still like to use little things, little
elements, effects, instruments, and we like to try different things.
