More is better when it comes to the bands that King Sunny Adé brings to America.

Instead of one guitarist, he uses four. Plus four drummers, a brace of backup singers and a chorus line of dancers.

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King Sunny Adé

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When this Nigerian legend performs Thursday at Variety Playhouse, he’ll have about 16 musicians in his band. But if the evening includes the distinctive, West African tradition of “dashing,” which is also called “spraying,” there will be even more people onstage.

Dashing, or covering the performer with money — sometimes literally sticking bills onto his sweaty forehead — is the way an audience member traditionally expresses appreciation for jùjú music in Lagos. At some performances Adé (pronounced “Ah-day”) brings along extra band members to help gather the green stuff.

Will this happen in Atlanta? “If there’s room for it, then no problem,” Adé said with a laugh in a telephone call from his home in Lagos. “If the management accepts it, OK.”

Adé, born Sunday Adeniyi to a royal family in Ondo, Nigeria, has become music royalty in Africa by creating, during the course of his 40-year career, some of the most popular, danceable music on the continent. He began bringing his relentlessly swinging big bands to the United States in the 1970s, and helped propel the growth of “Afro-beat” in this country.

Adé shares the bill Thursday with another leader in Nigerian pop music, Femi Kuti, the oldest son of Fela Kuti, whose politically charged music made him an enemy of despots and a hero to many Africans.

While Adé sings in Yoruba, and plays music rooted in the jùjú tradition, there will be plenty of Westerners in the audience Thursday. But he hasn’t lost his original base, and the Nigerian (and Senegalese, Gambian, Somali and Ethiopian) communities in Atlanta will also be there.

“I understand that African people are coming from Birmingham, Chattanooga, the Carolinas, and a couple of groups are coming from Houston,” promoter Bolaji Dawodu said.

Adé and Kuti will perform Sunday at the Bonnaroo Festival in Manchester, Tenn.

CONCERT PREVIEW

King Sunny Adé and his African Beats; Femi Kuti and the Positive Force

8 p.m. Thursday. $30 advance, $32.50 day of show. Variety Playhouse, 1099 Euclid Ave., Atlanta. 404-524-7354, www.ticketmaster.com.