Different beat: how Fela Kuti’s son and grandson are modernising the dynasty

Posted on January 31, 2021 by Admin

Ahead of their new double album, Femi and Made Kuti reflect on the Afrobeat pioneer’s legacy, their complex family, and the problems Nigeria still faces

The night 1,000 soldiers descended on Fela Kuti’s home, set it on fire and threw his elderly mother out of the window is etched into his family’s memory and music folklore for ever. On 18 February 1977, Fela’s eldest son, Femi, was at school when the compound – known as the Kalakuta Republic, a raucous commune that the musician had declared an independent state – was raided, a violent retaliation to the album Zombie, Fela’s biting attack on the mindless personnel of Nigeria’s military regime. Femi returned to find friends had been beaten, women raped.

“We all thought my father was dead on that day,” says Femi, who was in his teens at the time. Fela survived, but his mother’s fall proved fatal. “It was like a war zone. It took me several years to overcome that nightmare. Even seeing soldiers on the streets as a young boy, I was afraid they’d attack me because I was Fela’s son.”

‘The system is rigged’: Seun Kuti on reviving Fela’s political party

Posted on January 19, 2021 by Admin

The musician and youngest son of the Afrobeat legend has been galvanised to act after police brutality in Nigeria

“For 60 years nothing has really been solved in this country,” Seun Kuti says. “Healthcare, education, electricity, transportation, welfare – nothing has been accomplished.”

Galvanised by the brutality meted out by Nigerian police against protesters in October last year, the 37-year-old Grammy-nominated musician and youngest son of the Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti resurrected his father’s socialist political party, the Movement of the People. Against a backdrop of widespread and mounting frustration over how Nigeria is run, he hopes the MOP can be a vehicle for change in 2021.

Tony Allen: the Afrobeat maverick who blazed a trail across the globe

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Admin

The Nigerian musician was a restless creator who embraced the physicality of drumming and innovated until the end

Few musicians can claim to have invented a revolutionary rhythm, but then few are quite like the late Afrobeat pioneer Tony Allen. Brian Eno called him “the greatest drummer that ever lived”, citing his style alongside James Brown’s funk breakbeat and the constant pulse of German band Neu! as the “three great beats of the 1970s”. Allen’s swirl of jazz, Yoruba and highlife was unlike anything the world had ever heard: a full-body polyrhythmic workout that would give most drummers sore wrists just thinking of it.

Allen came to prominence in Lagos alongside Fela Kuti. He started drumming in the late 50s while working at a radio station, looking to jazz icons such as Art Blakey and Max Roach for inspiration as he taught himself to play. In 1964 he met Kuti and they spent the next half-decade fine-tuning their fusion of west African party music and American funk and jazz, in the bands Koola Lobitos and, by 1969, Africa ’70. While Kuti, who died in 1997, is more well-known than his musical soulmate, he said that “without Tony Allen there would be no Afrobeat”.

Tony Allen, legendary drummer and Afrobeat co-founder, dies aged 79

Posted on April 30, 2020 by Admin

Gilles Peterson and Biz Markie pay tribute to the Fela Kuti collaborator, described by Brian Eno as ‘perhaps the greatest drummer who ever lived’

The Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, who is credited with creating Afrobeat along with his old bandmate Fela Kuti, died suddenly at the age of 79 in Paris on Thursday, his manager said.

“We don’t know the exact cause of death,” Eric Trosset said, adding it was not linked to the coronavirus.