In Appreciation Of African Music

Music that spans the world
By David Honigmann
Published: October 8 2010 20:37 | Last updated: October 8 2010 20:37
Close your eyes backstage at the Barbican on Wednesday night, and you could imagine yourself in the Kalakuta Republic, Fela Kuti’s compound and headquarters in 1970s Lagos. All around was drumming; brass riffs being rehearsed and repeated and broken down and reassembled; testosterone and other scents in the air.

Had he been there, Fela would have been holding court with a Brobdingnagian marijuana cigarette, dressed in his underpants, dispensing furious denunciations of the Nigerian government and military. By way of contrast, his former drummer Tony Allen was riffling through a selection of Nigerian football shirts, eventually preferring the blue. And although Allen was keen to claim his share of the credit for the invention of afrobeat, he shied away from the political content. “I play music; I’m not following [Fela] in that sense.”

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He even sounded grudging about the ostensible reason for the concert: to mark Nigeria’s 50th birthday, on October 1, and his own 70th, in August. “Every day is a celebration, that’s how I look at it, as long as I go to sleep and wake up. The next day, I don’t know what happens.”

Since he quit Kuti’s band in 1979, and certainly since Kuti died in 1997, Allen has been a rhythmic powerhouse in search of a singer. To select a handful to join him at the Barbican, he had taken a random spin through his contacts book. All the invitees brought different perspectives. The Senegalese singer Cheikh Lo was delighted to honour the multiple birthdays. “It’s 50 years of Senegal too,” he pointed out, “and lots of African nations. Here in London, we can celebrate all of them together.”

“What am I doing here?” The South African singer Thandiswa Mazwai asked. “That’s a question I keep asking myself.” But her thrill at being present was palpable. “During uni I hung out in Yeoville [a bohemian suburb of Johannesburg] and listened to afrobeat – Fela, Tony. I’ve always loved the rhythm and how the women used their voices.”

The Finnish saxophonist Jimi Tenor was another who had got the call, and was wandering around in Austin Powers glasses and an outfit the colour of strawberry blancmange. “What do I bring that’s distinctively Finnish?” he deadpanned. “My pink suit.”

At the start of the concert, Allen took up a commanding position at a front-of-stage drum riser. And then, in essence, a series of singers took turns trying to fill Kuti’s place at the microphone while Allen sat impassively, laying down impossibly complex rhythms while scarcely seeming to twitch a muscle.

Ty, a British rapper, brought some menace to “Don’t Take My Kindness For Weakness”. Wunmi, a British singer of Nigerian descent with hair sculpted into the twin handles of an amphora, brought berserk authority, stalking in stilettoed boots, whipping off a long black frock coat to reveal a pink cutaway body stocking with a tasselled short skirt that she shook vigorously. Pee Wee Ellis, an alumnus of James Brown’s band, took up a leader’s place on saxophone. Eska Mtungwazi sang a highwire dance of a duet with Jason Yarde’s alto saxophone.

When Allen took occasional breathers, there were interludes from Keziah Jones, a one-man funk explosion, and Cheikh Lo, whose delicate acoustic guitar, with brass accompaniment from Ellis and Byron Wallen’s smoky trumpet, prompted distracted chatter from the audience but was a welcome relief from the relentless afrobeat. Mazwai, alternately growling and keening, delivered “Iyeza”, a song about traditional healers that sounded like an exorcism, with Wunmi and the other female singers perched on the vacant drum riser in a harmonising coven.

Despite patches of brilliance, the concert was incoherent. Yet towards the end, the ghost of Fela Kuti stalked on in the shape of his youngest son Seun, wearing one of his father’s trademark skintight mustard costumes.

“I’m here to celebrate Uncle Tony’s 70th,” he said, with a flash of the family contrarianism, “not Nigeria’s 50th.” The anniversary of the end of colonialism was “a time for reflection, not a time for celebration”. And then the full band launched into “Suffering and Smiling”, and for the first time the music came into focus; the Barbican became the Shrine.

Seun cannot compete with his father’s effortless charisma, but he had his moves down pat: quieting the eight brass players with an imperious raised finger so that Dele Sosimi could solo on a distorted electric piano, then taking a crouching half-moon run to gather them back up. He knew how to command attention: “I’m here to tell you a big secret ... you can’t tell anyone outside,” he teased, ahead of a Pidgin chorus.

The music fell to half-speed to let him play a saxophone solo, then shuddered to a halt before ticking up again into the dub-drenched lope of “Colonial Mentality”. Seun took a pantomimed military skank, the brass dropped away to expose the stoned drag of the beat, and he played out the theme on isolated single saxophone again.

For a moment then, all of the elements of afrobeat came together: noise and silence; drums and voice; music and politics; furious riffing from the massed brass and stark soloing. But it made the rest – including a final encore of “Celebration” – sound like mere technique.