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Born in Lagos,
Nigeria in 1940, of mixed
Nigerian and Ghanaian parentage,
Tony Allen taught himself to
play by listening to records
made by the American jazz
drummers Art Blakey and Max
Roach. He began working as a
professional musician in 1960,
gigging around Lagos and
variously playing highlife and
jazz. Today living in Paris,
Allen has long been acknowledged
as Africa’s finest kit drummer
and one of it's most influential
musicians, the man who with Fela
Anikulapo Kuti created Afrobeat
- the hard driving, James Brown
funk-infused, and politically
engaged style which became such
a dominant force in African
music and whose influence
continues to spread today.
Allen had to overcome strong
parental opposition to realise
his dream of becoming a
professional musician. “My
parents were…not keen. Back
then, in Lagos, musicians were
more or less thought of as
beggars, or worse. But I just
put it in front of them. I was
an electrical technician, but I
wanted to make a change. My
mother was never happy about it,
but my father, who was an
amateur musician, eventually
agreed.”
Allen started out as a jazz
drummer. “Art Blakey was my big
influence, and before that,
before I started club crawling,
it was Gene Krupa. When I
started, I tried to play like
Gene Krupa. Then I discovered
Blue Note Records and Art
Blakey’s Jazz Messengers - it
opened up another style to me.
Max Roach was important too. I
studied some lessons he wrote in
Down Beat magazine about how to
play high-hats. Most drummers in
Lagos never used them, they were
just a decoration on the kit,
and I’d always thought that was
something incomplete.”
It was, however, no easier
making a living playing jazz in
Lagos than it was anywhere else
outside the USA in the early
1960s: Allen’s first extended
gig was with the Cool Cats, a
highlife band fronted by Sir
Victor Olaiya (the so-called
“Evil Genius of Highlife”,
although Olaiya’s group was then
pretty much a “copyright band,”
playing covers of other artists’
hits). When the Cool Cats split,
Allen returned to his job as an
electrical technician before
joining other highlife groups
including Agu Norris and the
Heatwaves, the Nigerian
Messengers, the Melody Angels
and, finally, the Western
Toppers.
Allen was playing with the
Western Toppers when he met Kuti
in 1964. “Fela had been
presenting a jazz records
programme on NBC (Nigerian
Broadcasting Corporation) on
Friday nights. He decided he
wanted to form his own jazz band
and play the music himself in
the clubs. He’d tried out
several drummers, but none of
them were what he was looking
for. He began to think there was
no-one suitable in Africa. Then
someone recommended me to him. I
auditioned - and he asked me if
I’d learnt to play in the USA! I
had the style he wanted. We
played strictly jazz together
for about a year, as the Fela
Ransome Kuti Jazz Quartet,
before we started Koola Lobitos.”
Koola Lobitos, formed in 1965,
played a mixture of highlife and
jazz. According to Allen, the
music started out so complex and
full of changes that the
audience didn’t understand what
they were hearing. “In five
minutes we’d use like five
different arrangements (time
signatures). It was just too
complicated for the audience.
They couldn’t understand what
was happening - except,
possibly, the musically inclined
ones who knew that the music was
different from all the local
things they’d been listening to.
But it was a bit like showing
off, so we decided to simplify
things, giving each song two
hook lines and a straightforward
arrangement so that people
wanted to dance.” (A few years
later, at the urging of funk
musicians including Bootsy
Collins and other members of
James Brown's band they met on
tour in the US, Kuti and Allen
simplified things further. “One
idea, one song” became the
Afrobeat paradigm).
Koola Lobitos' nascent Afrobeat
would have been nothing without
Allen’s innovative bass drum
patterns, which were unlike
those used by any other kit
drummer working in Lagos at the
time. His bass drum dealt a
double whammy, b-boom, b-boom.
Where other drummers would play
a single beat, Allen made it a
double, giving Afrobeat its
trademark forward thrust. “The
bass drum patterns are unique to
me,” says Allen. “I’d never play
one, one. Any drummer can play
that straight beat. But that’s
just like putting a metronome in
there.”
In 1969, Koola Lobitos made an
extended visit to the US, where
they lived a hand to mouth
existence. “The living
conditions were rough,” says
Allen. “We started on the east
cost, where there were lots of
Nigerian students, and we did
well there. Then we went west,
via Chicago, to San Francisco
and Los Angeles.” Audiences,
which were still largely
composed of Nigerians, grew
smaller. “Fela got fed up just
playing to Nigerians. He said if
we were going to play to
Nigerians, we might as well do
it in Nigeria where there were a
lot more of them.” The Koola
Lobitos album The ‘69 Los
Angeles Sessions, made on the
hoof towards the end of the
tour, documents the emergent
Afrobeat style of the band.
Kuti’s political consciousness,
nurtured by his politically
active parents back home - and
soon to become a defining
feature of Afrobeat - was
sharpened in the US, where he
befriended a black American
woman called Sandra Isidore. A
member of the Black Panthers,
Isidore introduced Kuti to the
ideas of such people as Malcolm
X, Angela Davis, the Last Poets,
Stokeley Carmichael and Eldridge
Cleaver, all of whose thinking
played some part in the
development of Kuti‘s own
political philosophy, Blackism.
Once back in Lagos, Kuti renamed
the band Africa 70 (it had in
the US briefly been Nigeria 70,
and was later tweaked to Afrika
70). With Allen forging the
music’s vibrant signature
rhythms, and Kuti its incendiary
lyrics, the duo had, within a
few years turned Afrobeat into a
style rivalling the then
reigning juju and highlife in
popularity.
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“Fela said I sounded like
four drummers,” says Allen. “I was the only one who originated
the music I played.” Fela used to write out the parts for all
the other musicians. If Allen sounded like four drummers, it
could have been because, in his mature Afrika 70 style, he was
drawing on four different styles - highlife, soul/funk, jazz and
traditional African drumming. A unique and mighty sound. (In
1970 when James Brown played in Nigeria, his arranger made
careful study of Fela’s band and Allen’s drumming in particular,
as did Ginger Baker, another disciple).
Allen stayed with Kuti for
close on 15 years, from 1964-1979/80 (it wasn’t an overnight
parting of the ways). He played on all Afrika 70’s albums up
until 'V.I.P. - Vagabonds In Power' (after which the band
briefly dissolved, before Kuti formed Egypt 80). These include
the classic mid-decade stream of discs documenting the
post-colonial iniquities of Nigerian society and Kuti’s (and
Afrika 70’s) increasingly bloody conflicts with the authorities
- among them 'Alagbon Close', 'Everything Scatter', 'Expensive
Shit', 'Yellow Fever', 'Zombie', 'Kalakuta Show', 'Before I Jump
Like Monkey Give Me Banana', 'Sorrow Tears And Blood' and 'Fear
Not For Man'. The band enjoyed massive popularity in Nigeria and
elsewhere in West Africa, but (at home) were subject to constant
harassment, and at times brutal physical attacks, from the army
and the police.
In 1975, Allen recorded his debut album, 'Jealousy', the first
of three made with Afrika 70 and produced by Kuti. 'Progress'
followed in 1976, 'No Accommodation For Lagos' in 1978. But by
1978 he was ready for a change of scene, and a year later he
parted company with Kuti. The touring entourage had grown to
outlandish proportions and there was talk of him not getting due
respect or recompense for the contribution he had made to the
creation of Afrobeat and the success of Afrika 70. “It’s not a
big story,” says Allen today. “I was tired, I’d just had
enough.” His final studio collaboration with Kuti was on an
album made with American vibraphonist Roy Ayers, 'Africa Centre
Of The World' (released in 1981). In 1979 he formed his own
band, Tony Allen and the Afro Messengers, and recorded his first
album away from Kuti, 'No Discrimination'.
Allen spent the next few years in Nigeria, and from 1981-83 led
another Afrobeat band, the Mighty Irokos. The group enjoyed
local success, but Allen had tasted international breakthrough
with Afrika 70, and he had his eyes on a bigger stage. In 1984
he left Lagos for London, living there for eighteen months
before moving to Paris, where he lives with his family today.
“Lagos was too small for me and Fela. It was a small place, and
I wanted room to take off without causing competition,” says
Allen. “I eventually chose Paris partly because the British
immigration people were giving me difficulties, but also because
African music was more happening then in Paris than in London,
and my record company (Barclay) was in France. It was the only
place I felt I could exercise my knowledge and make a living.”
Soon after arriving in Paris, he recorded an album with producer
Martin Meissonnier, but, amid talk of unsatisfactory mixes, it
remains unreleased.
While still in London in 1984, with his band Afrobeat 2000,
Allen recorded the album N.E.P.A. - Never Expect Power Always.
The title track was a sardonic commentary on the erratic Lagos
power supply which then, and still today, leaves the city at the
mercy of regular power cuts. (The body responsible for the
supply, or the lack of it, was the Nigerian Electrical Power
Authority, hence the acronym).
By the mid 1980s, although few other Nigerian musicians had
committed to Afrobeat - ”too difficult,” says Allen - the music
had made a profound influence on the other prominent Nigerian
style, juju. Afrobeat’s kit drum had become a regular part of
juju line-ups (which had until then been dominated by talking
drums), and Allen’s style was picked up by juju drummers. Juju
rhythm guitarists had also adopted Afrobeat’s nagging “tenor
guitar” riffs. Allen was one of the first to introduce the
rhythmic power of Afrobeat to juju. In 1984, he toured with juju
superstar Sunny Ade and guested on his 'Aura' album, to which he
contributed one of his own songs, “Oremi,” and he toured with
Ade the following year.
Throughout the 1990s Allen was a sought after session drummer
and he collaborated with a range of artists including Randy
Weston, Groove Armada, Air, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Manu Dibango
and Grace Jones. During the years since Fela's death in 1997
Allen has become recognised as Afrobeat's torch bearer and he is
held in reverence by musicians and fans alike. Recently the
style has seen an upsurge of interest outside of Nigeria with
dedicated clubs opening up in Europe and the USA and groups such
as Antibalas and Masters At Work bringing the music to a new
public. Allen's albums have become more frequent. 'Black Voices'
was released in 1999, followed by 'Home Cooking', 'Tony Allen
Live', 'Lagos No Shaking' and now, in 2009, the definitively
tough and rocking 'Secret Agent'.
The album with The Good, The Band and The Queen was released in
2007, but Allen’s association with Damon Albarn goes back some
half dozen years. It came about after Allen heard the lyric
"Tony Allen got me dancing" ..'s 2000 song “Music is My Radar”
and invited Albarn to Lagos to guest on Home Cooking. His
association with Albarn continues, and includes the African
Express events which aim to introduce African and European
musicians to each other and encourage cross-fertilisation of
ideas.
Three decades after Allen made those classic albums with Afrika
70, Nigeria remains riven by the same injustices that the band
protested against so vividly and courageously. The lot of the
urban poor and middle classes is, if anything, worse today than
in it was in the 1970s, and Allen has no regrets about basing
himself in Paris. “Nigeria’s not getting any better. Why else is
everyone wanting to come to Europe? It’s all misadministration
and corruption, survival of the fittest. It’s a complete motherf**ker
of a place.”
“Music is my mission,” says Allen. “I never get satisfied and
I’m still learning from others. The musical world is very
spiritual, and I don’t think there’s an end to it. As musicians,
it’s our mission to keep going.”
Tony Allen
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