Fela Kuti - Afrobeat in power

The two passions Fela Ransome-Kuti cultivated from childhood were an unyielding spirit of rebellion and music. In particular, during those years, highlife, the music of Ghana's coastal region that emerged in the 1920s as a fusion of indigenous rhythms, Western military marches, religious hymns and sailors' ballads. Ghana's urban elite in the coastal centres financed the brass bands, while in rural villages highlife was played by guitar-centred groups.

His type of highlife group became known as concert parties. In the postwar years, concert parties essentially performed the role of griots, the wandering singers or poets who passed down oral tradition in West Africa.

In 1958 Fela arrives in London, where he enrolls at Trinity College of Music and studies trumpet. It's here that he forms his first group, Koola Lobitos, with his friend Jimo Kombi Braimah, who had also moved to London, along with a few Caribbean expatriates. The band plays a fairly conventional brand of jazz for the most part.

In 1964, back in Nigeria, Fela founds a second version of Koola Lobitos. That same year he meets Tony Allen, drummer with the Western Toppers, and the following year asks him to join Koola Lobitos. Thanks to Allen's prodigious skill on the drums (and above all his talent for blending, reinforcing, echoing and clashing conga and shekere rhythmic patterns against one another), Koola Lobitos begin playing a hybrid highlife jazz - a music deeper, more complex and more jarring than highlife, cadenced and inspired by the calypso of the time.

Koola Lobitos featured several regular members of Africa 70, such as Allen, trumpeter Tunde Williams and saxophonists Lekan Animashaun and Christopher Uwaifor. Of all the singles collected on Koola Lobitos/The 69 LA Sessions, the roots of Fela's signature sound can be heard most clearly on "Ololufe Mi". The bassline is far heavier than the lively feel of the diaspora sound that characterised highlife at the time, and the groove is hard, deep and hypnotic. Fela's trumpet solo, however, has yet to break free from the chains of jazz.

In 1969, at the height of the Biafran War (although he was Yoruba, Fela sided with the Igbo, who wanted to establish a Republic of Biafra in eastern Nigeria), the African musician takes his band to America, where he is introduced to Sarah Smith, an anthropology student and member of the Black Panther Party. There he becomes fascinated with Malcolm X's autobiography and the revolutionary thinking of Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver. Fela also begins taking a deeper interest in his African roots, developing a pan-Africanism that was only possible outside of Africa.

It's in Los Angeles that Fela writes what he considers his "first African song", "My Lady Frustration", about which he would later tell Carlos Moore that the main rhythm came from a memory of something by the Ghanaian musician based in London, Ambrose Campbell. Others, however, claim it was a rhythm drawn from samara, a percussion-heavy genre created and listened to almost exclusively by Yoruba Muslims. Even if the track can be said to mark the birth of Afrobeat, the stamp of American funk was still very much present.

Despite running just three minutes, "Obe" might be a better starting point for Fela's re-Africanisation of funk. Here, for the first time, the band manages the near-impossible feat of creating music as dense, layered and chaotic as an overcrowded African shared taxi, while remaining spacious and soft at the same time. "Wayo" is similarly deep, but with a stronger leaning towards jazz, and introduces what would become Fela's vocal trademark: his declamatory, drill-sergeant delivery. "Ako" and "Witchcraft", however, still sound like they could be off a Blue Note hard-bop record, with Tony Allen and an octopus playing congas in place of Art Blakey.

At some point in 1970, Fela, now back in Lagos, renames his band Africa 70 and begins holding concerts every Sunday afternoon at his club, the Afro-Spot, where generous quantities of Nigerian weed circulate among the crowd.

1971 brings Fela's first hit, "Jeun Ko' Ku", which will sell 200,000 copies and shortly after appears as the opening track of the album Afrodisiac. An album of trance-funk, built entirely on the tantric grooves generated by Tony Allen. And cosmic music too, for that matter. But above all, once again, it's the opening track that stands out, its title translating as "Eat and die". A sarcastic lyric about a glutton who sponges off whoever crosses his path: it was, and still is, strikingly topical. The metaphor was clearly aimed at General Yakubu Gowon's regime, which had used the Biafran War as a pretext to expand the power of military rule.

On the same album, "Alujon-Jon-Ki-Jon" is based on a Yoruba folk tale explaining why the tortoise hides in its shell, and amounts to a more cryptic, and musically more subdued, attack on political clientelism and favouritism. The following track, "Je'n Wi Temi", meanwhile, boasts the best percussion work on any Fela record. "Elko Ile", finally, finds Fela more jarring than ever, with a jagged rhythm and horns that leap noisily out of the amplifiers.

Around the same time, the third Africa 70 album, Open & Close, is released. The title track was apparently Fela's attempt to launch a dance craze (Allen sounds truly possessed on drums), but the result is more restrained. The opening "Swegbe and Pako" and "Gbagada Gbagada Gbogodo Gbogodo" combine old-school highlife military-band brass fanfares with grooves so relaxed and soft that it's like listening to a catatonic James Brown.

Along with his collaboration with longtime ally Ginger Baker on his 1972 album "Stratovarius", it's Roforofo Fight and Shakara that are the two records responsible for propelling Fela onto the international stage. Both were released in the US in 1974 on the legendary Editions Makossa label and became fixtures on radio and in clubs.

The dark drum vortexes and relentless repetition made Fela's records perfect for trance-inducing disco marathons, and their fierce rhythms tied in with the heavy percussive focus of much early disco music.

Africa 70 would nod to their relationship with disco on the track "Afro-Disco Beat", from Tony Allen's 1977 solo album "Progress".

Shakara is arguably the finest, and certainly the most coherent, album in Fela's prodigious catalogue (which runs to some 77 albums). "Lady" delivers a knife-edge assault of saxophone and congas. "Oloje" offers a strange combination of the slow, menacing intensity of "war drums along the Niger" and the drive of the blackest disco-funk.

On the following Roforofo Fight, Fela throws himself in like never before, scatting, muttering and grumbling in a manner worthy of Louis Armstrong. Africa 70 act as the audience to the fight Fela is singing about: an intense groove of hissing shekere, chattering congas and taut, wound-up guitars. Then comes Fela's fateful keyboard solo, and perhaps the finest saxophone performance of his entire discography. With its repetitive, insistent beat dragging on seemingly forever, its muffled, pent-up guitar riffs and blaring horns, "Go Slow", inspired by Lagos's dreadful traffic, is real socialism in action. "Question Jam Answer" is James Brown-style funk trapped in a cloud of marijuana smoke, yet none the worse for it, while "Trouble Sleep Yanga Wake Am" is essentially Fela's take on the ballad form: slow and cacophonous. Then comes "Shenshema", an almost dub-like track with wild keyboards. "Ariya", finally, is a stinging monster of a boogaloo.

Gentleman marks the turning point of Fela's career in more ways than one; by 1973 he had relocated, along with his roughly 100-strong entourage, to a two-story house on Agege Motor Road in Lagos. The standout is "Igbe," a track that fragments and contorts itself again and again, tracing the strangest trajectories, as if Kool and the Gang were colliding head-on with Sly and the Family Stone.

Gentleman, whose cover proudly displays a monkey dressed in a three-piece suit, marks the beginning of Fela's use of provocative covers, as his leftist-griot theatricality aims to needle the Nigerian authorities even further.

In the years that followed, many of the covers, created by artist Ghariokwu Lemi, depicted Fela's lyrics in a sardonic, satirical style, somewhere between Pedro Bell's comic-book art for Parliament-Funkadelic and the popular narrative paintings of African artists like Chéri Samba and Tshibumba Kanda-Matulu.

During this period Fela consolidated his Commune, home to hundreds of men and women living collectively. Thanks to this, along with his bizarre cosmology and devotion to lengthy trance-like improvisations, the Nigerian artist has often been compared to an African Sun Ra, and Confusion, a 1975 album made up of a single track, is where the analogy also takes hold musically. The abstract, cosmic opening five minutes and the Buster-style bass line bear this out. The bridge between the cosmic intro and the main full-blown afrobeat section is the true peak of Afrofuturism, with Allen at his most visionary.

Confusion is also a masterpiece lyrically. Fela uses Lagos traffic (and the three dialects he speaks in the song) as a metaphor for the chaos gripping Nigeria.

In those years many alternative communities saw excess and dissolution as a way to challenge social norms, but Fela and his commune did far more than simply épater le bourgeois. Fela helped organize a pan-Africanist think tank together with prominent intellectuals of the Nigerian left, founded a youth organization called the Young African Pioneers, and bought a printing press in order to publish pamphlets against the dictatorship.

On April 30, 1974, police raided the commune and arrested Fela Kuti for possession of marijuana. When he got out of jail two weeks later, the musician had a barbed-wire fence erected around the compound and declared the Kalakuta Republic's independence from Nigeria. This gave rise to Expensive Shit, released in 1975. The title track opens with an urgent rhythm-guitar riff courtesy of Leke Benson and a horn chorus straight out of the Bob Marley playbook: rebel music to the nth degree. The song ironically comments on the arrest episode and unleashes one of the most brilliant choruses in history: "Perché mai? Perché la merda puzza" ["Why is that? Because shit stinks"]. Beyond its connection to this personal episode, excrement carries an additional meaning for African countries already subjected to British colonialism: white colonizers used to punish Africans by forcing them to carry excrement through the center of town. Musically, it's a work marked by a highly conscious, deliberate danceability.

On the morning of November 23, 1974, police returned to Kalakuta once again, and Fela ended up straight in the hospital. Undeterred, once released he went back into the studio in May 1975 to record Kalakuta Show, which would be the first release on his own Kalakuta label.

Both Kalakuta Show and Ghariokwu Lemi's extraordinary cover painting refer directly to the police raid, but without the irony of Expensive Shit or Alagbon Close. Here the direct touchstone is the vibration of Linton Kwesi Johnson's "Dread Beat an' Blood," but the record is even more devastating in its sheer pragmatism, in the way its hypnotic, resolute on-the-beat groove pulls you in only to drop a bomb on you. The album's other track, "Don't Make Garan Garan," shows a fairly predictable Fela, though the keyboards offer a welcome reprieve after the carnage.

The raid only served to stoke the Nigerian musician's fire. His political attacks grew ever more unrestrained, and now he began naming names. 1976's Zombie is Fela's greatest recording, a groove so intense, so vibrant, so militant that it could wake an entire army of the undead. Which is exactly what happened. Set against Allen's funkiest drumming yet, punchy horn motifs and muscular guitar riffs, the song's relentless mockery of the military regime and its rank-and-file soldiers burrowed deep into Nigerian consciousness. After its release, the people of Lagos started mocking soldiers: whenever they spotted one on the street, they'd imitate a George Romero character, adopting a blank stare and marching with arms outstretched in front of them. The message was reiterated in the downtempo "Mr Follow Follow," but the damage had already been done with "Zombie." And once again, the government struck back brutally.

As ever, Fela turned the regime's brutality into shattering music. And like Kalakuta Show, Sorrow, Tears And Blood, the first record made after the attack on Kalakuta, drips with blood (the cover image shows Fela onstage with his broken leg still in a cast). The title track is the opposite of "Zombie," yet just as powerful: Africa 70 conjure up the black-and-white images of civil rights demonstrators in the American South, pressing doggedly and resolutely on as they were pelted with stones and garbage and set upon by guard dogs.

1977's Shuffering And Shmiling feels more like an exorcism. The intro to the title track is a piece of New York garage rock five or six years ahead of its time, while the lyrics are Fela's revenge against the "turn the other cheek" mentality. "Perambulator" shines, with psychedelic organ bordering on the Doors and guitars in the style of the 13th Floor Elevators. And then, as in the two tracks just described, the whole album is driven by blazing drums, propelled by a truly impetuous momentum.

Before dying of cardiac arrest on August 2, 1997, Fela Kuti had one last flash of brilliance in him. He renamed his band Egypt 80 and released the album Underground System, steeping it in a frenzied energy: blistering guitar riffs, overexcited horns and hyper-speed vocal choruses mark the title track, while dissonant Thelonious Monk-style piano lines, hissing hi-hats and sudden surges dominate the fantastic "Pansa Pansa."

The political charge was still there; Fela mourned the state of Africa with one last desperate snarl aimed at the former colonial powers and the corrupt thieves now in power. Full stop.

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