Fela and me, we made a package of something that wasn't there before. | | | | Tony Allen at Glastonbury, June 27, 2010.
(Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images) | | | | | | “Fela and me, we made a package of something that wasn't there before.”
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| | rantnrave:// Legend has it that when TONY ALLEN left FELA KUTI's employ in the early 1980s, it took a number of drummers to replace him. A number that no one has tried too hard to pin down. "It depends on my mood,” Allen told the GUARDIAN's TIM JONZE a few years ago. "When I’m in a happy mood playing, you can hear me like six drummers. On some days it could be 100!" Allen, who died Thursday in his adopted hometown of Paris, played elastic, ecstatic polyrhythms with a deceptive simplicity that could mask the fact he was sometimes marking different time signatures with each of his limbs. Fela was the songwriter, bandleader and revolutionary frontman, while Allen was in charge of the groundbreaking rhythm section of Fela's AFRIKA '70. The former got the credit—and absorbed the wrath and punishment of the Nigerian government—but the two men in many ways created and expanded Afrobeat together during their decade-plus partnership, trampling the borders between Ghanaian highlife and American jazz and funk while summoning fans on multiple continents to marathon dance parties. "Without Tony Allen," Fela famous said, "there would be no Afrobeat." The partnership nonetheless ended badly, in a dispute over money and credit. Exactly how badly would have depended on whom you asked. Fela's 1982 authorized biography barely mentions Allen (he calls him "Allen, my drummer then"). Allen, to the end, referred to Fela, who died in 1997, as a friend. There would be many more friends and musical partners. Allen, also to the end, never stopped performing, never stopped recording, never stopped exploring. Jazz. Techno. Rock. There were fruitful partnerships with DAMON ALBARN, FLEA, JEFF MILLS and others. There were solo albums and sessions. He was the drummer on ANGÉLIQUE KIDJO's CELIA CRUZ tribute album, CELIA, which won this year's GRAMMY AWARD for Best World Music Album. In the last few years, there were also a tribute album to ART BLAKEY; a jazz-leaning final solo album; a techno-tinged collaboration with Mills, and an album and tour with THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE QUEEN his band with Albarn, the CLASH's PAUL SIMONON and the VERVE's SIMON TONG. "Everything I’m doing is fusion" he told DOWNBEAT in 2018. "Any music that interests me, any style that interests me, I feel like collaborating with it.” His final album came just six weeks ago: the effervescent REJOICE, which documents a 2010 session with the late HUGH MASEKELA and, in one perfect moment that could inspire one last dance marathon, salutes his original partner. "Lagos never gonna be the same," Masekela sings on the chorus of "NEVER." "Never / Without Fela." Never without Tony Allen either. RIP... Following through on a recommendation from its Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion, the RECORDING ACADEMY has hired its first chief diversity and inclusion officer, VALEISHA BUTTERFIELD JONES, who previously worked for the OBAMA administration and for GOOGLE... The Academy also announced that its charitable wing, MUSICARES, has given away all of the $14 million it raised for its Covid-19 Relief Fund, and can't respond to any more applications for aid until its raises more. You can donate here... And you can donate here to a GOFUNDME for trumpeter and composer JON HASSELL, who is facing financial hardship because of longterm health issues. Hassell "is one of the most influential composers of the last 50 years," writes BRIAN ENO. "Many of us owe him a debt of gratitude"... It's FRIDAY and that means new music from DRAKE (mixtape today, album this summer), CAR SEAT HEADREST, JOJO, DIET CIG, KENNY CHESNEY, GHOSTPOET, MOZZY, CHICANO BATMAN, PURE X, JOHANNA WARREN, MAN MAN, UMBRA VITAE (metal supergroup fronted by CONVERGE's JACOB BANNON), AUSTRA, AMERICAN AQUARIUM, HOT COUNTRY KNIGHTS (DIERKS BENTLEY's tongue-in-cheek side project), SHA MONEY XL, HAPPYNESS, JOAN AS POLICE WOMAN, DAMIEN JURADO, KONRADASEN, CURTIS STIGERS, BOSTON MANOR and DRAMARAMA... BANDCAMP is once again waiving its fees for any downloads purchased today, which makes this a great day to buy any of those albums, or any album at all, that you can find there. Bandcamp will do it again on the first Friday of June and July... RIP STEZO and BOBBY LEWIS. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| | | the good, the bad & the queen |
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| In his 2007 Red Bull Music Academy lecture in Toronto, Tony details his initial encounters with Fela Kuti, whose groundbreaking band he would be an integral part of between 1968 and 1979. | | |
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| Disillusioned after leaving Pandora, Tim Westergren set out to create a better kind of streaming platform. Can he save struggling artists while redeeming himself? | | |
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| Thousands of people had journeyed to the ruins of Waldeck Castle, a collection of stone arches, mossy walls, and eroded towers on a ridge in the Hunsrück mountains of West Germany. It was May 1967, the fourth spring in a row that a folk festival had been staged at the medieval site. Forests spanned the valleys below—miles and miles of oak and hornbeam, green and thick with leaves. | | |
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| In an alternate timeline, I know precisely how I would have spent the evening of April 17. The dynamic South African pianist Nduduzo Makhathini had been booked for an album-release engagement at Dizzy's Club, the in-house nightclub at Jazz at Lincoln Center. | | |
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| When Harvey Mason, jr. took the job as chair of the Recording Academy 's Board of Trustees last June, it's safe to say he had no idea what was coming. | | |
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| “Without Tony Allen, there would be no Afrobeat,” Fela Kuti once said of legendary Africa 70 drummer. | | |
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| Chvrches, Real Estate, Cautious Clay, and more weigh in on creating in harmony while staying apart. | | |
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| Venues have spoken of their concerns and requirements if live gigs were to be allowed again in the UK under the easing of coronavirus lockdown restrictions. | | |
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| "Sick of my money funding crap." A Fan "These companies are taking power away from listeners, because listeners don't have any say where their money goes," Keating said. "If you only listen to me, I should get all the percentage of the money you spend on music." | | |
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| Tha Lights Global CEO, Dooney Battle, on staying independent with Lil Pump - and shunning big checks. | | |
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| Earlier this month, Babyface and Teddy Riley duelled for R&B supremacy in front of nearly half a million people. “I’m glad it’s over,” he says. | | |
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| The coronavirus has spawned thousands of memes this spring, but perhaps none as ubiquitous as the "dancing coffin" crew from Ghana. The six dancing pallbearers seen in the macabre yet humorous memes popularized by the pandemic, are soundtracked in nearly every video posted by a decade old track from Russian composer and artist Tony Igy (real name Anton Igumnov) called "Astronomia." | | |
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| Studios like SoundScape and Spacebomb are trying to weather the pandemic as the best they can, but some face furloughs or even closures if things don’t change. | | |
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| You enter a record store and alphabetically dig through the rap LPs. You reach W: West, Kanye. All of the widely distributed Kanye LPs appear, but of his 2013 cinematic masterpiece "Yeezus," a “FOR PROMOTIONAL USE ONLY” copy appears. The jacket shows Virgil Abloh’s iconic album package design, a red-taped CD case, cropped and blown up to a 12” square. "Yeezus" on vinyl?! A promo? For real??? Uhhhh, no. | | |
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| His guilt over Kurt Cobain’s death, his scrap with Liam Gallagher, his year getting clean ... the former Screaming Trees frontman reveals why writing his memoirs hurt. | | |
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| We've done some research about how to automatically detect explicit content in songs using only the music itself, and no additional metadata. Since it's a sensitive and subjective issue, we did not want to use a black-box model, but rather build a modular system whose decisions can be traced back to some keywords being detected in the song. | | |
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| New Yorkers’ shouting-and-pot-banging celebration of essential workers, turned into music. | | |
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| “Hype Man,” the show’s breakout, destigmatized bipolar disorder in a way few have dared. | | |
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| From "Beauty And The Beast" as told by Spielberg and Dior to a 19th-century waltz by way of Bootsy Collins, the author of a major new biography reveals the secrets of McLaren’s stateside second career. | | |
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| After pioneering afrobeat in the 70s, Tony Allen has gone on to work with musicians as diverse as Damon Albarn and Flea. As part of our series Gateways -- Tony Allen and Nigeria, he talks about Fela Kuti, drugs and the art of drumming. | | |
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| | | | | Tony Allen with Africa '70 |
| | From "Progress" (1977). RIP. |
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