Features
A Conversation with Tony Allen
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Tony Allen prefers to speak with his hands and feet. During his concert in Paris, Allen remained camouflaged behind his kit and band, engaging the crowd sparingly. But all evening his hi-hat retained a brisk conversation with Max Roach’s ghost and his snare held a subtle, articulate dialogue with Dilla.It is Allen’s rhythmic conversation with the audience that is his most important. And it is this conversation that has transcended genre lines and seen him retain 50 years of relevance in the music industry.
“I was just after the music. Make people dance, that’s my own intention,” Allen said during a recent conversation in Paris, his current home. His powerful Nigerian accent preferring abrupt, and sometimes intimidating sentences.
Allen’s afrobeat rhythms were born in Lagos, Nigeria during the late 1960s as part of his legendary union with Fela Kuti. It was through their discovery of the jazz, soul and funk of the United States that allowed Allen to unite the native sounds of Nigeria with the nightclub culture of America to create the rhythmic fusion of afrobeat.
“Afrobeat is a combination of different rythms. Highlife, funk you name it. It is a combination. I got my inspriartion from other drummers. From my country and abroad too. People like Art Blakey, Max Roach and Elvin Jones.”
Allen is quick to stress that afrobeat is not all about politics.
“Not everybody is projecting an ideology of politics through music. We should not put everything on afrobeat… I hear that every time I play in the mode of afrobeat, it has to be militant. No! Its just got to be the way I feel.”
This desire, distinct to Fela’s political motives, saw Allen’s drums became the backbone of afrobeat.
“It’s Fela’s course. Politics, politics. That’s not really what I was after.”
It was the paradox of Fela’s militant message and Allen’s celebratory, dance floor friendly format that established afrobeat’s success. While Fela used the music as a mouthpiece it was Allen’s double kick drum that drove the popularity of afrobeat in Nigerian nightclubs.
But the enduring testimony to Allen’s style and groove is his longevity and his contemporary influence and presence.
Tony Allen’s soft hands have been referenced everywhere from the Rolling Stones to Common. Rock and funk musicians were quick to understand the pop potential of Allen’s beat. Cream’s Ginger Baker was an immediate afrobeat addict and became a disciple and friend of Allen and James Brown and Bootsy Collins were both students of the afrobeat rhythms.
Now, as Fela and afrobeat experiences a resurgence in popular culture, those with an ear to the beat know that Allen and his rhythms never lost their influence on contemporary western music or their presence on dance floors. At the Broadway opening of the Fela! musical in November 2009 Leigh Blake, the president of the AIDS focused charity Keep a Child Alive, described the production as the “beginning of the African renaissance.” I don’t think that Leigh listens to much music.
Tony Allen knows better. He is as humble about his success as he is skeptical about his presence in any African renaissance.
“Look at how many years afrobeat has been in the world before now. Now everybody comes to jump on afrobeat asking questions about afrobeat. Afrobeat has been there for over 50 years now. So it is not new to me for anybody to be jumping on afrobeat. I’m just playing music. The way I feel it is what I am doing.”
Hip Hop has always had a special relationship with afrobeat.
?uestlove recently championed the resonance of Fela’s story with modern American hip hop culture. The Roots front man drew parallels with Fela and hip hop’s political, social and creative “trials and tribulations.” He referenced the afrobeat front man and hip hop’s similar turbulent relationship with authority, the police and women.
But this analysis forgets the ubiquitous influence of Allen’s rhythms when explaining afrobeats appeal to hip hop. While the musical politics of Fela is obviously appealing to artists like The X-Clan and Mos Def, it is the drum lines of Allen that inspired producers like Jay Dee and Pete Rock. Afrobeat rhythms were the natural meeting point for Branford Marsalis’s jazz, funk and hip hop project, ‘Buckshot LeFonque.’ And even Alicia Keys was drawn to the rhythmic pulse of Allen when she sampled the open drums of the 1975 Fela track Na Poi, for Nas’s “Warrior Song.”
Sonically, hip hop identifies with the familiar combination of cultural reverence and pop sensibility found in the distinctly African sound of afrobeat’s Yoruba parentage intertwined with the prevailing presence of James Brown.
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Simon is a regular contributor to Deft Magazine and active in the hip hop community in Paris. He earned his Bachelors of Law and Arts from New Zealand's University of Otago, Simon was also a DJ on Radio One Dunedin, in Otago, New Zealand.
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