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Press Highlights
How can one account for the singular genius of Tony Allen? The contours of his incommensurable musical journey, which ended with his sudden – one could be forgiven for saying untimely – passing shy of his 80th birthday in April 30th, 2020, are well-known: Born to a Nigerian-Ghanaian family, the rhythms of his parents' Ga, Ewe, and Yoruba cultures, and the wider musical universe of the Bight of Benin, inhabited him from a young age. They were soon joined by the swing of the great jazz age and bebop drummers he so greatly admired: From Gene Krupa to Max Roach, to Tony’s hero Art Blakey. And at the center of that mix, the inimitable blending of American jazz and West African traditions by Ghana's own Guy Warren (Kofi Ghanaba), whose journey from highlife acolyte with E.T. Mensah to jazz innovator powerfully shaped Tony's musical horizons.
As much as any of the virtuoso drummers who inspired him, Tony Allen created his own, immediately identifiable musical creole, a language that redefined the sound and rhythms of the instrument across multiple genres and eras. Gestated in the cultural cauldron of late colonial and post-independence Lagos, Tony's ground-breaking Africana fusion emerged and matured into brilliance during his 15 years playing behind Fela Kuti, blossoming even further when he stepped out of Fela's shadow to forge his own serpentine path as a bandleader and artist. As the album before you so well demonstrates, the language he created was as supple and pleasing to the ear as it was complex and difficult to decipher, moving with ease across the avant-garde of modern popular music on both sides of the Black Trans-Atlantic – from jazz to highlife, funk to electronica, hip hop to the full spectrum of African music and its American and European diasporas.
Miles famously said that the essence of music inhabited the “space between the notes.” In a similar vein, Blur and Gorillaz frontman Damon Albarn explained that what made Tony a singular musician was his ability to create space, “the space of Tony... to allow other things to inhabit the mind.” Adding a fourth axis to the three dimensions of space, Yale University Professor Michael Veal, co-author of his autobiography Tony Allen: An Autobiography of the Master Drummer of Afrobeat, talks of Tony's remarkable ability to “play with the time continuum,” in a manner would leave the listerner suspended “between his high hat and his downbeat... just cast out in this parallel universe, waiting for Tony to call you back.”
In fact, Tony was that rarest of musicians, one who literally played in four dimensions – controlling the musical space-time continuum through his grooves, stretching and compressing, pulling and pushing the fabric of musical space and time. Bootsy Collins described it best when recalling the first time he heard Tony, with Fela at the New Africa Shrine (during James Brown's first tour of Nigeria in 1970): It was “another dimension, that I had never experienced before... the deepest level you could get.”
How to reach that level, the ground of all grooves? If James Brown famously defined funk by the strong accent on the 1, Tony's relationship to the 1 was more mystical. In the words of Roots drummer Questlove, he had the “discipline of a Navy seal, but his emphasis was never on the 1.” In fact, for Tony the 1 was everywhere: each bass kick, percussive glissando, ghost note, snare and hi-hat hit equally carried the power of the 1 and pushed the music forward, an alchemical amalgam of the funk, the clave and local rhythms that created a “swing-jazz stew” (as he described his work with South African legend Hugh Masekela) whose precise recipe he adjusted with each new collaboration. And that's why the music on most every track Tony played on, from the earliest recordings of Africa 70 to his final sessions, feels literally like it's levatating, as if the music – and through it, we the listeners – are dancing on air.
Indeed, Tony floated like a butterfly, but not being a fighter he rarely felt the neeed to sting like a bee, preferring to “caress” the groove, “like a woman.” It was this delicate power that made Tony's playing so attractive to successive generations of electronic and hip hop artists, from Brian Eno to Sébastien Tellier and today's beatmakers and producers as well. How could it be otherwise? His grooves are like endless, magical loops that fluctuate at a quantum level, opening spaces and vectors for collaborators to groove on that few drummers before or after him could create.
Tony Allen's singular talent didn't end when the music stopped. For all those who knew him, he was a deeply spiritual man whose life's mission not just to create a new musical language, but to pass it on to subsequent generations. As he put it, “I'm just doing my best to please the universe. Life's a boomerang, you know? You create bad or good [and] it comes back to you.” Right up to this, his last album, his thoughts were for the younger artists who continued to flock to him, especially in the fraught historical and political moment in which we live. “I want to take care of youngsters; they have messages and I want to bring them on my beat. The idea is to transmit to the young generation, to mix different universes – the hip hop world to the Afrobeat world.”
His messages of simplicity, of achieving an intensity of concentration that feels effortless, resonates with the great sages from Lao Tzu to John Coltrane, Rumi to Bruce Lee. But more than anything, he taught several generations of musicians around the world to “respect the music, open your ears and listen.” If Fela taught us that “music is the weapon of the future,” Tony Allen offered a language, a spiritual practice, that transcended conflict to collaboration as the greatest victory music could achieve.