The Mebusas - Son Of Mr Bull Dog(Re Edit EmilOne)

Constellation Seven

Port Of Spain Hustle

Push And Pull

Nigerian singer and saxophonist Seun Kuti, the youngest son of the late Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti, inherited both his father's band Egypt 80 and his political fight in support of the working class. With a new album Black Times out this week, he talks to RFI's Alison Hird about building an African Dream based on community, not consumerism. And calls on people from the motherland to "be proud of who we are everyday, not just the week Black Panther is released by Hollywood!"

Nigeria's Seun Kuti hails 'black' times

Gasper Lowell - Kita Kita

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.”

Push And Pull

Tony Allen

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