Greet the beat: Africa's finest drummer.

Secret Agent

By Tony Allen 

World Circuit

Cat: WLW/CD082

It must be tiresome for a musician to be always associated with a far more famous colleague, but that has been Tony Allen's fate. His work with Nigerian superstar Fela Anikulapo Kuti, in whose band he played in for 15 years and with whom he co-created Afrobeat - has always prefaced any profile of Allen. But since Kuti's death in 1997, Allen's musical output has confirmed his status as a superstar in his own right; perhaps Africa's finest kit drummer and one of the continent's most influential musicians.

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There is little doubt that Allen's contribution to the hard driving, horns-rich, funk-infused, politically insurrectionary style that came to be known as Afrobeat was absolutely pivotal. Indeed, Kuti himself acknowledged that "without Tony Allen, there'd be no Afrobeat".

Born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1940, Allen taught himself to play by listening to American jazz drummers Art Blakey and Max Roach and played around Lagos in highlife and jazz bands. Like many African musicians, Allen had to overcome strong parental opposition to realise his dream of becoming a professional musician. Back then, musicians were more or less thought of as beggars, or worse: "My mother was never happy about it, but my father, an amateur musician, eventually agreed."

Allen's first extended gig was with the Cool Cats, fronted by Sir Victor Olaiya. When the Cool Cats split, Allen returned to his job as an electrician and joining other highlife groups before meeting Kuti in 1964. "Fela had been presenting a jazz records programme on Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation on Friday nights," Allen recalls. "He decided he wanted to form his own jazz band and play the music himself in the clubs. I auditioned - and he asked me if I'd learnt to play in the USA! I had the style he wanted. We played strictly jazz together for about a year, as the Fela Ransome Kuti Jazz Quartet, before we started Koola Lobitos."

Koola Lobitos' nascent Afrobeat would have been nothing without Allen's innovative bass drum style, unlike any other kit drummer working in Lagos at the time. Where other drummers would play a single beat, Allen made it a double, giving Afrobeat its trademark forward thrust. "The bass drum patterns are unique to me," says Allen. "I'd never play one, one. Any drummer can play that straight beat. But that's just like putting a metronome in there."

In 1969, Koola Lobitos made its famous extended visit to the US, where Kuti was radicalised by a black American woman called Sandra Isidore.

A political awakening

A member of the Black Panthers, Isidore introduced Kuti to the ideas of such people as Malcolm X, Angela Davis, the Last Poets, Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver, all of whose thinking played some part in the development of Kuti's own political philosophy, 'Blackism'.

Returning to Nigeria, Allen forged Afrobeat's vibrant signature rhythms while Kuti wrote incendiary lyrics. "Fela said I sounded like four drummers," says Allen, and in 1970 when James Brown played in Nigeria, Brown's arranger made a careful study of Fela's band and Allen's drumming in particular.

Allen stayed with Kuti for close on 15 years, the band enjoying massive popularity in Nigeria and elsewhere in West Africa, but (at home) they were subject to constant harassment, and at times brutal physical attacks, from the army and the police. In 1979 there was a parting of ways amidst talk of unhappiness about not getting due respect or recompense for the creation of Afrobeat and the band's success - talk that Allen now makes light of. "It's not a big story," says Allen today. "I was tired, I'd just had enough."

He spent the next few years in Nigeria leading another Afrobeat band, the Mighty Irokos, but in 1984 he left Lagos for London, living there for 18 months before moving to Paris, where he lives with his family today. Allen's playing has always drawn on highlife, soul/funk, jazz and traditional Nigerian drumming - and there is no change here on Secret Agent, recorded with a band with players from Nigeria, Cameroon, Martinique and France.

Allen drives the music on, straight as an arrow, in a loose-limbed ragged shuffle, fusing the cross rhythms into one irresistible forward motion. It is at once a marvellously lucid, sensual, authoritative and powerful musical statement.