Tony Allen
Biography
1940-2020
Born in 1940 in Lagos, Tony Oladipo Allen was perhaps best known as the defining rhythmic engine of Fela Kuti’s sprawling Africa 70 combo – the much-celebrated lodestar of Nigerian Afrobeat.
Allen cut his teeth listening to and playing jazz. Influenced by American drummers like Art Blakey and Max Roach as well as Ghanaian percussionist Guy Warren, he was playing with a number of Lagos jazz and highlife bands when he made the acquaintance of Fela Kuti, whom he would accompany for the next 15 years – first as part of Fela’s Koola Lobitos, and later as part of Africa 70, for which they developed a new musical language, fusing West African rhythms, American funk and jazz into what would later be dubbed Afrobeat.
Allen’s simultaneously kinetic yet counter-intuitive drumming has underpinned an extensive catalogue of superb solo works, including a series of classic afrobeat LPs produced by Fela in the 70s, his 1999 avant garde opus ‘Black Voices’, ‘Film of Life’ (featuring the dazzling masterpiece single ‘Go Back’, a collaboration with Damon Albarn), and his 2017 EP release, a tribute to his hero Art Blakey
He remained a prodigiously engaged and much in-demand musician until the end, having created innumerable, groove-heavy coalitions with an astonishingly diverse retinue of collaborators that include everyone from Damon Albarn (their shared adventures over the past 2 decades started with the 2002 album ‘Home Cooking’, and continued with alt-rock supergroup The Good, The Bad and the Queen), Charlotte Gainsbourg, Sebastian Tellier, Grace Jones, Malian singer Oumou Sangaré and more recently, Detroit techno legend Jeff Mills (their “Tomorrow Comes The Harvest” project was released on Blue Note in 2018). Allen passed away in April 2020 at the age of 79.
BIOGRAPHY
1940-2020
Born in 1940 in Lagos, Tony Oladipo Allen was perhaps best known as the defining rhythmic engine of Fela Kuti’s sprawling Africa 70 combo – the much-celebrated lodestar of Nigerian Afrobeat.
Allen cut his teeth listening to and playing jazz. Influenced by American drummers like Art Blakey and Max Roach as well as Ghanaian percussionist Guy Warren, he was playing with a number of Lagos jazz and highlife bands when he made the acquaintance of Fela Kuti, whom he would accompany for the next 15 years – first as part of Fela’s Koola Lobitos, and later as part of Africa 70, for which they developed a new musical language, fusing West African rhythms, American funk and jazz into what would later be dubbed Afrobeat.
Allen’s simultaneously kinetic yet counter-intuitive drumming has underpinned an extensive catalogue of superb solo works, including a series of classic afrobeat LPs produced by Fela in the 70s, his 1999 avant garde opus ‘Black Voices’, ‘Film of Life’ (featuring the dazzling masterpiece single ‘Go Back’, a collaboration with Damon Albarn), and his 2017 EP release, a tribute to his hero Art Blakey
He remained a prodigiously engaged and much in-demand musician until the end, having created innumerable, groove-heavy coalitions with an astonishingly diverse retinue of collaborators that include everyone from Damon Albarn (their shared adventures over the past 2 decades started with the 2002 album ‘Home Cooking’, and continued with alt-rock supergroup The Good, The Bad and the Queen), Charlotte Gainsbourg, Sebastian Tellier, Grace Jones, Malian singer Oumou Sangaré and more recently, Detroit techno legend Jeff Mills (their “Tomorrow Comes The Harvest” project was released on Blue Note in 2018). Allen passed away in April 2020 at the age of 79.
RELEASES
Secret Agent
