Felá Ransome Kútì was a global icon, a Pan-Africanist, and a political activist who spoke up for the poor and oppressed, and one of the most important and influential African musicians of the 20th century.
Kuti was one of the first to blend Western African music, mostly from Nigeria and neighboring countries, with Western styles like jazz, rock, funk, and also Caribbean music, in particular reggae. In doing so, he created an entirely new genre, which he called Afrobeat.
Kuti released several dozen albums during his life time, most of them during an extraordinary explosion of creativity in the 1970s. Musicians from Miles Davis to Beyoncé have name-checked Kuti as a major influence, and it will be difficult to find a serious musician who does not owe a huge debt to Kuti, whether they are aware of it or not.
FOUNDATION
Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti was born on October 15, 1938, in Abeokuta, a large city in south-west Nigeria. He came from a family of famous Nigerians. In fact, the Ransome-Kuti family has been described as ‘the Kennedys of Nigeria.’ It helps to explain his enormous influence on Nigerian society.
Fela started his musical career on the piano, at age of 9. He also became the leader of the school choir. His foundation was in religious music, something that was reflected in the transcendent and euphoric nature of much of his later music.
In 1958, when he was 19, Kuti went to London to attend Trinity College of Music, where he studied trumpet. Kuti wasn’t only fascinated by Western classical music, but also by jazz and funk, and by his own African musical heritage. He’d chosen to study the trumpet, because it was the instrument played by the leaders of Nigeria’s most famous highlife bands, like Rex Jim Lawson and Victor Olaiya.
The resolutely optimistic highlife genre with its rolling rhythms had originally come out of Ghana, but eventually spread to many West-African countries. However, while highlife was a strong influence on Kuti during his teenage years, it was his discovery of jazz trumpeters Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie that further galvanized his decision to study the trumpet, and to explore jazz.
INSPIRATION
In 1959, Kuti started a band called Fela Ransome Kuti & His Highlife Rakers in London, which recorded four tracks for the Melodisc label. He then formed the band Koola Lobitos with West African and Caribbean musicians. They played a mixture of jazz and highlife.
Kuti graduated in 1962, and returned to Nigeria in 1963. He initially set up a jazz ensemble called the Fela Ransome Kuti Jazz Quintet. Two years later it morphed into a group called Fela Ransome Kuti and his Koola Lobitos, which again blended highlife and jazz. One of the musicians he recruited was drummer Tony Allen, who would for many years be the most influential member of his band and who is regarded as a co-founder of Afrobeat.
Koola Lobitos became popular in Lagos, but Kuti was still trying to find his musical direction. In search of new inspiration and to reacquaint himself with his highlife roots, Kuti travelled to Ghana in 1967. He encountered one major inspiration there in Sierra Leone native Geraldo Pino and his band The Heartbeats. They were popular in Ghana and Nigeria, and blended funk with highlife.
From this Kuti further developed his own style, combining highlife with funk, soul, jazz, Afro-Latin styles, and traditional Yoruba music. He called the new direction Afrobeat. He returned to Nigeria later in 1967, and started playing with Koola Lobitos at a club he founded in Lagos, Afro-Spot. A compilation album of Koola Lobitos recordings was released in 1968.
PROTEST SONG
Kuti and his band left for a 10-month tour of the US in 1969. He met Black Panther and civil rights activist Sandra Smith, now Sandra Izsadore. She had a profound impact on him by introducing him to the writings of black activists like Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Jesse Jackson, and many others, and educating him on social and political issues.
During the months they spent in the US, Kuti renamed his band Nigeria ‘70, and selections from a series of concerts at the Citadel d’Haiti on Sunset Boulevard were released in Nigeria in 1970 as Fela, Fela, Fela, and rereleased worldwide in 1993 under the name The ’69 Los Angeles Sessions.
The album contains the first Afrobeat recordings by Kuti, albeit in an embryonic form, containing relatively short songs, sounding like a mixture of highlife and James Brown. The horn arrangements are funk-influenced, rather than the Latin-sounding horns in highlife, and the beat was deeper with Allen mixing highlife, jazz and R&B in his drumming. Kuti sang in the more declamatory style typical of African music, and some of his lyrics addressed social issues. For example, ‘Viva Nigeria,’ is a protest song against the Biafran War.
MOVED TO TEARS
Fela Kuti and his musicians returned to Nigeria in 1970. During the first half of the seventies many essential developments in his career happened in quick succession. Kuti renamed his band to Africa ’70, and he and the ensemble took Nigeria by storm, with an avalanche of best-selling albums that were both politically and musically revolutionary.
By 1972, Kuti and his band had become big stars in Nigeria. Kuti set up a commune in Lagos, that also included a recording studio. He dropped Ransome from his name, as he regarded it as a slave name, and replaced it with Anikulapo-“he who carries death in his pocket.” He also renamed his Afro Spot club Afrika Shrine. Paul McCartney saw him perform there, and declared, “They were the best band I had ever seen live. I just couldn’t stop weeping with joy. It was a very moving experience.”
Another famous British musician who made his way to Lagos around this time was drummer Ginger Baker. The two had met in London, and Baker played alongside Tony Allen on Fela’s London Scene, an album recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London in 1971.
When Baker visited Lagos, he worked with Kuti on Why Black Man Dey Suffer¸ recorded in Arc Studio in 1971. It was the title track of this album that moved McCartney to tears. Kuti and Africa ’70 recorded several more albums in 1971. Na Poi had strong funk influences and lyrics so sexually explicit that the album was banned by Nigerian radio. Open & Close has been described “a trance-inducing groove-fest,” and there was a live album called simply, Live!
RUSH OF CREATIVITY
Kuti’s extraordinary creative peak continued in 1972 with the albums Shakara and Roforofo Fight, and in 1973 with Gentleman and Afrodisiac. Gentleman has been credited with being his “first fully formed Afrobeat” album. Afrodisiac was again recorded at Abbey Road, and contains Kuti’s biggest hit in Nigeria, “Jeun Ko Ku,” a satire of gluttony.
Not long after its release, Brian Eno bought Afrodisiac in a London record shop, on a whim, as he had no idea who Fela Kuti was. Eno later stated that it sounded to him like music of the future, and that it changed his life. He used the album to introduce countless people, including the Talking Heads, to the music of Kuti. There indeed are strong echoes of the album on Remain In Light.
Almost all albums recorded by Kuti and Africa 70 from 1973 until the end of the seventies are today regarded as classics, and fully-released expressions of his Afrobeat direction. However, some people say that the band leader’s true purple patch, with his most “mature Afrobeat,” occurred from 1974 until the dramatic events of 1977, when his commune was burnt down by the Nigerian army.
During these three years Kuti did indeed, as the captions state, “tore it up in a rush of creativity,” releasing a stunning 23 albums with new material. These albums include tour de forces like Alagbon Close and Expensive Shit, with lyrics referencing Kuti’s wrongful imprisonment in 1974, and Confusion Kalakuta Show, Ikoyi Blindness, Unnecessary Begging, Upside Down, Yellow Fever, and Zombie.
LONG-FORM AFROBEAT
Kuti’s fully-realized Afrobeat was performed by large ensemble, with the leader himself on vocals, electric piano, organ, and tenor and alto saxophone. The brass section could consist of up to three trumpeters and one or more saxophonists, there could be up to three guitarists, a bassist, Tony Allen on drums, up to five percussionists, and sometimes as many as ten female backing vocalists.
The rhythms were essentially African, with highlife and Yoruban foundations, but also with powerful funk influences, and elements of calypso, reggae, and jazz, because Tony Allen was strongly influenced by jazz drummer Max Roach.
The guitars and bass would play interlocking, two-bar phrases a lot of time, creating a complicated multi-layered mosaic of rhythms. The brass section either contributed to the rhythm, or would play melodies or riffs, often in call and response with Kuti’s singing, as did the backing vocalists. Vamps and melodies would often be modal.
Kuti’s long-form songs would often introduce the instruments one by one, after which there would be a long introductory section. Various instruments would then jam and solo, including Kuti on saxophone or a keyboard. The vocals would often not come in until halfway the track. When Kuti was once asked why he used the long-form, he again referenced Western music, replying, “Bach and Beethoven did not play short.”
THE ATTACK ON KALAKUTA
By the early seventies Kuti was singing mostly in Pidgin English, or ‘Broken English’, so his lyrics could be understood all over Africa. His lyrics became more and more explicitly and aggressively political, increasingly threatening and taunting the military dictatorship in Nigeria. This boiled over after he released Zombie at the end of 1977, which was his most explicit attack on the military attack yet.
Kuti was a thorn in the side of the authorities and raids on his house, with arrests and beatings, were commonplace. On top of this, Kuti’s commune, which he called Kalakuta, became more and more difficult for the military to accept. He declared the commune a Republic, independent from the Nigerian state, which was yet another provocation that was unacceptable to the military. They were looking for an excuse to close down the commune.
The lyrics of the title song of the Zombie album, which mocked soldiers for slavishly following orders, was the last straw. The military’s response was vicious. On February 18th, 1000 soldiers descended on Kalakuta, beat and forcefully evicted everyone and set the house on fire. Kuti’s club, The Shrine, was also destroyed, and he was nearly killed. The event gathered international headlines and outrage.
More consequentially and painfully for Kuti than the injuries he sustained, and the fact that many instruments and master tapes were destroyed, was the fact that his mother was thrown from a first floor window. She died soon afterwards from her injuries.
SUFFERHEADS
In part in an attempt to come to terms with the dramatic and painful events of February 18th, 1977, Kuti continued recording a string of albums. He changed the spelling of his band’s name to Afrika 70, and the albums he released during this time include, No Agreement, Sorrow Tears and Blood, Shuffering and Shmiling, Stalemate, and Unknown Soldier.
Kuti had also lost most of his money in the raid of 1977, so he eagerly accepted an invitation to perform at the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1978, with the offer of a six-figure fee. The Berlin concert, which was professionally shot on video, was a triumph, but also the end of Afrika 70, and Kuti’s association with Tony Allen.
According to Allen, the musicians had not or barely been paid for many months, and the band, technical crew and management added up to 28 people, which made touring expensive enough. When they found that an amazing 71 people went to Berlin, many of the musicians left after the concert.
Kuti formed a new band, Egypt 80, which contained many young musicians. One of the resulting albums was Original Sufferhead (1981), which describes another savage beating by the police that he had endured, with Kuti drawing parallels with the callous treatment of ordinary Nigerians, which he called sufferheads. Kuti appeared at Glastonbury in 1984, and that same year his album Army Arrangement was released.
FINAL YEARS
In September 1984, Kuti was arrested on trumped-up money laundering charges, and he ended up spending 20 months in prison.
Amnesty International took on Kuti’s case, and declared him a prisoner of conscience. Kuti was released from prison in 1986, and in June he appeared at Amnesty International’s A Conspiracy of Hope concert in New Jersey, along with Carlos Santana, the Neville Brothers and Bono.
More albums followed, including Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense (1986), with a slick, Western production by Level 42 producer Wally Badarou, which Kuti did like. Kuti’s next album Beast Of No Nation was released in 1989. It had anti-apartheid and anti-corruption themes. Kuti’s last album of new material was Underground System, which was released in 1992.
As the 90s progressed, Kuti continued to perform, and the police continued to harass him. But he appeared increasingly in ill health, and there were rumors of him having a mystery illness. In fact, Kuti had AIDS, but refused to be tested, and he put his faith in African medicine. The subject of AIDS was taboo in Nigeria at the time.
Kuti’s brother, Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, made the announcement that the bandleader had died from AIDS complications on August 2, 1997. Over one million people turned up for the funeral to say farewell to Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the weird one who was ‘carrying death in his pocket.’
POWERFUL LEGACY
No-one knows whether Kuti, in fact, chose the moment of his passing. But what is for sure is that Miles Davis was not alone in calling him a “life-transforming artist.” The countless Nigerians who expressed their gratitude to Kuti during the funeral clearly felt that he changed their lives for the better.
The same can be said for the many millions of musicians and listeners whose lives he touched with his Afrobeat. Afrobeat has influenced countless musicians in pretty much all genres, from Branford Marsalis to Miles Davis in jazz, to Talking Heads, Paul Simon, Vampire Weekend and Foals in rock and folk. Moreover, Kuti’s sons Femi and Sean are still active Afrobeat musicians today.
Afrobeat also became a strong influence on the short-form and very different Afrobeats pop genre, which uses the latest music technology, and is dominant in the charts today, with chart-topping artists like Burna Boy, Kanye West, Drake, and many others, all incorporating elements in their music.
Kuti and Afrobeat have left a powerful legacy, that has changed the world in many different ways. In so doing, Kuti fulfilled his purpose as a musician, which he once described like this,
“Music is supposed to have an effect. If you’re playing music and people don’t feel something, you’re not doing shit. When you hear something, you must move. I want to move people to dance, but also to think. Music wants to dictate a better life.”
By Paul Tingen,