African-pop fans reaped a bonanza last year in the form of a harvest of reissues from two great Nigerian bandleaders: the late, iconoclastic firebrand Fela Anikulapo Kuti, and the eternally youthful monarch of juju music, King Sunny Ade. MCA released 15 volumes from the Fela Kuti catalogue, adding to the 11 it had given us in 2000. Meanwhile, Stern’s is distributing six Nigerian-produced volumes of vintage King Sunny Ade. Most of these CD volumes combine two original vinyl releases, so we’re talking a whole lot of juju and Afrobeat. Altogether, this music — of widely varying quality — illuminates epic band histories full of social drama and brilliant musical invention.
The Fela material is the most significant and revealing. Thanks to Michael Veal’s recent biography, The Life and Times of An African Musical Icon (Temple University Press), we know a lot about Fela’s journey from rebellious son of the elite to London-educated jazz-loving highlife musician to the creator of a bold new genre of music — Afrobeat — and then to violent clashes with a series of Nigerian governments that make him as close to a musical martyr as African pop has produced. Fela died of AIDS in 1997, righteously and wrongheadedly condemning condom use with his dying breath. Although his words are full of courageous truth, his passions and frustrations also led him to reactionary conclusions. In his rhetoric, his lifestyle, and his ever more grandiose music, he veered back and forth across the line that separates genius from insanity.
Whereas Veal wrote the notes for MCA’s first set of Fela volumes, this past year’s crop features detailed exposition, mostly of song lyrics, from Nigerian author Mabinuori Kayode Idowu, who wrote Fela: Why Blackman Carry Shit (Paris). We learn that long before he did his 30-minute musical seminars on Nigerian history and politics delivered in sarcastic Pidgin English amid sprawling brass-section arrangements and meandering solos — mostly by the bandleader himself on various saxophones and Fender Rhodes piano — he led a small, almost conventional dance-music combo called Koola Lobitos.
Koola Lobitos/The ’69 L.A. Sessions (MCA) reveals the birth of Afrobeat. The first six tracks find Fela performing "highlife jazz," a mix of calypso, Latin music, and blues that reflects his London experience. The horns are a tad out of tune — as is sometimes the case throughout the Fela catalogue — and the singing is fairly tame and conventional, but the band cook, and the soloing introduces the refreshing open-endedness of 1960s jazz into otherwise constrained pop-music formulas. One surprise in these pre-Afrobeat tracks: Fela played quite respectable trumpet in his early days. But starting with track #7, which was recorded just one year later in LA, we find him working up an entirely different sound. His first American visit taught him that Koola Lobitos’s derivative sound wouldn’t have much international impact. It also introduced him to Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, the Black Panthers, James Brown, and marijuana. In LA, Fela smoked his first joint — many would follow — and wrote "My Lady Frustration," the seminal Afrobeat song.
Many of the elements that would carry him ahead for two-plus decades are clear in these 1969 tracks. The heavy bass line coming from the Nigerian apala rhythm. The sizzling shaker that underlies almost every Afrobeat groove. The layered, pouncing horn breaks. The tough attitude of funk. And the roar of certainty and indignation in Fela’s voice.
The volumes that follow are the most musically satisfying in his collection. His 1970s band — first called Nigeria 70 and then Africa 70 — were exceptional. At their heart was the subtle, simmering, ultra-cool drumming of Tony Allen. On Fela with Ginger Baker Live! (MCA), we get four playful, kicking numbers from 1971 that burst with the excitement of Fela’s new creation. Baker and Allen tear it up on an extended solo on "Yeye Dey Smell," a slam against men who flirt with their friends’ wives. The horns are crisp, the grooves are funky, and Fela is vigorous and engaged, even encouraging the audience to sing with him on "Egbe Mi O (Carry Me I Want To Die)." The volume ends with another incendiary Allen/Baker drum jam live in Berlin in 1978.
Open & Close/Afrodisiac (MCA), recorded in 1971 and ’73, is also outstanding. "Open and Close" is a spirited celebration of the Afrobeat sound, but Fela is now moving beyond such frivolity with material like "Swegbe and Pako," where he lists examples of swegbe, or "bad," as in a doctor trying to act like a lawyer, and pako, or "good," as in a competent leader. No surprise that he finds more swegbe than pako in his survey of Nigerian society. The band’s sound at this stage owes a lot of its punch and bravado to James Brown, but there’s more. Hints of the popular juju sound poke through here and there, and Fela’s taste for jazz arranging and soloing leads to ever more extended and interesting introductory passages. Crisply re-recorded at Abbey Road studio in 1973, the Afrodisiac tracks are some of his first real hits in Nigeria.
Another rewarding early ’70s volume is Roforofo Fight/The Fela Singles (MCA). The Roforofo tracks are better than the two singles, but any shortcomings are redeemed by the title track, a condemnation of petty, ego-driven fighting that’s preceded by one of Fela’s most inventive brass-section set-ups, which can now run up to seven minutes long. "Zombie," his legendary assault on the mindlessness of the Nigerian military, is a high point of his late-’70s material, but the track appears in better company on the two-CD compilation The Best, Best of Fela Kuti (MCA) than on Zombie (MCA), which is filled out with some dubious live material.
"Zombie" touched a nerve in Nigeria. A mob of Nigerian soldiers attacked and burnt down Fela’s compound — the "Kalakuta republic" — in the aftermath of its 1977 release. This was neither the first nor the last assault on Fela and his now cultlike following. As we move into the 1980s, when he called his band Egypt 80, the songs extend from 20 to 30 minutes, and there’s often a beleaguered quality to the music. Recorded in 1984, shortly before he went to prison on a trumped-up currency charge, Live in Amsterdam (MCA) is another high point. "M.O.P. (Movement of the People)" begins with 18 minutes of jamming and chanting, Fela switching from baritone sax to Dracula-meets-Terry-Riley keyboard work before settling into an analysis of the British legacy in Nigeria: militarism and divide-and-rule politics. His large contingent of women singer-dancers — at one point his wives — act as a kind of Greek chorus, echoing and responding to his clever, rambling commentary.
Mid-’80s efforts like Army Arrangement (MCA) and Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense (MCA) have fascinating lyrics that are well explained in the liner notes, but the music seems to go through the motions of Afrobeat’s by now well-worn formulas. Veal says that Egypt 80 recordings suffer because the band grew larger at a time when Nigeria’s recording facilities were falling into disrepair. Compounding this problem was Fela’s "ambivalent relationship to the issue of fidelity and recording technology." The result is some of the flattest and least memorable material of his long career. The horn section is too big. The arrangements lack the freshness of the ’70s, and even in the lyrics and the vocals, you can sense Fela’s battered state. There’s another creative burst on Beast of No Nation/O.D.O.O. (MCA), from 1989 and ’90, the best of the later recordings. But on 1992’s Underground System (MCA), dissonant harmonies, overall out-of-tuneness among the singers and the horn players, and his deliriously wandering vocals all suggest that the end is near.
As Fela begins his decline in the 1980s, juju man King Sunny Ade is coming into his own in the wake of remarkable international success. The six volumes from MasterDisc appear to come mostly from the 1980s, though the lack of even basic information about the music is a huge minus, and as yet there is no book about Ade. So the music must speak for itself. These volumes deliver KSA in his "non-stop" mode, where five or six songs are run together. Volume 2: Ekilo Fomo Ode & The Way Forward (MasterDisc) seems to have the earliest material. The Ekilo section lets you hear the individual guitar parts (generally, there are four); the Way Forward section borrows from other popular styles: gospel, percussive Islamic fuji music, Congolese soukous.
Elsewhere, we get the lush interplay of layered male vocals, intertwining guitars, stinging pedal-steel breaks, and rich percussion — especially the deep, warm-toned talking drum — that made juju a global sensation in the 1980s. It’s hard to do much better than Volume 3: The Good Shepherd & the Child (MasterDisc). The percussion has depth, the guitar lines are lucid, the vocals are gorgeous, and the band smoke. Volume 6: Merciful God & Baba Moke Pe O (MasterDisc) offers gentler grooves and particularly sweet melodies. Even without translation, you know you’re dealing with wholesome, constructive messages that bad boy Fela wouldn’t have touched. For a blast of really raw KSA juju, look for Ogun (Aladdin). This 1970s session is lo-fi compared with the MasterDisc releases, but well worth it for KSA’s boyish vocals and the rowdy guitar work.
Fela and KSA illuminated flip sides of Nigerian pop, and it’s a welcome development to see so much of their vast local catalogues available in American record stores. The long arc of these recordings lets us appreciate the extent of their contributions to world music.
