1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 222. Fela Kuti and the Africa ’70 With Ginger Baker – Live! (1971)

 

In the twenty or so albums still to go for 1971, there are still a few artists I’ve never heard of before, which is pleasing. And here’s one of them. 

Fela Kuti was a Nigerian musician, pioneer of the “Afrobeat” sound which takes rhythms from West Africa and matches them up with, largely, jazz – on this album more of the hard-bop variety with plenty of sax. Looking up Kuti’s biography, he’s a complex character. Very intense regarding social justice , with clashes against the rising authoritarian regime in Nigeria that saw the death of his aging mother, and Kuti almost beaten to death. But then the man also had 12 wives (cultural differences...) and was an AIDS denier. Mind you, his co-creator on this album, Ginger Baker, was a mass of contradictions as well.  

The album came about as a result of Baker travelling across Africa to meet his hero, and is a live performance given ... somewhere. I don't know, the notes don't say.

Taking the personalities out of it, this is some exuberant stuff, driving congo beats that carry lengthy jam tracks (there are four tracks on the album in total) with horn riffs and vocal interjections throughout – it evokes the Afro-Cuban stuff like Sabu from the Fifties/Sixties. Baker’s contribution is relatively minimal – he gets a bit of solo work in the wonderfully titled track Ye Ye De Smell, otherwise he’s just one member of the fairly large ensemble that is the Africa 70, which I feel is as it ought to be, really. Otherwise it would have a bit of a feel of the Big White Man promoting the poor benighted Africans, which it thankfully doesn’t.  

I hope that going forwards we’ll have a bit less UK-USA bias to the music, but I’m not holding my breath. The album, though, was a good one.