Quote:
What I love about Fela Kuti's music is the incorporation of Jazz and deep Funk bass lines which makes the music sound timeless whereas KSA's music sounds dated in many parts and missing that deep bass that evokes the vitality and passion of Africa.
To compare these two artists is a little unfair as they play and have expanded upon the traditional Yoruba music but KSA does'nt grab me emotionally or as passionately. Sure it is very well played and not at all offensive but it is also, in the main; forgettable and on some tunes you could imagine artists such as Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel (in their African tinged output) doing very similar music.
|
I never heard Fela in concert but I wish I would have. It wasn't until the early Eighties that I became aware of his amazing body of recorded work from the early Seventies. Even though Fela spent a few years attempting to launch an American career while living in Los Angeles he never really succeeded. Fela wasn't the first great performer of African music, but he's as significant to the development of Afrobeat as Bob Marley was to reggae.
I saw King Sunny Ade in the Hynes Center in Boston in 1984. He does a lot more jamming and and dub effects in his live shows than on his records. Some of his live jams go on for 30-45 minutes. I think Sunny's guitar playing was bit like listening to Wes Montgomery doing a Grateful Dead style jam with Yoruba tribal drums. Phish's Trey Anatassio cites King Sunny and a leading influence on his own style of guitar playing.
At the Hynes Center performance, Sunny's band got overpowered by his own opening act, Black Uhuru, who at the peak of their powers when Michael, Ducky, Puma, Sly and Robbie were all still in the band and they had just released
Anthem, the most powerful album of their career. It wasn't so much that Black Uhuru was a better band, it was more a matter of Black Uhuru having a hard hitting dance floor beat while much of Sunny's music was of the jazz influenced "listening" variety of music. I think about the only African band that could successfully followed Black Uhuru in that era was Fela Kuti's amazing jazz funk ensemble.
The contrast between the two bands was sharp. King Sunny's band was cerebral and Black Uhuru was visceral. After the Black Uhuru set, about half the people left because it was difficult to make the transition from Sly and Robbies sledge hammer riddim driven band to the more delicate circular riddims of the multiple talking drums that Sunny used as backdrop to his psychedelic guitar noodlings. Had Sunny chosen not to have an opening act (especially Black Uhuru) I think more people would have gotten caught up in the vibe of his music.
The grandmaster of Nigerian ju ju music is Sir Shina Peters who has more recently refined ju-ju into a hard hitting afro-beat style where the drum and bass are front and center to the sound. Shina hasn't toured that much outside of Africa and took a long haitus for music during most of the Eighties. While still in his teens in the 70s Shina introduced ju ju music to Nigeria and became the nation's most popular music star. King Sunny (who really is a Nigerian King) is about 10 years older than Shina and had reinvented himself and his music several times before he finally recorded
Ju Ju Music in 1982 for Chris Blackwell's Island Records.
At the time Bob Marley had just died and Blackwell was in search of the African equivalent of Marley. Chris and his crew decided to launch an attack on the world music scene with a very brilliant artist such as Adé and was successful at opening up the music of Africa to the rest of the world. The 21 year old Shina Peters was the charismatic performer that all the big labels (including Blackwell's Virgin) wanted to sign back in 1982, he stubbornly refused to record until 1989. Here's a video of one of his amazing performances: