SOUND PROJECTIONS

AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE

EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU

SPRING, 2017

VOLUME FOUR NUMBER ONE

JILL SCOTT

Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:

DAVID MURRAY
(February 25--March 3)

OLIVER LAKE
(March 4–10)

GERALD WILSON
(March 11-17)

DON BYRON
(March 18-24)

KENNY GARRETT
(March 25-31)

COLEMAN HAWKINS
(April 1-7)

ELMORE JAMES
(April 8-14)

WES MONTGOMERY
(April 15-21)

FELA KUTI
(April 22-28)

OLIVER NELSON
(April 29-May 5)

SON HOUSE
(May 6-12)

JOHN LEE HOOKER
(May 13-19)

http://www.allmusic.com/artist/fela-kuti-mn0000138833/biography

Fela Kuti

(1938-1997)

Artist Biography by John Dougan

It's almost impossible to overstate the impact and importance of Fela Anikulapo (Ransome) Kuti (or just Fela as he's more commonly known) to the global musical village: producer, arranger, musician, political radical, outlaw. He was all that, as well as showman par excellence, inventor of Afro-beat, an unredeemable sexist, and a moody megalomaniac. His death on August 3, 1997 of complications from AIDS deeply affected musicians and fans internationally, as a musical and sociopolitical voice on a par with Bob Marley was silenced. A press release from the United Democratic Front of Nigeria on the occasion of Fela's death noted: "Those who knew you well were insistent that you could never compromise with the evil you had fought all your life. Even though made weak by time and fate, you remained strong in will and never abandoned your goal of a free, democratic, socialist Africa." This is as succinct a summation of Fela's political agenda as one is likely to find.

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Born in Abeokuta, Nigeria, north of Lagos in 1938, Fela's family was firmly middle class as well as politically active. His father was a pastor (and talented pianist), his mother active in the anti-colonial, anti-military, Nigerian home rule movement. So at an early age, Fela experienced politics and music in a seamless combination. His parents, however, were less interested in his becoming a musician and more interested in his becoming a doctor, so they packed him off to London in 1958 for what they assumed would be a medical education; instead, Fela registered at Trinity College's school of music. Tired of studying European composers, Fela formed his first band, Koola Lobitos, in 1961, and quickly became a fixture on the London club scene. He returned to Nigeria in 1963 and started another version of Koola Lobitos that was more influenced by the James Brown-style singing of Geraldo Pina from Sierra Leone. Combining this with elements of traditional high life and jazz, Fela dubbed this intensely rhythmic hybrid "Afro-beat," partly as critique of African performers whom he felt had turned their backs on their African musical roots in order to emulate current American pop music trends.

In 1969, Fela brought Koola Lobitos to Los Angeles to tour and record. They toured America for about eight months using Los Angeles as a home base. It was while in L.A. that Fela hooked up with a friend, Sandra Isidore, who introduced him to the writings and politics of Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver (and by extension the Black Panthers), and other proponents of Black nationalism and Afrocentrism. Impressed at what he read, Fela was politically revivified and decided that some changes were in order: first, the name of the band, as Koola Lobitos became Nigeria 70; second, the music would become more politically explicit and critical of the oppression of the powerless worldwide. After a disagreement with an unscrupulous promoter who turned them in to the Immigration and Naturalization Services, Fela and band were charged with working without work permits. Realizing that time was short before they were sent back to Nigeria, they were able to scrape together some money to record some new songs in L.A. What came to be known as the '69 Los Angeles Sessions were remarkable, an indication of a maturing sound and of the raucous, propulsive music that was to mark Fela's career. Afrobeat's combination of blaring horn sections, antiphonal vocals, Fela's quasi-rapping pidgin English, and percolating guitars, all wrapped up in a smoldering groove (in the early days driven by the band's brilliant drummer Tony Allen) that could last nearly an hour, was an intoxicating sound. Once hooked, it was impossible to get enough. Upon returning to Nigeria, Fela founded a communal compound-cum-recording studio and rehearsal space he called the Kalakuta Republic, and a nightclub, the Shrine. It was during this time that he dropped his given middle name of "Ransome" which he said was a slave name, and took the name "Anikulapo" (meaning "he who carries death in his pouch") . Playing constantly and recording at a ferocious pace, Fela and band (who were now called Africa 70) became huge stars in West Africa. His biggest fan base, however, was Nigeria's poor. Because his music addressed issues important to the Nigerian underclass (specifically a military government that profited from political exploitation and disenfranchisement), Fela was more than a simply a pop star; like Bob Marley in Jamaica, he was the voice of Nigeria's have-nots, a cultural rebel. This was something Nigeria's military junta tried to nip in the bud, and from almost the moment he came back to Nigeria up until his death, Fela was hounded, jailed, harassed, and nearly killed by a government determined to silence him. In one of the most egregious acts of violence committed against him, 1,000 Nigerian soldiers attacked his Kalakuta compound in 1977 (the second government-sanctioned attack). Fela suffered a fractured skull as well as other broken bones; his 82-year old mother was thrown from an upstairs window, inflicting injuries that would later prove fatal. The soldiers set fire to the compound and prevented fire fighters from reaching the area. Fela's recording studio, all his master tapes and musical instruments were destroyed.

After the Kalakuta tragedy, Fela briefly lived in exile in Ghana, returning to Nigeria in 1978. In 1979 he formed his own political party, MOP (Movement of the People), and at the start of the new decade renamed his band Egypt 80. From 1980-1983, Nigeria was under civilian rule, and it was a relatively peaceful period for Fela, who recorded and toured non-stop. Military rule returned in 1983, and in 1984 Fela was sentenced to ten years in prison on charges of currency smuggling. With help from Amnesty International, he was freed in 1985.

As the '80s ended, Fela recorded blistering attacks against Nigeria's corrupt military government, as well as broadsides aimed at Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan (most abrasively on the album Beasts of No Nation). Never what you would call progressive when it came to relationships with women or patriarchy in general (the fact was that he was sexist in the extreme, which is ironic when you consider that his mother was one of Nigeria's early feminists), he was coming around to the struggles faced by African women, but only just barely. Stylistically speaking, Fela's music didn't change much during this time, and much of what he recorded, while good, was not as blistering as some of the amazing music he made in the '70s. Still, when a Fela record appeared, it was always worth a listen. He was unusually quiet in the '90s, which may have had something to do with how ill he was; very little new music appeared, but in as great a series of reissues as the planet has ever seen, the London-based Stern's Africa label re-released some of his long unavailable records (including The '69 Los Angeles Sessions), and the seminal works of this remarkable musician were again filling up CD bins. He never broke big in the U.S. market, and it's hard to imagine him having the same kind of posthumous profile that Marley does, but Fela's 50-something releases offer up plenty of remarkable music, and a musical legacy that lives on in the person of his talented son Femi. Around the turn of the millennium, Universal began remastering and reissuing a goodly portion of Fela's many recordings, finally making some of his most important work widely available to American listeners.

https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/fela-kuti_chronicle-ofa-life-foretold

WIRE

Fela Kuti: Chronicle of A Life Foretold

September 2011

FELA KUTI
1938-1997

© David Corio

When Fela Anikulapo-Kuti died in August 1997, Nigeria lost one of its most controversial and inspirational cultural figures. Here, the Africa-based writer Lindsay Barrett maps the extraordinary trajectory of Fela's life, detailing the emergence of his patented brand of Afrobeat, his anarchic lifestyle, and the ongoing battles with the Nigerian authorities. This feature was originally published in The Wire 169 (March 1998).

No one who knew him well was surprised when Nigeria's greatest musician Fela Ransome-Kuti changed the first part of his double-barrelled surname to Anikulapo in the mid-1970s. He was just being consistent. Throughout his career, up to that point, Fela had constantly changed his mode of living and transformed the nature of his music. Eventually this process of change was to become the force that motivated his entire life.

The renaming was instructive. Anikulapo means 'I have death in my pocket', which is to say, as he often did, 'I will be the master of my own destiny and will decide when it is time for death to take me'. When he died in August of last year at the age of 58, Fela appeared to fulfil the prophecy implicit in that earlier name change; and the manner of his dying was as dramatic and unruly as the manner of his living.

In the weeks leading up to his death, Fela's condition deteriorated while he refused to accept treatment from Western-trained doctors, in spite of the fact that many of his family were illustrious medicos (Koye, the eldest, and former Minister of Health; Beko the younger, who was once President of the Nigerian Medical Association, detained incognito by the Nigerian government for his outspoken protests against what he believed to be the anti-democratic activities of the military; and his elder sister, a former matron in Nigeria's health services). To the end Fela was a conscious rebel. The themes of his rebellion never changed, and the anarchy which often seemed to surround his life and music was always tempered by the fundamental truths which he sought to elucidate with regard to both African society and the ongoing exploitation of people in African nations.

Fela's family wanted him to become a lawyer, and in 1958 he left Nigeria for the UK, ostensibly to study law. But many of his close friends maintain that he never intended to follow that line, and that he had made his decision to be a musician from his schooldays.

Once in the UK Fela enrolled In the Trinity School of Music. The trumpet was his preferred instrument, as most of Nigeria's leading highlife band leaders were trumpeters and at least two of them, Rex Jim Lawson and Victor Olaiya, were early heroes of Fela's. Although his father, the Reverend Israel Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, encouraged him to play the piano, he had begun to practise the trumpet on his own before leaving secondary school, and sat in with many of the popular groups of the day. Bandleaders such as Roy Chicago, Bobby Benson, Eddie Okonta and the late anarchic genius Billy Friday all encouraged him and spoke highly of his youthful talent. However, Fela once told me that it was the discovery of Miles Davis's early recordings with Charlie Parker that strengthened his commitment to the instrument when he began studying in London.

During his stay in London, Fela also listened to Afro-Cuban music, and began performing in venues frequented by African students and workers with a group of dedicated Nigerian musicians which included the pianist Wole Bucknor, who became the Musical Director of the Nigerian Navy Band, and the fine jazz drummer Bayo Martins. In fact Martins was a seminal influence on Fela's listening habits, and was largely responsible for steering him in the direction he was eventually to take in building a close link between jazz and highlife music.

Fela returned to Nigeria in the mid-60s, and was employed by Nigeria's National Broadcasting Corporation, but he seemed to have little interest in working there. He formed his first professional group, The Koala Lobitos, and in their earliest performances the musical influences which had exercised Fela's imagination in the UK came to the fore. The group made some recordings, and while Fela's trumpet playing, though lyrical, sounded weak in interpretative power, his singing was innovative, more discursive and rational than the general run of highlife vocalising of the time. Fela's musical sensibility drew on the principles of West African popular music, especially its hypnotic, cyclical rhythm patterns, and he was always conscious of the ability of music to carry a social message in a powerful way. Accordingly, the lyrics he wrote for The Koala Lobitos also demonstrated a desire to bring new subjects into the purview of the music.

In 1968, by which time he had consolidated the membership of The Lobitos, new elements began to surface in the music which were strongly influenced by James Brown's recordings. In that year Fela gave a number of press interviews claiming that Brown had actually "stolen my music". Whatever the truth of the matter, what was clear was that in emphasising the rhythmic and improvisational elements, Fela's music was drawing closer to the kind of extended trance-like workouts that defined Brown's music of the period.

Later the same year, Fela went on a maverick tour to Ghana, the acknowledged home of highlife. He was accompanied and guided on the tour by Benson Idonije, a well-known Nigerian producer who was responsible for the presentation of jazz on Radio Nigeria. But while his music was well received by both Ghanaian audiences and musicians, he felt that in Nigeria his talents were still not appreciated. He either lost or left his job at the radio station after that. While still in Ghana he met a promoter called 'Duke', a Ghanaian who had relocated to California, and together they began to plan a tour to the USA.

The tour took place in 1969, and turned out to be a frustrating sequence of triumphs and disasters. It was halted when it was discovered that the promoter had not obtained the proper work permits for all the group's members. In addition, some members absconded, and in a legal fight with some of the local promoters, Fela seized a collection of hired instruments and shipped them back to Nigeria. He left the USA under a cloud of debt and threats of legal action, but in the few months he had been there he also met many musicians and other artists, especially writers and painters, who were harnessing their creative energies to the kind of radical politics that were being espoused by groups such as the Black Panthers. It was on this trip that he realised how valuable an understanding of Africa's history could be to the expansion of music's outreach, and it was during this trip too that he was able to record some of his latest compositions with a new group of musicians who interpreted his musical vision with a greater level of commitment and ability. He called this group Nigeria 70.

On his return to Nigeria Fela renamed the group a second time, calling it Africa 70. He hired the Kakadu (Parrot) nightclub in Yaba, a suburb of Lagos, renamed it the Afro-Spot, and instigated a programme of three live sessions a week that were to produce some of the most extraordinary events in African musical history.

Liberated by the music's new open-ended forms, some of the members of Africa 70 emerged as performing geniuses in their own right: tenor saxophonist Igo Chico Okwechime (replacing Isaac Olasugba), drummer Tony Allen, guitarist Fred Lawal and percussionist Henry 'Perdido' Kofi. Fela gradually dropped the trumpet and concentrated on leading the group by conducting it from the front and singing. Eventually his rudimentary keyboard riffs, which he used as part of his conducting formula, began to become more integral to the arrangements. By early 1971 he had stopped playing trumpet solos entirely and Tunde Williams, playing second trumpet, developed into a key player, taking over the important brass parts which Fela introduced into the arrangements.

By now Fela was virtually composing his songs in public. Each week at the Afro-Spot new works were premiered, and Fela would talk the audience through the meaning of the lyrics and work the group through the arrangement on stage. In this way classics such as "Lady", "Go-Slow", "Water No Get Enemy", "Chop And Quench", "Palava" and "Shakara-Oloje" emerged to become part of the urban folklore of Lagos. Not only were the songs massive local hits, but for many Lagos citizens it became imperative to attend these sessions, where Fela's interactive style made the audience a part of the performance.

That year – 1970-71 – Fela set a pace which was incredible, not only in terms of his musical growth but also his philosophical and ideological trajectory. The issues he raised as he discussed the lyrics of his songs grew increasingly topical, and he began the form of public speaking which he termed 'yabis' in which he would excoriate government officials for their inefficiency, or preach a new form of freedom of expression which he equated with the right to smoke 'igbo' (marijuana). Before his trip to the USA, Fela had neither smoked nor drank. He was a serious and committed musician, definitely no libertine. Back in Lagos, he claimed that a young woman he had met in America (who was later to sing on one of his albums) had introduced him to marijuana, and he was now convinced that the use of stimulants was not taboo provided the user was 'conscious'. This attitude was eventually to contribute greatly towards his many confrontations with the Nigerian government, and his public criticisms became increasingly focused on specific instances of what he considered to be government hypocrisy and the betrayal of national potential.

As his group grew from nine to 16 members, the music became less lyrical and more strident, the arrangements more complex. In 1974 Fela had a serious falling out with his tenor saxophonist Igo Chico, and in one of the legendary feats of his life, he vowed to replace Igo himself in 24 hours. According to the legend, Fela practised for 17 hours straight, and when the group appeared at the Afro-Spot that Friday night, he played all the famous Igo Chico tenor saxophone solos, not nearly as brilliantly as the master but with enough competence to satisfy his loyal audience.

This period also marked a turning point in Fela's commercial strategies. He moved from the Afro-Spot to a new club located in another part of Lagos called Surulere. The club was owned by a legendary Lagos entrepreneur, Chief SB Bakare, and Fela began to operate a full week's schedule. It was here that he first referred to his club as the Shrine, and began to speak of his musical existence as a religious rather than a purely commercial experience.

Fela's recording strategy was a particularly unique one at this point. Almost monthly he would go into the EMI studios in Apapa and produce extended versions of two of the group's most popular and topical compositions. EMI would release the songs immediately, their remarkable sales fuelled by the fact that a few weeks after they were issued on vinyl, Fela would stop singing them in his club. Fela continued this strategy for two years, issuing records like news bulletins, so that he served as a symbol of Nigeria's united national consciousness, as his songs would be heard blaring from loudspeakers across Nigeria as soon as they were released. The fact that his lyrics were in a very direct form of pidgin English was crucial, as it made his records accessible throughout Nigeria and much of Anglophone Africa.

Now Fela decided to build his own management team and control the release and performance of his music himself. In the early 70s, multinational record companies such as EMI, Decca and Philips/Phonogram had a stranglehold on recording and management of groups in Nigeria and elsewhere in West Africa, bankrolling watered down versions of US soul and Fela's patented Afrobeat. But as Fela developed into a megastar he sought to gain greater benefits from his recording contracts by encouraging competitive bidding among the rival companies for his independently recorded tapes.

The strain of this strategy caused cracks to appear within Fela's own organisation. He tended to be informal and careless with his finances, and some of his musicians broke away when it became difficult for him to pay them regularly. This was the period too when he began to expand his team of female dancers and establish a commune in his mother's house at Mosholashi-Idi-Oro. His sexual appetite was legendary, and many young women submitted themselves to a life of virtual enslavement as he preached an ideology of chauvinistic control and established a lifestyle that was based on his theories of female submission.

With the departure of certain musicians, the nature of the group changed drastically. Fela added more percussion and developed a new style of rhythm guitar voicing, laying a greater emphasis on the guitars and bass to carry the melody lines. He gave control of the reed and brass sections to Lekan 'Ani' Animashaun, a baritone saxophonist and one of the stalwarts of Fela's music, and spent more time refining his keyboard playing. Along with the ensemble singing of his female chorus, these developments became the signatures of his music, and the most distinctive sound of Afrobeat emerged from this era.

Some time In 1974, Fela moved from his Surulere base to the former Ambassador Club, a famous nightspot owned by the Lagos-based Ibo businessman and entertainment tycoon, Chief Kanu. This club was rechristened the African Shrine, and it was here that Fela began to incorporate ritualistic elements into his performances, including the pouring of libations and ceremonies performed by a succession of visiting traditional priests, some of whom appeared from nowhere, it seemed, and disappeared just as mysteriously. There was a Camerounian High Priest who, it was claimed, had sacrificed a human being at the Shrine and brought the victim back to life. Then there was a Ghanaian who performed magic tricks, and a Yoruba 'Babalawo' who gave Ifa divinations for selected members of the audience. Eventually Fela himself was declared High Priest of the Shrine, and each of his performances was prefaced with an elaborate ritual ceremony, replete with face painting, libation pouring, wild dancing and special prayers offered to the ubiquitous 'God of Africa'.

The African Shrine was located right opposite his mother's house, where his commune was still based, and his presence attracted a lot of commercial activity to the area, including a swarm of marijuana dealers. It was in this period, from 1974-76, that both his lifestyle and political attitudes coalesced into a flagrant challenge to the Nigerian authorities.

Apart from openly advocating the smoking of 'igbo' on the theory that "the God of Africa created this herb to enlighten his people", he also paraded his harem of young women all over Lagos. For a while they were appendages to his entourage, but in mid-1975 he began to incorporate them into his show, first as dancers and then as members of the vocal chorus. Later that year he undertook the famous single-day traditional marriage in which he pledged himself as husband to 28 women.

There followed another change of name for the group. Fela had begun reading esoteric literature promoting the belief that African history had been distorted and misrepresented by Western academics, and his interpretation of these ideas and transformation of them into musical themes became his main concern. Reflecting this embrace of pan-African revisionism, he now called his group Egypt 80.

Fela began applying these radical ideas in a pungent and systematic criticism of the Nigerian Government's own decrepit value system. Inevitably, the state began to fight back against both his political criticisms and what some government officials referred to as his 'immoral' lifestyle, and in what would turn out to be just the first of many raids on his club and commune, Fela's house was raided in daylight by teams of soldiers and police.

During the raid Fela was arrested and taken to the notorious Alagbon Close jail, where he was hailed as a hero by the prisoners and installed as 'president' of one of the toughest cells, named after the infamous dark hole of Calcutta but pronounced 'Kalakuta'. On his release he immortalised this experience in the extraordinary protest song "Kalakuta Show", and renamed his commune the Kalakuta Republic. This marked a major turning point in his life, and in many ways may have sealed his fate.

Fela's domestic lifestyle, and his battles with the Nigerian authorities, became major selling points for Nigerian tabloids. One newspaper, The Sunday Punch, serialised a set of features about the Kalakuta experience, liberally sprinkled with pungent quotes from Fela himself, and sold in numbers hitherto unknown for independent newspapers in Nigeria. His reputation also began to spread abroad: The New York Times ran a major feature on him, and his comments began to surface in foreign articles surveying Nigeria's economic and political climates. It is a moot point whether this attention was responsible for his increasing militancy or whether it was the other way round. Whatever the cause, Fela's radicalism increased and his music became even more powerful as a result. The consistency with which he interpreted political events and issues in musical terms was remarkable. The anti-military pieces "Zombie" and "Unknown Soldier" were seminal products of this period. They indicated that Fela was unbowed in the face of sustained attacks from the police and military.

Eventually he fell out seriously with his record companies and began to attack them also. It was clear to Fela that the government had been putting pressure on these organisations to undermine his independence, and he set out to prove that he could survive without them. One of his most famous songs emerged during this period, "ITT" ("International T'ief T'ief"), in which he heaped abuse on Chief MKO Abiola who was then 'Vice President for Africa and the Middle East of ITT', owners of the Decca label.

In a further break from the conventions of the record industry, some of Fela's closest friends were drafted into his organisation to handle contractual and promotional matters. These included the late Kanmi 'People's Lawyer' Osobu, Alhaji UK Buraimoh, the late Akin Davies and Barrister 'Wole 'Feelings Lawyer' Kuboye. Now Fela began to tour Nigeria playing concerts that drew up to 50,000 people at a time in places such as Port Harcourt, Aba, Benin City, Warri, Enugu, Jos, Kaduna and Calabar. These were not club dates but fully fledged stadium concerts. This strategy, and Fela's increasing popularity, seemed to anger the government even more, and towards the end of 1976, after Fela had returned to Lagos following one of his major national tours, one of the most vicious attacks on his home took place.

The timing of the raid was strategic. Nigeria was about to host the Second World Festival of Black and African Arts (FESTAC 77), and the government obviously wanted to silence Fela before the expected large contingent of international visitors arrived in Lagos for the festival. If this was the intention, it backfired badly. The raid was covered widely in the media, and the songs Fela wrote by way of response emerged as some of his most popular international hits. In fact, during the festival the African Shrine was packed almost every night, proving more popular than any of the official FESTAC events, so much so that most nights Fela and Egypt 80 had to play four shows instead of the normal one or two.

In early 1978, a few months after FESTAC, Fela's home was raided again, and this time the raid was carried out entirely by the military - with tragic consequences. Fela believed that the raid had been ordered personally by the then Head of State General Olusegun Obasanjo, a fellow Ogun State indigene, who had been humiliated by the amount of attention Fela had received during FESTAC. During the raid, Fela's mother, Funmilayo, who was then around 75 years old, was thrown from a first floor window by "an unknown soldier". In addition, Funmilayo's house, and an adjoining clinic belonging to Dr Beko Ransome-Kuti, were both burned to the ground. Official explanations for the raid were cynically off hand, which angered Fela even more.

When his mother died some months later from complications arising from the injuries she had received during the raid, Fela led a protest march carrying a coffin to the official residence of the Head of State in central Lagos, and also wrote one of his most tragic hits, "Unknown Soldier", which contained the heart-rending lamentation, "Dem kill my mama, political mama, the only Mama in Africa".

Shortly after the death of Funmilayo, Fela and his group went on a European tour, where he was surprised to discover that he had a massive following, especially in France. He toured for about three months, but on his return to Nigeria some of the key members of Egypt 80 - percussionist Henry 'Perdido' Kofi and drummer Tony Allen - left the group. In addition, one of its brighter young stars, the guitarist Kologbo, absconded and remained in Europe. The European tour was a success both critically and commercially, but once again Fela's casual approach to finance led to disagreements within the group. Moreover, he seemed increasingly depressed over the death of his mother.

Although he had never been a big drinker Fela had created a special compound which he called 'Felagoro' made from marijuana mixed with the local gin 'ogogoro', and he used it extensively during the European tour. The compound was a powerful hallucinogenic and sometimes, when under its influence, his performances were erratic, and the music was mostly held together by Lekan 'Ani' Animashaun, who had developed into a powerful baritone saxophonist, and was officially designated musical director of the group.

During the European tour Fela introduced his teenage son Femi on stage in the heat of a hard-driving performance in a circus tent outside of Paris. It was a real baptism of fire, as Femi was breaking in a new alto saxophone, and previously had only practised with the group during rehearsals. But before a crowd of more than 10,000 Fela ordered Femi to take his first major solo. Fela stood by the side of the stage driving his son on with shouts of encouragement and derision. The experience proved its worth. Femi now leads a group called Positive Force, and has developed a streak of determination in almost direct response to his father's unorthodox method of apprenticeship.

After his return from Europe, Fela's life and music took on a doomed brilliance which was overshadowed by a cloud of inevitable confrontation. Raids by the police and military became even more regular when he moved to Ikeja and took over another club, where he installed the New African Shrine. His hangers-on from Mosholashi-Idi-Oro followed. They virtually repopulated the area around the Shrine bringing hard drugs, especially 'bana' (heroin) and crack, with them. Fela spoke against the use of any drugs other than igbo, but many members of his entourage, including some of his wives, had already become junkies, a development which only seemed to reinforce the allegations of immorality and criminality that the government was levelling against him.

The confrontation between Fela and the security forces now developed into one of the saddest displays of state terrorism ever seen in Africa; sometimes it appeared that individual government members and departments were vying with each other to see which one was more anti-Fela.
In 1983 Fela announced that he would be standing for President in the forthcoming Nigerian elections on the ticket of his own party, the Movement of the People (MOP), in order to "clean up society like a mop". Following the elections, the military overthrew the new civilian government and the attacks on Fela increased again. He was accused by one agency of flouting the country's currency laws because he returned from an overseas visit with about 1000 US dollars. He was arrested, charged, and kept in detention for almost two years. He was released in 1986 after yet another coup had occurred, but just a few months later he was charged with kidnapping one of the young women who lived at his house and whose father was said to be a senior official in one of the security agencies. Fela was acquitted, but a year or so later he was accused of murder after someone had been killed in a fight at the Shrine. Years later, Fela told me that he believed the dead man was killed and planted in the club by yet another branch of the security services.

Even during this incredibly fraught period, Fela's music retained an innovative strength. Just before the breakdown of apartheid in South Africa at the beginning of the 1990s he began to turn his attention to the subject of world racism, and the economic exploitation and international hypocrisy that sustained it.

His composition "Beast Of No Nation" evolved out of a statement by South Africa's President PW Botha: "This uprising [against the apartheid system] will bring out the beast in us." The song was powerfully argued and the music showed that Fela had not lost his sense of rhythmic vitality in his approach to composition. Many of his last songs written between 1993-96 represent some of his best work, containing large scale orchestrated arrangements with more freedom for melodic interpretation. In a parallel with the increased sophistication of his music, Fela announced that marriage was an erroneous imposition of control on a fellow human being. Accordingly, he granted freedom to all his wives, or at least those who remained - more than half of the original 28 had already absconded, although many of them remained resident in his house and as members of his performing ensemble.

Even as Fela was revising his lifestyle, the authorities were closing in. A few weeks before his death, his health shot to pieces by years of official and personal physical abuse, he was paraded in chains on state television in Lagos by yet another security agency, the Anti-Drug Squad. Even in these harrowing circumstances, Fela maintained his dignity, challenging the director of the agency openly, and declaring that he did smoke marijuana and considered it not only his right but a privilege ordained for humanity by the "God of Africa".

By now, Fela's poor health was obvious. He was skeletal, but his spirit was unbowed. He continued to appear at the Shrine, and whenever the group, led by Lekan Animashaun, struck up its signature tunes, he still found the strength to leap on stage and blast his adversaries and proclaim his belief in the rejuvenative power of his personal vision. To the end, Fela believed that this vision was motivated by a spiritual link to the ancestral power of Africa, and that even if it did not save his own life it had the power to restore a sense of political renewal in the continent.

Fela died on 2 August 1997. Some members of his family announced that he was suffering from AIDS, and have demanded that the Nigerian government establish a campaign to officially recognise the AIDS issue as a potentially catastrophic one for the whole of Africa. In this way they probably hope that Fela's death might help bring about the kind of fundamental changes in Nigerian society which he strived for during his life, but failed to achieve, in spite of his constant battles with officialdom.

Fela's funeral developed into a festival of joy and anger unprecedented in Lagos. Three days of processions culminated in a public service which brought the city of well over five million people to a standstill - obviously, Fela's spirit still ran deep in the hearts of the masses.

It is no exaggeration to say that Fela's memory will always symbolise the spirit of truth for a vast number of struggling people in Africa and beyond. His music and the determined consistency with which he challenged authority and demanded that popular ambitions and attitudes should be reflected in the official objectives of the nation's leadership will continue to create a basis for radical challenges to the complacency of officialdom. His musical legacy is a solid one. His compositions are effectively underscored by the huge number of records which he leaves behind. Everyone who worked with him retained a deep sense of his musical spirit, and in the future, his formal musical legacy will grow even stronger as the extraneous elements of his wild, anarchic lifestyle give way to reflective tributes to his talent and the philosophical relevance of his ideas.

The members of Fela's group, devastated by his passing, will find it difficult to keep the flame alive, but there is also a need to preserve the traditions which Fela established. One of his greatest legacies is the consummate technical proficiency which he enabled his instrumentalists to achieve even without travelling beyond Nigeria. Some of his soloists, such as the young baritone saxophonist 'Showboy' and the leader Lekan Animashaun, have the breadth of experience as well as the evanescent quality of stardom in their veins.
Now that he is no longer alive, the eternal values which gave birth to Fela's perpetual struggle to find justice in life will gain new strength through the immortal power of his musical vision.

By Lindsay Barrett

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-03-29/entertainment/ct-ott-0330-fela-preview-20120329_1_kalakuta-afrika-shrine-funmilayo-ransome-kuti

The life and theater of Fela Kuti

March 29, 2012

by Aaron Cohen

Chicago Tribune

Fela Kuti created a dynamic Nigerian musical genre known as Afrobeat, and his theatrical entrances during shows were equally exciting. His concerts began with an extended set from his large bands — Afrika 70 or, later, Egypt 80 — and then Kuti's statuesque singer/dancers would gyrate onstage. He would then stroll in, usually shirtless and with two raised, clenched fists and a sly grin that won over everyone.

But several times, that smile almost cost him his life.

During the 1970s and '80s, Kuti's compositions were uncanny and universally danceable, while his words irritated his homeland's despots. His caustic lyrics satirized the legacy of European colonialism, African corruption and even Lagos traffic jams. Kuti's way of living also ridiculed Nigerian social mores. Reprisals were harsh.

"What Fela took on, and what he endured, is unparalleled in the United States," said "Fela!" musical director Aaron Johnson. "Imagine if people busted down Bob Dylan's door and beat him to an inch of his life — it's astounding what he stood for and it's entrenched in his music."

At the same time, Kuti embraced contradictions. Michael Veal describes these complexities in his book, "Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon." While Kuti championed dissidents and the disenfranchised, he grew up in an upper-middle class home where his father, Israel Ransome-Kuti, was a school principal and composer. But Fela Kuti's mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, had a stronger influence on him. She demonstrated against British rule over Nigeria during the 1940s and took considerable risk as an outspoken feminist.

Kuti claimed to follow his parents' wishes when he enrolled at London's Trinity College in 1958 to study classical music. Instead, he started a band that performed at traditional Nigerian and Ghanaian high-life dances. Then, Kuti brought new ideas into his group, including modal jazz solos that came from his admiration for Miles Davis and John Coltrane. He arranged for percussive guitarists to sound interlocked. His expansive compositions drew on Yoruba folk melodies through his minor-key piano lines. And Kuti's underlying beats awed many a musician, including James Brown's bassist, Bootsy Collins.

The horrific Nigerian-Biafran war in the late 1960s, military coups and the brutal regimes that followed radicalized Kuti's lyrics as much as his music. Singing in a mix of Yoruba and English, he mocked the army ("Zombie"), African elites ("Colonial Mentality") and — notwithstanding his own religious upbringing — the influence of Christianity and Islam ("Shuffering and Shmiling").

Rejecting official Nigerian sovereignty, Kuti created a commune in Lagos, which he called Kalakuta ("Rascal") Republic. He built his own performance space there, Afrika Shrine, along with a lifestyle that laughed at any kind of authority. Kuti openly smoked jumbo-sized marijuana spliffs and simultaneously married a couple of dozen of his singers. Despite his mother's objections to such a patriarchal setup, she remained devoted to her son. She died of injuries when soldiers threw her from a window during an army attack on Kalakuta in 1978.

That assault, one of many, accompanied Kuti's constant arrests on false charges in Nigeria throughout the '70s and '80s. Usually, those wound up only enhancing Kuti's stature, according to his son Femi. He remembered, "When Fela won a case that would have sent him to jail for 10 years, thousands of people carried him from court to his house."

Since Fela Kuti's death at 58 of AIDS-related complications in 1997, his international renown has proliferated. Johnson has also been a trombonist in the American Afrobeat-influenced band Antibalas since 2000. Hip-hop artists such as Mos Def and The Roots have praised Kuti's courage, and sampled his records. Femi Kuti has his own musical career, and Fela Kuti's youngest son, Seun, also regularly tours and is performing with Egypt 80 at the House of Blues on Sunday.

Meanwhile, Femi Kuti continues his father's work in Lagos.
"The Shrine is about five times bigger now," Femi Kuti said. "We're trying to build a studio and provide free music lessons for the youths. Life here is still challenging, but Fela laid the groundwork for all of us."

onthetown@tribune.com
Twitter @chitribent

http://www.contramare.net/site/en/fela-ransome-kuti-political-activism-identity-music-and-ritual/

Chikukuango/Musicology/Sub-Saharan Africa

Fela Ransome-Kuti: Political Activism, Identity, Music and Ritual

18/11/2014
by Chikukuango

My background is crucial to the way I see and appreciate the works of Fela Kuti, and therefore this article reflects my artistic perspective, as a scholar and an artist, of their value, while attempting to contextualize their relationship to music, political activism, Pan-Africanism and anti-imperialism.

I will spend a great part of this text analysing Fela’s music and activism because of the great impact it made on the global stage, as pointed out by Kenneth Surin[i]. Particularly, since Fela’s creation of Afro beat revolutionised African music and scholarship in Africa and the Diaspora[ii].

It is important to point out that a central argument in this paper are Fela’s explorations and devotions of Yoruba religious cosmology and iconography[iii] through rituals, music, dance, theatre, poetry, masquerade – illustrated by the colourfully painted bodies of his dancers -, as well as libations and venerations of the musician’s ancestral spirits for protection.

Fela Kuti’s background

Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti was born into an upper-middle-class Nigerian family in Abeokuta, Ogun State. His family was an active participant in the Pan-African and anti-colonial struggles for independence, human dignity and liberation in Nigeria[iv]. Fela used his music to voice to the general population his opposition to political mal-governance and corruption in Nigeria. As a wide-travelled, foreign-educated individual, living abroad, his international experience was pivotal in the formation of his personal and political consciousness, manifested in a type of music that was highly influenced by jazz and the highlife. Particularly, in the 1960’s, when Fela travelled to North America and discovered the Black Power and Black Panther movements, his music and political views were transformed, radicalised, and his understanding of African music and roots was naturalised. In other words, African music became a tool that expressed and validated African ancient civilisation, its history and its monuments.

According to Schoonmaker, this artistic manoeuvre based on the African cultural roots reflected his own personal principles and concepts of nationalism and “nativism”[v]. In this article I am arguing that, Fela’s creative musical ideology became the contemporary expression of Africa’s glories and achievements in ancient classical civilisation. This is visible in Fela’s creation of the Egypt 80 band and their album cover drawings depicting symbols of African civilisations including the pyramids of Egypt[vi]. The articulation of the African classical civilisation became the focus in his expressive musical narration centred in Nigerian culture, identity, politics and way of life. He used music to de-colonise education and create awareness of Africa’s greatness; a reverse development of the postcolonial condition[vii].

Fela’s creation of his band Fela & Egypt 80, was a musical revelation of his sentiments of African utopia, and he vividly narrated the legacy of Egypt as an African great civilisation. His musical concept connected two legendary African American musicians: George Clinton, the funk and intergalactic artist, and Sun Ra’s instrumental and experimental jazz. In Fela’s interview[viii] during his stay and performance in Spain, Catalonia, the musician described his ideas and views in relation to Egyptian civilisation, when creating the Fela & Egypt 80 band.

Music, Performance and Ritual in Fela Kuti’s work

As my performances developed in London after 2004, I was captivated by the live performances of Fela Ransome Anikulapo-Kuti, the Nigerian musician who created Afro beat, the African contemporary music style that revolutionised African music globally, in postcolonial times. I found his music and performances important because he expressed concerns about social life, poverty and political malpractice, specifically in the government in Nigeria[ix]. His exciting performances addressing political issues as a “…pan-African postcolonial philosophy and political radicalism”[x], empowered other African artists in the Diaspora who were struggling to express a black perspective of identity and spirituality. I was attracted to Fela Kuti and Egypt 80’s performances, specifically due to their devotion in celebrating Yoruba religions and cultural traditions through music, dance and ritual, as well as to Kuti’s belief in venerating his ancestors’ spirit for protection and religious practices. Clearly, Fela Kuti had an impact in my work, as an African artist recalling ancient roots, and became my central reference point. I was drawn to his music because of the composition and the set-up of his Africa shrine – a place that combined spirituality, music, theatre, dance and poetry – the use of masquerade tradition, dance and libation, African textile garments and the colourful painted body of his dancers. Anikulapo-Kuti was the only African superstar who was publically engaged in ritual practices while exploring African traditional music.

Kuti’s ritualistic ceremonies and dialogue with the spiritual world had a particular impact on my own performances. I was absorbed by his artistic search for deeper African spirituality and modernity. I was fascinated to find out that Anikulapo-Kuti performed live in his shrine everyday at 2:00am, in silence, paying respect to the Yoruba spirits of Shango, Ifa, Eshu and Ogun; the same great spirits that are found in Afro-Cuban, Brazilian, Haitian and Caribbean cults and in North American vodou. During those performances he sacrificed a chicken as a form of blessing to his music[xi]. The act of chicken sacrifice represents the power and cross connections between the visible mortal world and the invisible immortal world, opening an avenue between them[xii]. What I found most appealing was that during Kuti’s rituals “…the intent and emphasis of sacrifice is not upon the death of the animal, it is upon the transfusion of its life…” from the physical to the spiritual world[xiii]. In other words, flesh and blood become the essence of life and death, a divine energy, in Yoruba mythological divinity[xiv].

In Kuti’s ritual performances the chicken sacrifice is the beginning of a deeper connection with spirits, who arrive when the chicken dies. Upon the chicken’s death he loses control of his consciousness and speaks in sign language, struggling to break off from an incomprehensible experience[xv]. What I found interesting was that the chicken represented both death and the force that generates new life – in other words life and death become one and the same[xvi].

Most of Fela’s songs are narrations of daily experience story-telling in Yoruba land, and open criticisms of Nigeria’s post-colonial condition. Fela’s manifesto is therefore visible in the larger musical legacy that he left behind, in his dialogues and messages, as a perspective of de-colonisation and to restore Africanness in the afrocentric sense, as Molefi Asante has described[xvii].

In the first political stages of post-colonial Nigeria, the government was extremely authoritarian preventing the development of freedom of speech in the country; a period during which Fela was very vocal of the situation, using his music as a weapon, speaking against the government and police brutality, and as a result, ending up in prison several times, subjected to torture and beatings. The consequence was that he lost all fear and began to criticise, naming and shaming the politicians that abused power.

Fela’s works raised awareness to the issue of decolonization of the minds of black people, as well as of Western domination of Africa. Chinweizu pointed out:

“If we truly wish to bring Western domination of Africa to an end, we must take control of our history, and steer it away from where the West would like to maroon it. But that calls, not for absolving ourselves from all responsibility for our fate, nor for the lamentations and tantrums of the campaign for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), nor for elegant begging sessions like Cancun, but for cultural and historical initiative on our part[xviii].”

In relation to public speakers and their roles in society and culture, Chinweizu continues:

“…The task for African historians who care to contribute to African’s development is to decolonize the history of Africa by developing a more accurate and truthful history, free from colonialist distortions[xix].”

I am arguing here that Fela Kuti showed us in his works, a new and alternative way to look at the African experience free of colonialist historical claims and perspectives. In his song Colonial Mentality, he criticized Nigerian leaders and politicians for devaluing African tradition and culture in favour of the values and religions of the West; he pointed out that for the leaders, black things weren’t as good as foreign ones; and that they were proud and preferred slave names, Christian names and Muslim names.

Furthermore, in this song with melody beats in Afro beat style, he sings in English pidgin language style to emulate the suburban vernacular language communication in Nigeria. He exposes African people’s colonial mentality; and essentially, he criticizes the colonial system and the hegemony of English education in Nigeria, which prohibited that national languages were spoken in schools.

According to John Mbiti, Fela’s works are a manifestation of religious practices and heritages in an African context, a spiritual presence whereby the spirit plays a part in people’s lives, acting as protector and guardian:

“The fact remains, nevertheless, that the spirits are an integrated part of the religious heritage in Africa. People are deeply aware of the spirit world, and this awareness affects their outlook and experiences in life for better and for worse[xx].”

Notes:

[i] Surin, 1997, p.201.

[ii] Olorunyomi, 2003, p.212.

[iii] Mbiti, 1991, p.20.

[iv] Olorunyomi, 2003, p.23)

[v] Schoonmaker, 2003, p.11.

[vi] Diop, 1974, p.1.

[vii] Oguibe, 2003, p.27.

[viii] Kuti, 1982, DVD.

[ix] Phillips, 2003, p.7.

[x] Schoonmaker, 2003, p.15.

[xi] Olorunyomi, 2003, p.138.

[xii] Veal, 2003, p.39.

[xiii] Deren, 2004, p.216.

[xiv] Olorunyomi, 2003, p.135.

[xv] Olorunyomi, 2003, p.136.

[xvi] Kuti, 1982, music video.

[xvii] Asante, 2002, p.102.

[xviii] Chinweizu, 1987, p.72.

[xix] Chinweizu, 1987, p.73.

[xx] Mbiti, 1991, p.81.

Bibliography

Asante, Molefi, “Afrocentricity and the Decline of Western Hegemonic Thought: A Critique of Eurocentric Theory and Practice”, In: Mark Christian, ed., (2002) Black Identity in the 20^th Century: Expressions of the US and UK African Diaspora, London: Hansib publications, 101-118.

Chinweizu (1987) Decolonising the African Mind, Lagos: Pero press.

Deren, Maya (2004) Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, New York: McPherson & Company.

Diop, Cheikh (1974) The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality (trans. Mercer Cook), Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books.

Mbiti, John (1991) Introduction to African Religion, 2^nd edition, Oxford: Heinemann.

Olorunyomi, Sola (2003) Afrobeat: Fela and the Imagined Continent, New Jersey: African World press.

Oguibe, Olu, “The Power of Song”, In: Trevor Schoonmaker, ed., (2003) The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 26-32.

Phillips, Lisa, “Forward”, In: Trevor Schoonmaker, ed., (2003) Black President ‘The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’, New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 6-7.

Schoonmaker, Trevor, “Kalakuta Show”, In: Trevor Schoonmaker, ed., (2003) Black President ‘The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’, New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 10-5.

Surin, Kenneth, “On Producing the Concept of a Global Culture”, In: V. Y. Mudimbe, ed., (1997) Nations, Identities, Cultures, Durham: Duke University press, 199-219.

Veal, Michael, Fela and the Funk, In: Trevor Schoonmaker, ed., (2003) Black President ‘The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’, New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 34-40.

DVD and Music:

Kuti, Fela (1982) Music is the Weapon, Paris: FKO Music Video.

Kuti, Fela and Africa 70 (1977) Sorrow Tears and Blood (song: Colonial Mentality), Lagos: Nigeria Kalakuta label.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3zHgktQGDE

[accessed: 01 Nov 2014].

http://www.signature-reads.com/2017/03/fela-kuti-and-the-power-of-music-as-a-tool-for-resistance/

History

Fela Kuti and the Power of Music as a Tool for Resistance

by Odafe Atogun

March 7, 2017

FELA KUTI

Editor's Note:

Odafe Atogun was born in Nigeria. He studied journalism at the Times Journalism Institute in Lagos and is now a full-time writer. He is most recently the author of Taduno’s Song, and joins Signature to talk about the life of Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, central to Taduno’s Song.

My earliest memory of Fela Kuti (1938 – 1997) was of a strange being, abami eda, as he loved to refer to himself: wiry, half-naked, a long roll of marijuana clenched between his index and middle finger, a humorous smile on a rugged face decorated with kaolin. Like the rest of the country, I grew up entranced with the man, not least because the military regime that ruled Nigeria at that time labelled him a dangerous man.

In those unwholesome days when everyone lived in mortal fear of the regime, not many could understand why the regime, with all its might, lived in fear of Fela Kuti. It turned out that his music, the only weapon he wielded against tyranny, was more potent than any form of violent opposition. He sang against tyranny and social injustice, and, through his music and his lifestyle, he took sides with the downtrodden against the regime.

Fela’s career had started in the sixties, at a time when the Nigerian nation, having newly gained independence, was attempting to establish self-governance. But the tribal, religious, and social dichotomies of the new nation were such that it aborted its nascent democracy. The army seized power through a bloody coup, marking the beginning of successive dictatorships that would witness the clash of songs and guns for over two decades.

As Fela’s music gained him cult following, his opposition to tyranny intensified and he became an enigma to the junta, for his music was devoid of bitterness. He was a man of peace. He sang from the depth of his soul with a humor that endeared him to millions of fans. With Fela, there were no pretensions. He sang about sex and love with the same passion with which he denounced tyranny and the many ills bedevilling his society, and he became the conscience of a nation. He believed that art, and thus his own music, would be meaningless if it did not promote positive change. This philosophy defined his music, and his voice, raw yet sensual, became one adored by the masses but loathed by the regime he opposed fearlessly.

In response to the propaganda onslaught against him, Fela would scratch his ass virulently in the glare of publicity in disdain of the regime and the establishment. He lambasted them for condemning his use of semi-nude female dancers, claiming that they do worse things behind closed doors with girls young enough to be their grandchildren. In his view, he was giving women the opportunity to express themselves through art.

But he paid a high price for his rebellion.

Fela became the butt of the government’s brutality. His 1977 album Zombie, which mocked the Nigerian army, describing them as senseless robots, led to an attack on his commune, the Kalakuta Republic, which he had declared an independent state. This was during the regime of General Olusegun Obasanjo (who would later become civilian president in 1999). Soldiers burnt down the commune and murdered his elderly mother by throwing her from the top floor of a building. Fela and hundreds of his followers became homeless for some time.

With the untold violence he suffered at the hands of the regime, his music assumed a more revolutionary and spiritual dimension. He delivered his mother’s coffin to Dodan Barracks, the residence of General Obasanjo. And with the hit songs “Coffin for Head of State” and “Unknown Soldier,” he responded to the government’s ridiculous claim that his commune was attacked by an unknown soldier. The songs gained wide popularity, further discrediting the military dictatorship.

The regime made several unsuccessful attempts to buy Fela off. And then, in a desperate bid to silence him, the regime of General Muhammadu Buhari (presently Nigeria’s President), jailed him in 1984 on trumped up charges. But that did not diminish the effect of the man’s music — on the contrary, his message became more poignant. It was pointless to keep holding him. So, during the regime of General Ibrahim Babangida (who had toppled General Buhari in another coup), Fela Kuti was released after spending twenty long months in jail. The dogged artist that he was, he continued to make music to denounce tyranny and social injustice.

Fela Kuti preached his visionary message to the end. Sadly, he died without seeing the changes he desired for his society. Today, nearly twenty years after his death, the many ills he denounced through his music still bedevil Nigeria.

The struggles of Fela Kuti inspired the plot for my novel Taduno’s Song. The book considers the power of the arts to promote social and political change, and depicts a duel between a tyrant and an iconic musician. Taduno is faced with an impossible choice: praise the government with his music and save the woman he loves, or sing to liberate his country and condemn love.

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/04/arts/fela-58-dissident-nigerian-musician-dies.html

Arts

Fela, 58, Dissident Nigerian Musician, Dies

by DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

August 4, 1997

New York Times

Fela, the Nigerian singer and band leader who combined pulsating Afro-beat rhythms and scathing pidgin English lyrics to goad Nigeria's leaders and denounce their authoritarian regimes, died on Saturday at his home in Lagos. He was 58 and had been Africa's most famous musician and his country's foremost political dissident.

The immediate cause was heart failure, but he had suffered from AIDS, his older brother, Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, said at a news conference in Lagos, Reuters reported.

Fela (pronounced FAY-la) was a showy, insolent, marijuana-smoking icon, who often made appearances wearing only bikini underwear. In more than 30 years as a dissident songwriter and saxophonist, he was arrested and imprisoned at least a dozen times, most recently in 1993.

His songs, some an hour long, were influenced by James Brown, and fused American funk and jazz with traditional African music. The titles were written in initials like ''M.A.S.S.'' (Music Against Second Slavery), ''B.B.C.'' (Big Blind Country), ''I.T.T.'' (International Thief Thief) and ''V.I.P.'' (Vagabonds in Power). In addition to railing against governmental corruption and military abuses, he also sang introspectively about shortcomings in Nigerian society.

For years, Fela was merely Nigeria's most popular musician. He labeled himself ''the chief priest,'' lived in a commune that he called ''the Kalakuta Republic'' after the nickname of a prison cell he had once occupied, smoked marijuana and recorded about half a dozen albums a year that were banned on Government radio because of a dispute over copyright payments. The records, with their roiling groove and subversive lyrics, sold wildly across the African continent.

Then, in 1977, came the Fela Affair, which overnight catapulted him into a symbol of Government opposition and raised unsettling questions about civil liberties in Nigeria and about the future of civilian rule in a country that had broken free of colonial England only to fall into authoritarian military rule.

On the steamy afternoon of Feb. 18, a swarm of 1,000 soldiers gathered around Fela's Kalakuta Republic, a two-story yellow building in the sprawling Lagos slum of Surulere. In the ensuing siege, the house was burned to the ground and most of its 60 occupants were hospitalized. Fela was beaten unconscious and held under armed guard in a hospital room. His 77-year-old mother was thrown from her bedroom window and died of her injuries the following year.

Once free, he announced a lawsuit against the army that was later dismissed. For the rest of his life, he was an enemy of various Nigerian Governments, as much a political figure as a musical one.

He often said he would one day be president of the country, but his political showmanship never left the band stage. In recent years, he was less vocal, remaining mostly at home in Ikeja, a working-class section of Lagos, and performing only infrequently at his club, the Shrine.

Fela Ransome-Kuti was born on Oct. 15, 1938, into a prominent family in Abeokuta, a Yoruba town in the western part of Nigeria. His father, the Rev. Ransome-Kuti, was an Anglican priest, one of the country's best-known clergymen and educators. He raised his children to respect England, the colonial ruler, and saw to their education.

Two of Fela's brothers became doctors. One, Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, later served as Minister of Health. The other, Beko Ransome-Kuti, became chairman of the Campaign for Democracy, a coalition of trade unions and civil rights groups that has opposed Nigeria's military rule. Like Fela, Beko Ransome-Kuti has been jailed for his political views.

His mother, Funmilayo, had a flair for politics. In 1948, she led the women of Abeokuta, who were not represented in local government, in a successful crusade against a tax on women. She also strove for Nigeria's independence and by the time it was achieved in 1960, she was the country's foremost female nationalist. Later, she became one of few female chiefs.

Both Fela and his mother de-Anglicized the family name, dropping Ransome in favor of Anikulapo, a name from Yoruba mythology that means ''he who carries death in a sack.''

Growing up in Abeokuta, Fela led a school choir and played piano and percussion. In 1959, he left Nigeria to study classical music in London. There, he was exposed to American jazz. He listened to Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Miles Davis and he began playing trumpet and keyboards in jazz and funk bands.

He returned to Nigeria in 1963 and formed his first band, Koola Lobitos. But American jazz was not popular, and his sound did not catch on. In 1969, he traveled to the United States where he discovered Malcolm X and the Black Panther movement.

''It was incredible how my head was turned,'' he told The New York Times in 1977. ''Everything fell into place, man. For the first time, I saw the essence of blackism. It's crazy; in the States people think the black-power movement drew inspiration from Africa. All these Americans come over here looking for awareness. They don't realize they're the ones who've got it over there. Why, we were even ashamed to go around in national dress until we saw pictures of blacks wearing dashikis on 125th Street.''

He returned to Nigeria and invented the genre known as Afro-beat, becoming a patriarch of modern African music. He called his band Afrika '70 and later changed the name to Egypt '80.

He once described his music this way: ''I am playing deep African music. I've studied my culture deeply, and I'm very aware of my tradition. The rhythm, the sounds, the tonality, the chord sequences, the individual effect of each instrument and each section of the band, I'm talking about a whole continent in my music.''

Musicians around the world followed his lead.

''We were influenced by Fela's pure African style,'' Salif Keita, a Malian singer and star of the African music scene, said in 1995. ''Fela's music is pure rhythm, with a groove. It is driven by percussions, bass and accented rhythm guitar, with the lead singer's voice floating over everything. He introduced the background chorus voices into modern African music. Fela's lyrics are very political and funny. He is a legend, and all modern African singers and musicians owe a lot to him.''

Fela wrote his lyrics in the pidgin language of the lower classes. ''You cannot sing African music in proper English,'' he once said. ''Broken English has been completely broken into the African way of talking, our rhythm, our intonation.''

In 1978, he married 27 of his dancing girls in a single traditional ceremony. All but eight later left him while he was in jail. At times it seemed that Fela could not shed his role as a Government opponent no matter who was in power. In a 1982 documentary, shown in the United States three years later on public television, Fela accused the Nigerian Government of ''criminal behavior,'' and said, ''Nigeria is worse than South Africa. In Nigeria, blacks mistreat blacks.''

But at the time the documentary was made, Nigeria was experiencing a brief period of democratic, civilian rule, which lasted from 1979 until 1984. In November 1984, he was arrested at the Lagos airport as he was leaving for a concert tour in the United States. He was charged with illegally exporting foreign currency, convicted and spent 18 months in prison. Amnesty International labeled him a ''prisoner of conscience'' and it was later revealed that the charges had been trumped up.

In 1993, he was arrested and charged with conspiracy and murder in the death of a man who worked as a technician for his band and whose body was found not far from his home. No one, however, accused Fela of witnessing the incident or being near the scene. He was released on bond and he called the arrest one more example of his family being harassed for its views.

Such harassment ''is almost a way of life in our family,'' said his niece, Morenike Ransome-Kuti, who is a lawyer in Lagos. ''It's the price you have to pay when you're fighting for certain things.''

THE MUSIC OF FELA KUTI: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. KUTI

Fela Kuti - "Zombie"--1976

From the LP 'Zombie'-- (CD release 2001):

"Colonial Mentality" - Fela Kuti (1977):

Fela Kuti - "C.B.B. (Confusion Break Bone)"

Fela Kuti - "Kalakuta Show":

Fela Kuti - "Teacher Don't Teach Me Nonsense"

Fela Kuti - "I. T. T. (International Thief Thief)"

Fela Kuti - "Beasts of No Nation":

Fela Kuti & Egypt 80 [Arsenal TV3 Catalonian TV 1987-08-04:

Fela Kuti - "Water no get enemy":

The Best of the Black President

Top Tracks - Fela Kuti

Fela Kuti - Topic
1/115 videos

Fela Kuti - "Look and Laugh" (1&2)

Fela Kuti (Nigeria, 1985) -- "Army Arrangement”-- (Full Album)

Fela Kuti - 'Open and Close'-- (LP):

Open and Close (LP) (1971) Fela Kuti
Songs includes: Open And Close/ Suegbe And Pako / Gbagada Gbogodo

This video is part of a series of songs being posted on Fela's official YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/fela) each featuring, alongside the music, an informative commentary by Afrobeat Historian, Chris May.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fela_Kuti

Fela Kuti

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Fela" redirects here. For the Broadway musical, see Fela!

Fela Kuti
Fela Kuti in 1970
Background information
Birth name	Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti
Also known as	Fela Anikulapo Kuti Fela Ransome-Kuti
Born	15 October 1938 Abeokuta, British Nigeria
Died	2 August 1997 (aged 58) Lagos, Nigeria
Genres	Afrobeat highlife
Occupation(s)	Singer-songwriter musician activist
Instruments	Saxophone vocals keyboards trumpet guitar drums
Years active	1958–1997
Labels	Barclay/PolyGram MCA/Universal Celluloid EMI Nigeria JVC Wrasse Shanachie Knitting Factory
Associated acts	Africa '70 Egypt '80 Koola Lobitos Nigeria '70 Hugh Masekela Ginger Baker Tony Allen Femi Kuti Seun Kuti Roy Ayers Lester Bowie
Website	felabration.net

Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti^[1] (15 October 1938 – 2 August 1997), known professionally as Fela Kuti, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, or simply Fela, was a Nigerian multi-instrumentalist, musician, composer, pioneer of the Afrobeat music genre, human rights activist, and political maverick.^[2]^[3] He has been called "superstar, singer, musician, Panafricanist, polygamist, mystic, legend."^[4] During the height of his popularity, he was often hailed as one of Africa's most "challenging and charismatic music performers."^[5]

Biography

Early life and career

Reverend Israel and Funmilayo beside him, Dolu is behind and Fela in foreground, baby in arms is not named (most likely Beko), Olikoye is to the right

Fela was born Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti on 15 October 1938 in Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria^[6] into an upper-middle-class family. His mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was a feminist activist in the anti-colonial movement; his father, Reverend Israel Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, an Anglican minister and school principal, was the first president of the Nigeria Union of Teachers.^[7] His brothers, Beko Ransome-Kuti and Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, both medical doctors, are well known in Nigeria.^[8] Fela is a first cousin to the Nigerian writer and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.^[9]

He attended the Abeokuta Grammar School in Abeokuta. Later he was sent to London in 1958 to study medicine but decided to study music instead at the Trinity College of Music, the trumpet being his preferred instrument.^[8] While there, he formed the band Koola Lobitos, playing a fusion of jazz and highlife.^[10] In 1960, Fela married his first wife, Remilekun (Remi) Taylor, with whom he would have three children (Femi, Yeni, and Sola). In 1963, Fela moved back to Nigeria, re-formed Koola Lobitos and trained as a radio producer for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. He played for some time with Victor Olaiya and his All Stars.^[11]
In 1967, he went to Ghana to think up a new musical direction.^[7] That was when Kuti first called his music Afrobeat.^[7] In 1969, Fela took the band to the United States where they spent 10 months in Los Angeles. While there, Fela discovered the Black Power movement through Sandra Smith (now Sandra Izsadore), a partisan of the Black Panther Party. The experience would heavily influence his music and political views.^[12] He renamed the band Nigeria '70. Soon afterwards, the Immigration and Naturalization Service was tipped off by a promoter that Fela and his band were in the US without work permits. The band immediately performed a quick recording session in Los Angeles that would later be released as The '69 Los Angeles Sessions.

1970s

1980s and beyond

In 1984, Muhammadu Buhari's government, of which Kuti was a vocal opponent, jailed him on a charge of currency smuggling which Amnesty International and others denounced as politically motivated.^[20] Amnesty designated him a prisoner of conscience,^[21] and his case was also taken up by other human rights groups. After 20 months, he was released from prison by General Ibrahim Babangida. On his release he divorced his 12 remaining wives, saying that "marriage brings jealousy and selfishness".^[18]

Once again, Fela continued to release albums with Egypt '80, made a number of successful tours of the United States and Europe and also continued to be politically active. In 1986, Fela performed in Giants Stadium in New Jersey as part of the Amnesty International A Conspiracy of Hope concert, sharing the bill with Bono, Carlos Santana, and The Neville Brothers. In 1989, Fela and Egypt '80 released the anti-apartheid Beasts of No Nation that depicts on its cover U.S. President Ronald Reagan, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and South African State President Pieter Willem Botha, that title of the composition, as Barrett notes, having evolved out of a statement by Botha: "This uprising [against the apartheid system] will bring out the beast in us."^[8]

Fela's album output slowed in the 1990s, and eventually he stopped releasing albums altogether. In 1993, he and four members of the Afrika '70 organization were arrested for murder. The battle against military corruption in Nigeria was taking its toll, especially during the rise of dictator Sani Abacha. Rumours were also spreading that he was suffering from an illness for which he was refusing treatment.

Death

On 3 August 1997, Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, already a prominent AIDS activist and former Minister of Health, announced his younger brother's death a day earlier from Kaposi's sarcoma brought on by AIDS. More than a million people attended Fela's funeral at the site of the old Shrine compound. The New Afrika Shrine has opened since Fela's death in a different section of Lagos under the supervision of his son Femi Kuti.

Music

Main article: Afrobeat

The musical style of Felá is called afrobeat, a style he largely created, which is a complex fusion of jazz, funk, Ghanaian/Nigerian highlife, psychedelic rock and traditional West African chants and rhythms. Afrobeat also borrows heavily from the native "tinker pan" African-style percussion that Kuti acquired while studying in Ghana with Hugh Masekela, under the uncanny Hedzoleh Soundz.^[22] The importance of the input of Tony Allen (Fela's drummer of twenty years) in the creation of Afrobeat cannot be overstated. Fela once famously stated that "without Tony Allen, there would be no Afrobeat".

Afrobeat is characterized by a fairly large band with many instruments, vocals and a musical structure featuring jazzy, funky horn sections. A riff-based "endless groove" is used, in which a base rhythm of drums, shekere, muted West African-style guitar and melodic bass guitar riffs are repeated throughout the song. Commonly, interlocking melodic riffs and rhythms are introduced one by one, building the groove bit-by-bit and layer-by-layer. The horn section then becomes prominent, introducing other riffs and main melodic themes.

Fela's band was notable for featuring two baritone saxophones, whereas most groups were using only one of this instrument. This is a common technique in African and African-influenced musical styles and can be seen in funk and hip hop. Fela's bands at times even performed with two bassists at the same time both playing interlocking melodies and rhythms. There were always two or more guitarists. The electric West African style guitar in Afrobeat bands are paramount, but are used to give basic structure, playing a repeating chordal/melodic statement, riff or groove.

Some elements often present in Fela's music are the call-and-response within the chorus and figurative but simple lyrics. Fela's songs were also very long, at least 10–15 minutes in length, and many reached 20 or even 30 minutes, while some unreleased tracks would last up to 45 minutes when performed live. This was one of many reasons that his music never reached a substantial degree of popularity outside Africa. His LP records frequently had one 30-minute track per side. Typically there is an instrumental "introduction" jam part of the song, perhaps 10–15 minutes long, before Fela starts singing the "main" part of the song, featuring his lyrics and singing, in which the song continues for another 10–15 minutes. Therefore, on some recordings one may see his songs divided into two parts, Part 1 (instrumental) followed by the rest, Part 2.

His songs were mostly sung in Nigerian pidgin English, although he also performed a few songs in the Yoruba language. Fela's main instruments were the saxophone and the keyboards, but he also played the trumpet, electric guitar, and took the occasional drum solo. Fela refused to perform songs again after he had already recorded them, which also hindered his popularity outside Africa.

Fela was known for his showmanship, and his concerts were often quite outlandish and wild. He referred to his stage act as the "Underground" Spiritual Game. Fela attempted making a movie but lost all the materials to the fire that was set to his house by the military government in power. Kuti thought that art, and thus his own music, should have political meaning.^[16]

It is of note that as Fela's musical career developed, so too did his political influence, not only in his home country of Nigeria, not just throughout Africa, but throughout the world. As his political influence grew, the religious aspect of his musical approach grew. Fela was a part of an Afro-Centric consciousness movement that was founded on and delivered through his music. Fela, in an interview found in Hank Bordowitz's "Noise of the World", states, "Music is supposed to have an effect. If you're playing music and people don't feel something, you're not doing shit. That's what African music is about. 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, against a bad life. When you're listening to something that depicts having a better life, and you're not having a better life, it must have an effect on you."^[23]

West Africa has been a cultural crossroad for musical development. The most widespread and influential music was guitar-based genres including "palmwine" music, which swept the region during the 1920s and 1930s. Palmwine was most often heard at informal gatherings among the urban lower classes. The musicians would accompany themselves with guitars, beer bottles for percussion or kerosene cans. The singers were often fairly political and touched on contemporary issues. The other popular genre was "highlife," which was more associated with the upper classes and social elite. Performed at important events such as weddings, funerals, and holidays, highlife ensembles combined European band instruments and harmonic structures with distinctly African practices such as praise singing. Highlife’s appeal was broadened by its origins in Ghana, the first African nation to gain independence in 1957. Under the leadership of the prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s political and cultural influence was strong throughout the region during the postcolonial period.
With a population of 150 million people, Nigeria was the most populous country in sub-Saharan Africa, gaining its independence in 1960.^[24] Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, while dominated by the Yoruba people, is in many ways a postmodern collage of different ethnicities, nationalities, and cultures. The city’s origins lie in the illicit slave trade. Built on a sandy island, its many creeks afforded hiding places for slave traders after the French (1791) and British (1807) outlawed the slave trade. Lagos became an important incubator for urban popular musics as the Kru mariners, as well as Ghanaians, Cameroonians, and others brought palm wine and highlife, which blended with Yoruba traditions, especially jújù.

As in highlife, jújù groups typically play for important social functions, often hired by the social and economic elite. Here they are expected to perform the traditional role of offering praises to their hosts both vocally and articulated by the sonically prominent talking drum or dundun. The social status of musicians as beggars is reinforced by the practice of "spraying" in which the hosts and their guests reward the musicians by pressing money to their foreheads. In the 1930s, as the "rhumba" craze (actually Cuban son montuno) swept much of the United States and Europe, highlife, palmwine, and jújù began to assimilate Caribbean rhythms, percussion instruments, and harmonic and formal structures. Calypso and other genres from English-speaking islands also became part of the mix. Latin and Caribbean influence in West Africa came not only through the African colonies’ and Caribbean colonies’ common tether to the European powers (particularly London), but through the important communities of repatriated former slaves and their descendants.

Lagos’ importance as a center for music grew as Decca, EMI, and other record companies established recording studios in the city as they expanded their operations in Africa (Veal, 2000, 79). In the years after World War II the modern sound of jújù featuring electric instruments, especially guitars, was popularized by such artists as Tunde Nightingale, I. K. Dairo, Ebenezer Obey, and King Sunny Adé. The 1960s brought an influx of American soul music such as Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, James Brown and others. The postcolonial market was ripe for a new broadly popular music, one that appealed to different ethnicities and social classes, that internally was emblematic of African-ness but presented a modern face to the world. As an ambitious young musician, Fela Anikulapo Ransome-Kuti was determined to create a genre to satisfy this demand. But his route to this innovation first led him to two important international black Atlantic destinations: London and the United States.

Political views and activism

Activism

Fela Kuti was a political giant in Africa from the 70s until his death. Kuti criticized the corruption of Nigerian government officials and the mistreatment of Nigerian citizens. He spoke of colonialism as the root of the socio-economic and political problems that plagued the African people. Corruption was one of the worst, if not the worst, political problem facing Africa in the 70s and Nigeria was among the most corrupt countries of the time. The Nigerian government was responsible for election rigging and coups that ultimately worsened poverty, economic inequality, unemployment, and political instability, which further promoted corruption and thuggery. Fela's protest songs covered themes inspired by the realities of corruption and socio-economic inequality in Africa. Fela Kuti's political statements could be heard throughout Africa.

Kuti's open vocalization of the violent and oppressive regime controlling Nigeria didn't come without consequence. He was arrested on over 200 different occasions, including his longest stint of 20 months after his arrest in 1984. On top of the jail time, the corrupt government would send soldiers to beat Kuti, his family and friends, and destroy wherever he lived and whatever instruments or recordings he had.

In the 1970s, Kuti began to run outspoken political columns in the advertising space of daily and weekly newspapers such as The Daily Times and The Punch, bypassing editorial censorship in Nigeria's predominantly state controlled media.^[25] Published throughout the 1970s and early 1980s under the title "Chief Priest Say", these columns were extensions of Kuti's famous Yabi Sessions—consciousness-raising word-sound rituals, with himself as chief priest, conducted at his Lagos nightclub. Organized around a militantly Afrocentric rendering of history and the essence of black beauty, "Chief Priest Say" focused on the role of cultural hegemony in the continuing subjugation of Africans. Kuti addressed a number of topics, from explosive denunciations of the Nigerian Government's criminal behaviour; Islam and Christianity's exploitative nature, and evil multinational corporations; to deconstructions of Western medicine, Black Muslims, sex, pollution, and poverty. "Chief Priest Say" was cancelled, first by Daily Times then by Punch. The reason given was non-payment, but many commentators^[who?] have speculated that the papers' editors were increasingly pressured to stop publication, including by violence.

Political views

"Imagine Che Guevara and Bob Marley rolled into one person and you get a sense of Nigerian musician and activist Fela Kuti."

—Herald Sun, February 2011^[26]

Kuti was outspoken; his songs spoke his inner thoughts. His rise in popularity throughout the 1970s signaled a change in the relation between music as an art form and Nigerian socio-political discourse.^[27] In 1984 Anikulapo harshly criticized and insulted the then authoritarian president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari.^[28] One of his popular songs, Beast Of No Nation, refers to Buhari as an animal in a mad man's body; in Nigerian Pidgin "No be outside Buhari dey ee, na krase man be dat, animal in krase man skin ii". Kuti strongly believed in Africa and always preached peace among Africans. He thought the most important way for Africans to fight European cultural imperialism was to support traditional African religions and lifestyles.^[16] The American Black Power movement also influenced Fela's political views; he supported Pan-Africanism and socialism, and called for a united, democratic African republic.^[29]^[30] Some of the famous African leaders he supported during his lifetime include Kwame Nkrumah and Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso.^[31] He was a candid supporter of human rights, and many of his songs are direct attacks against dictatorships, specifically the militaristic governments of Nigeria in the 1970s and 1980s. He was also a social commentator, and he criticized his fellow Africans (especially the upper class) for betraying traditional African culture.

The African culture he believed in also included men having many wives (polygyny). The Kalakuta Republic was formed in part as a polygamist colony. In defense of polygyny he said: "A man goes for many women in the first place. Like in Europe, when a man is married, when the wife is sleeping, he goes out and fucks around. He should bring the women in the house, man, to live with him, and stop running around the streets!"^[32] Some characterize his views towards women as misogynist, and typically cite as evidence songs like "Mattress".^[33]^[34] In a more complex example, he mocks the aspiration of African women to European standards of ladyhood while extolling the values of the market woman in his song "Lady".^[34] In accordance with his beliefs, Fela Kuti married multiple women at the same time in 1978. ^[19]^[35]

Fela Kuti was also an outspoken critic of America. At a meeting during his 1981 Amsterdam tour, he "complained about the psychological warfare that American organizations like ITT and the CIA waged against developing nations in terms of language. He did not see why the terms 'Third World,' 'undeveloped,' or even worse, 'Non-aligned countries,' should be used, as they all implied inferiority."^[31]

Revival

Since Fela's death in 1997, there has been a revival of Fela's influence in music and popular culture, culminating in another re-release of his catalog controlled by Universal Music, Broadway and off-Broadway biographically based shows, and new bands, such as Antibalas, who carry the Afrobeat banner to a new generation of listeners.

In 1999, Universal Music France, under the aegis of Francis Kertekian, remastered the 45 albums that it controlled and released them on 26 compact discs. These titles were licensed to countries of the world, except Nigeria and Japan where Fela's music was controlled by other companies. In 2005, Universal Music USA licensed all of its world-music titles to the UK-based label Wrasse Records, which repackaged the same 26 CDs for distribution in the USA (replacing the MCA-issued titles there) and the UK. In 2009, Universal created a new deal for the USA with Knitting Factory Records and for Europe with PIAS, which included the release of the Fela! Broadway cast album. In 2013, FKO Ltd, the entity that owned the rights of all of Fela's compositions, was acquired by BMG Rights Management.

In 2003, an exhibition in the New York Museum for Contemporary Art titled "The Black President Exhibition" debuted and featured concerts, symposia, films, and the works of thirty-nine international artists.^[31]^[36]
Thomas McCarthy's 2008 film The Visitor depicted a disconnected professor (Oscar nominee Richard Jenkins) who wanted to play the djembe. He learns from a young Syrian (Haaz Sleiman) who tells the professor he will never truly understand African music unless he listens to Fela. The film features clips of Fela's "Open and Close" and "Je'nwi Temi (Don't Gag Me)".

In 2008, an off-Broadway production of Fela Kuti's life entitled Fela!, inspired by Carlos Moore's 1982 book Fela, Fela! This Bitch of a Life,^[37]^[38] began with a collaborative workshop between the Afrobeat band Antibalas and Tony award-winner Bill T. Jones. The show was a massive success, selling out shows during its run, and garnering much critical acclaim. On 22 November 2009, Fela! began a run on Broadway at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre. Jim Lewis helped co-write the play (along with Bill T. Jones), and obtained producer backing from Jay-Z and Will Smith, among others. On 4 May 2010, Fela! was nominated for 11 Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, Best Direction of a Musical for Bill T. Jones, Best Leading Actor in a Musical for Sahr Ngaujah, and Best Featured Actress in a Musical for Lillias White.^[39] In 2011 the London production of Fela! was made into a film.^[31] On 11 June 2012, it was announced that FELA! would return to Broadway for 32 performances.^[40]
On 18 August 2009, award-winning DJ J.Period released a free mixtape to the general public via his website that was a collaboration with Somali-born hip-hop artist K'naan paying tribute to Fela, Bob Marley and Bob Dylan, entitled The Messengers.

In October 2009, Knitting Factory Records began the process of re-releasing the 45 titles that Universal Music controls, starting with yet another re-release of the compilation The Best of the Black President in the USA. The rest were expected to be released in 2010.^{[needs update]}

Fela Son of Kuti: The Fall of Kalakuta is a stage play written by Onyekaba Cornel Best in 2010. It has had successful acclaims in 2010 as part of that year's Felabration celebration and returned in 2014 at the National Theatre and Freedom Park in Lagos. The play deals with events in a hideout a day after the fall of Kalakuta.
Although Fela Kuti is late, he is remembered as an influential icon that was brave enough to boldly voice his opinions on matters that affected the nation through his music. Furthermore, to celebrate this icon there is an annual festival ceremony "Felabration" held each year to celebrate the life of this music legend and his birthday.
The full-length documentary film Finding Fela, directed by Alex Gibney, received its premiere at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.

In addition, a movie by Focus Features, directed by Steve McQueen and written by Biyi Bandele about the life of Fela Kuti was rumoured to be in production 2010, with Chiwetel Ejiofor in the lead role, but has not eventuated.^[41]

Discography

Main article: Fela Kuti discography

Fela Fela Fela (1969)
Fela's London Scene (1971)
Why Black Man Dey Suffer (1971)
Live! (1971)
Shakara (1972)
Afrodisiac (1973)
Gentleman (1973)
Confusion (1975)
Expensive Shit (1975)
He Miss Road (1975)
Zombie (1976)
Stalemate (1977)
No Agreement (1977)
Sorrow Tears and Blood (1977)
Shuffering and Shmiling (1978)
Black President (1981)
Original Sufferhead (1981)
Unknown Soldier (1981)
Army Arrangement (1985)
Beasts of No Nation (1989)
Confusion Break Bones (1990)
The Best Best of Fela Kuti (1999)
The '69 Los Angeles Sessions (1969/2010)

Filmography

Finding Fela, 2014, Alex Gibney and Jack Gulick (Jigsaw Productions)
Fela in Concert, 1981 (VIEW)
Music is the Weapon, 1982, Stéphane Tchal-Gadjieff and Jean Jacques Flori (Universal Music)
Fela Live! Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and the Egypt '80 Band, 1984, recorded live at Glastonbury, England (Yazoo)
Fela Kuti: Teacher Don't Teach Me Nonsense & Berliner Jazztage '78 (Double Feature), 1984 (Lorber Films)
Femi Kuti — Live at the Shrine, 2005, recorded live in Lagos, Nigeria (Palm Pictures)

References

Ogunnaike, Lola (17 July 2003). "Celebrating the Life and Impact of the Nigerian Music Legend Fela". The New York Times. Manhattan, New York City: Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. Retrieved 18 November 2010.

Moore, Carlos (2012-12-14). Fela Kuti. This Bitch of a Life! (in German). Haffmans & Tolkemitt. ISBN 9783942989343.

"Barack Obama and the Original First Black President". Seattle Weekly. Retrieved 17 July 2009.

Moore, Carlos (2012-12-14). Fela Kuti. This Bitch of a Life! (in German). Haffmans & Tolkemitt. p. 1. ISBN 9783942989343.

Grass, Randall F. (1986-01-01). "Fela Anikulapo-Kuti: The Art of an Afrobeat Rebel". The Drama Review: TDR. 30 (1): 131–148. doi:10.2307/1145717. JSTOR 1145717.

Hamilton, Janice. Nigeria in Pictures, p. 70.

Albert Oikelome. "Stylistic Analysis of Afrobeat Music of Fela Anikulapo Kuti" (PDF). Analysisworldmusic.com. Retrieved 27 January 2013.

Lindsay Barrett, "Fela Kuti: Chronicle of A Life Foretold", The Wire, September 2011. Originally published in The Wire 169 (March 1998). Retrieved 13 June 2015.

Spencer, Neil (2010-10-30). "Fela Kuti remembered: 'He was a tornado of a man, but he loved humanity'". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2016-10-01.

Olatunji, Michael (2007). "Yabis: A Phenomenon in the Contemporary Nigerian Music" (PDF). The Journal of Pan African Studies. 1: 26–46.

David Ryshpan. "Victor Olaiya, All Star Soul International". Exclaim!. Retrieved 3 November 2009.

Tewksbury, Drew (December 13, 2011). "Fela Kuti's Lover and Mentor Sandra Smith Talks About Afrobeat's L.A. Origins, as Fela! Musical Arrives at the Ahmanson". L.A. Weekly. Retrieved April 3, 2016.

"Meaning of Anikulapo in". Nigerian.name. 11 January 2008. Retrieved 1 October 2011.

"Fela Anikulapo Kuti: The 'ghost' resurrects and the beat goes on, a preview by The Independence". Emnnews.com. Retrieved 1 October 2011.

Bobby Gass credits Allmusic

Grass, Randall F. (1986). "Fela Anikulapo-Kuti: The Art of an Afrobeat Rebel". The Drama Review: TDR. MIT Press. 30 (1): 131–148. doi:10.2307/1145717. JSTOR 1145717.

Matthew McKinnon (12 August 2005). "Rebel Yells: A protest music mixtape". Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 22 November 2009.

Culshaw, Peter (15 August 2004). "The big Fela". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 2 May 2010.

Collins, John (2015-06-05). Fela: Kalakuta Notes. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 9780819575401.

Adenekan, Shola (15 February 2006). "Obituary: Dr Beko Ransome-Kuti". The Guardian. London.

"Success stories". Amnesty International. Retrieved 9 June 2012.

As Iwedi Ojinmah points out in his article "Baba is Dead – Long Live Baba,"

Bordowitz, Hank (2004). Noise of the World: Non--‐Western Musicians In Their Own Words. Canada: Soft Skull Press. p. 170.

Dappa-Biriye, Harold J. R. (1995-01-01). Minority politics in pre- and post- independence Nigeria. University of Port Harcourt Press.

This section includes material copied verbatim from "Chief Priest Say", at chimurengalibrary.co.za, released under GFDL.

Blanche Clarke, "Man of Beats Brings a Message with him", Herald Sun, 4 February 2011.

Shonekan, Stephanie (2009-01-01). "Fela's Foundation: Examining the Revolutionary Songs of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti and the Abeokuta Market Women's Movement in 1940s Western Nigeria". Black Music Research Journal. 29 (1): 127–144. JSTOR 20640673.

Denselow, Robin (2015-04-01). "Nigeria's new president Muhammadu Buhari – the man who jailed Fela Kuti". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2016-10-04.

Stewart, Alexander (2013-12-05). "Make It Funky: Fela Kuti, James Brown and the Invention of Afrobeat". American Studies. 52 (4): 99–118. doi:10.1353/ams.2013.0124. ISSN 2153-6856.

Hadj-Moussa, R.; Nijhawan, M. (2014-07-09). Suffering, Art, and Aesthetics. Springer. ISBN 9781137426086.

Collins, John (2015-06-05). Fela: Kalakuta Notes. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 9780819575401.

"Fela Kuti". Jaybabcock.com. Retrieved 1 October 2011.

Stanovsky, Derek (1998). "Fela and His Wives: The Import of a Postcolonial Masculinity". Jouvert. english.chass.ncsu.edu. Retrieved 16 March 2010.

Olaniyan, Tejumola (2001-05-01). "The Cosmopolitan Nativist: Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and the Antinomies of Postcolonial Modernity". Research in African Literatures. 32 (2): 76–89. ISSN 1527-2044.

Moore, Carlos; Gil, Gilberto (1982-01-01). Fela: This Bitch of a Life. Chicago Review Press. ISBN 9781556528354.

"BOMB Magazine — Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, New Museum of Contemporary Art by Snigdha Koirala". bombmagazine.org. Retrieved 2016-11-29.

Gregory Bossler (13 July 2012). "Fela!: Review Roundup". Gregorybossler.com. Retrieved 27 January 2013.

R. Scott Reedy (3 May 2012). "Theatergoers can't stay in their seats during 'Fela!'". Marshfield Mariner. Retrieved 27 January 2013.

Tony Award Nominations, 2010 Archived 9 May 2010 at the Wayback Machine.

Andrew Gans and Adam Hetrick. "Fela! Will Play Limited Summer Return Engagement on Broadway". Playbill. Retrieved 21 November 2012.

Brendan Bettinger (5 May 2010). "Chiwetel Ejiofor Fela Kuti Steve McQueen-Directed Biopic". Collider.com. Retrieved 1 October 2011.

External links

Official website
Fela Kuti at Find a Grave
Fela Kuti at AllMusic
Fela Kuti discography at Discogs
Fela Kuti at the Internet Movie Database
Book of Afrobeat Drumming
"Fela’s Marriage to Twenty-Seven Women was a Noble Act – Oscar-winner Alex Gibney", Xclusive Interview.
Alex Hannaford, "'He was in a godlike state'", The Guardian, 25 July 2007.
Fela Kuti article from the New Official Ginger Baker Archive and Drummers forum launched by the Baker family September 2010
Fela Kuti biography at World Music Central, includes biography, discography and bibliography

Welcome to Sound Projections

Saturday, April 22, 2017

Fela Kuti (1938-1997): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, arranger, ensemble leader, social activist, cultural critic, philosopher, and teacher