• Tony Allen Last visit to Madrid

The causes have not transpired, but Nigerian drummer Tony Allen has just died at his residence in Paris, at the age of 79. Allen reinvented African rhythms to dream a new music for the black continent and give it a generous future, a kind of jazz-funk rooted in hypnotic and ecstatic effects that was called afrobeat, the true germ of everything that sounds today in any neighborhood of any great African city.

That new musical seed caught on in the late 1960s, in a revolutionary decade also for Africa, led by his companion and compatriot Fela Kuti, in the end, the most widely known figure of that new sound heartbeat. One of the last performances of Tony Allen in our country took place last year, within the programming of the Madrid festival Veranos de La Villa, together with the DJ Mills , a reference of the American techno with whom he had been collaborating since 2012.

Tony Oladipo Allen (Lagos, 1940-Partis, 2020) represents like few others the organic connection between jazz and African music, which in his case gave rise to this new artistic expression with its own identity and cause, since after the cultural movement it was also They were waving pan-African political slogans . The great laboratory of that cry was the Fela Kuti Africa 70 group, which Tony Allen powered from 1968 to 1979; the drummer has already embraced the future and has never abandoned that philosophy -or arguably ideology-, moreover, he continued to explore it and increase it in his own bands, such as the Afro Messengers (with whom he recorded the monumental album No discrimination ), Lagos No Shaking ( Lagos is OK ) or the better known recently The Good, the Bad and the Queen. At the same time, the musical authority of Tony Allen was requested by all kinds of artists, while putting his talent at the service of African musicians such as Ray Lema, Baaba Maal, Oumou Sangare or Manu Dibango, among others.

In 2009 he released his first album for the great British record label World Circuit, delivering another anthological album, Secret agent , which received a planetary echo and was one of the most critical moments of his career. This label has just published what will already be a posthumous album by both Tony Allen and the South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela - another African jazz icon who died two years ago -, Rejoice . The couple had raised this collaboration since the 1970s, when both gravitated in the orbit of Fela Kuti, but not until that gold producer who is Nick Gold reunited them.

The death of Tony Allen leaves the heart of African music without rhythm , although his heartbeat will continue to beat in the new generations of musicians who follow his doctrine, knowing that he opened a window that, even today, no one has yet managed to close. Today he leaves us a record legacy that surpasses seventy titles, thirty of which he recorded with Fela Kuti and some imperishable jewels such as Black voices . Today it is clear that Tony Allen not only placed African music in modernity, but gave him a speech, a philosophy and a reason to live tomorrow.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • music
  • Nigeria
  • culture
  • Africa

Music Saxophonist Lee Konitz, venerable grandfather of the great history of jazz, dies from the coronavirus

MúsicaBisbal, Aitana and their "tribute to people who manage to have fun"

Theater30,000 shows canceled and 130 million lost; the stage sector asks the State for help