"Biggest drummer in the world", Tony Allen, has died

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Some said he was the greatest drummer in the world. Tony Allen died in Paris, France on April 30. The Nigerian musician had created Afrobeat alongside Fela Kuti.

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Tony Allen was the drummer of genius, a legend, a pioneer of Afrobeat with his master and friend Fela Kuti. The two young Nigerian musicians discovered the fight and the claims of African-Americans like Martin Luther King, Malcom X and the Black Panther Party during a tour in the 1960s in the United States.

From this political learning will arise a musical current, Afrobeat, with committed texts and a rhythm at the crossroads of jazz and Africa. Nigeria will become the cradle of it. The path of the two men separated in the late 1970s. Tony Allen will always prefer the camp of music, pure, experimental, sometimes flirting with electro.

In the early 1980s, he moved to Paris and recorded the drums on several albums of French singers such as Jean-Michel Jarre, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Sébastien Tellier. In 2005, he returned to his roots with the album "Lagos No Shaking" ("Lagos, do not tremble"), recorded in Nigeria. The following year, he was on a new adventure, a member of the supergroup The Good, The Bad and the Queen, formed by Damon Albarn, the leader of the group Blur. The two men, 40 years apart, admire and multiply the projects.

► Also read: Aux sources de Tony Allen

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