' AZZ MUSIC INFLUENCES ON THE WORK OF 
FELA ANIKULAPO-KUTI MICHAEL VEAL 
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contribution to jazz evolution. 
the most associated with jazz music. Afrobeat and jazz is complicated by the 
Although his music contains a number conflicting cultural perspectives which 
of jazz elements, however, Fela does frequently occur when any artistic 
not play 'jazz' in the traditional stylistic expression crosses cultural borders and 
sense of the term. Nevertheless, there 
arc reasons why his music is so strongly 
associated with jazz in Nigeria, and I 
intend to examine some of those 
reasons in this essay. The major 
questions I will address are: One, what 
arc the specific jazz elements in Fela's 
Afrobcat? Two, how did these come to 
exist in his music? Three, to what 
extent can Afrobeat be called jazzstyle? 
Hopefully, this discussion will 
demonstrate the process by which Fela 
gradually distilled jazz elements into a 
distinctly African form, while 
clarifying the relationship between jazz 
and Afrobeat on the stylistic, symbolic 
and functional levels. 
Fela may be placed in a generation of 
world musicians born during the 1930s 
who fused jazz with a variety of local 
styles to achieve international 
recognition. Among these are Hugh 
Masekela of South Africa, Abdullah 
assumes a new functional and symbolic 
identity. Fundamentally an African- 
American expression, jazz has in fact 
been subjected to a variety of new 
interpretations in cultural spheres as 
dissimilar as Japan, West Africa, Russia 
and Western Europe. While Fela's 
Afrobeat style is strongly associated 
with jazz in Nigeria, attempts to define 
his music as jazz have been met with 
strong resistance in Europe and the 
United States. An example of this is 
Afrika '70's headlining performance at 
the 1978 Berlin Jazz Festival causing a 
controversy in the German music press 
in which jazz critics denigrated the 
musicianship of the Afrika '70 band 
and Fela in particular. There are several 
fundamental aspects - political, cultural, 
religious - which mitigate against 
Afrobeat's simple characterization as 
jazz. In spite of this, I will assert that 
Fela's work - while not 'jazz' in the 
strict sense - does represent a 
In order to provide the widest perspective 
on the subject, it is necessary to discuss 
the continuous circulation of musical 
elements of cultural symbols between 
West Africa and its descendants in the 
Americas, a process which has operated 
at least since the earliest years of this 
century, influencing stylistic 
development throughout Africa and the 
African diaspora. This will enable us to 
place Fela's work in the larger context 
of jazz's historic influence upon West 
African popular music through the time 
that the Afrobeat style was developed in 
the late 1960s and early 1970s. 
It must be noted that many of the musical 
practices identified as 'jazz' have strong 
West African origins. They acquired 
their distinct character through a 
blending with Western European 
elements in the Americas, and they in 
turn served to transform West African 
music. The current African-American 
interest in traditional African music and 
culture, and the reverse influence of 
African-American expressive forms 
such as jazz and rap music in 
contemporary Africa, are merely the 
8
latest examples of a historical cycle of 
circulating cross-influence. While 
characterizations of Africa as the 
'traditional' and America as the 
'modern' are overtly simplistic and 'Bebop and modal 
differed from earlier jazz 
styles in that they were 
more abstract and were 
essentialist in nature, the symbolic poles 
of tradition and innovation have 
contributed equally to the construction 
of contemporary pan-African identity. 
Fela's music is an exemplary of this 
process. meant for reflective 
listening than social 
dancing. Ifius, neither of 
these styles was 
particularly popular in 
flfrica, and Mela's first 
Since the introduction of phonograph 
recording technology into West Africa 
in the 1920s, there have been successive 
phases of jazz influence on the popular 
music of the region. Ragtime and 
Dixieland jazz (along with minstrelsy) 
was popular in the 1920s, while bigband 
swing styles were popular in the 
1930s. The main conduits for the 
introduction of these styles into West 
Africa were highlife musicians such as 
E. T. Mensah and Bobby Benson - 
musically literate bandleaders who were 
proficient on Western wind instruments 
and who had traditionally performed a 
variety of Western musical genres such 
as foxtrots, twosteps, 
waltzes to 
entertain colonial 
administrators 
and African 
elites. 
attempts at playing jazz 
in 9{jgeria were doomed 
to failure. 
E. T. Mensah: Highlife impressario. 
arrangements. In its most developed 
form - such as the experiments with 
Afro-Cuban Latin Jazz, important 
linkages were forged between neo- 
African musical practices (such as the 
The jazz 
influence also 
took more 
i n d i r e c t l y , 
through its 
presence in other 
styles which in 
turn influenced 
West African 
music. The 
influenceof Afro- 
Caribbean styles 
from Jamaica, 
Cuba and 
Trinidad was a decisive turning point 
for highlife during the 1940s. A creation 
of African descendants in the Americas, 
these styles combined transplanted West 
African rhythms with jazz-derived horn 
liturgical music accompanying the neo- 
Yoruba Santeria cult in Cuba), 
European compositional techniques(by 
jazz composers such as Mario Bauza 
and Machito), and virtuoso African- 
American jazz improvisers such as 
Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. 
Therein lies one importantexplanation 
for the popularity of Afro-Caribbean 
sounds throughout Africa: the blending 
of African and European musical 
elements resulted in a modern, 
cosmopolitan sound which was the 
perfect sonic match for the rapid 
modernization Africa experienced 
during the colonial and post-colonial 
period. Thus, the musical fusion of 
higlife became the music most 
associated with cultural pride, national 
identity, and political independence. 
The use of the word 'jazz' in the names 
of many African dance bands of this 
period (Bembeya Jazz, Rocafil Jazz) 
functions on three levels - musically 
(indicating the presence of jazz stylistic 
elements in the music), functionally 
(indicating large dance-bands utilising 
W e s t e r n 
instruments and 
performing for 
u p p e r - c l a s s 
audiences), and 
symbolically 
( i n d i c a t i n g 
'modernity' and 
international, 
cosmopolitan 
identity). 
It is the Ghanaian 
highlife bandleader 
E. T. Mensah who, 
with the help of his 
drummer, Guy 
Warren (Kofi 
Ghanaba), is 
widely credited 
with integrating 
modern jazz and 
Afro-Caribbean elements into highlife 
music. Mensah and the Tempos caused 
a storm during the Nigerian tour of the 
late 1950s. Soon, Nigerian
Fix 1 Sonny Rollins, 2: Miles Davis, 
J: Thelonious Monk, 4: John Coltrane, 
5: Louis Armstrong 
. review 10
bandleader Bobby Benson transformed 
his act from a variety show to Mensah's 
style of highlife, and begun developing 
distinctly Nigerian highlife sound with 
his Jam Session Orchestra. Benson's 
band spawned a host of younger 
bandleaders including Zeal Onyia, Rex 
Lawson and Victor Olaiya who gave 
the young Fela his first performing 
experience in the 1950s as a singer with 
his Cool Cats highlife band. Fela was 
already heir to decades of sty 1 istic crossbreeding 
between jazz and indigenous 
styles. 
Fela's years of study in a British music 
school during the late 1950s and early 
1960s exposed him to newer styles of 
jazz - the bebop style popularized by 
Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in 
the 1940s and the modal style 
popularized by Miles Davis and John 
Coltrane in the early 1960s. It was 
initially his goal to introduce these 
traditional styles to Nigerian audiences 
upon his return with his Fela Ransome- 
Kuti Quartet. However, this presented 
a creative quandary. Bebop and modal 
differed from earlier jazz styles in that 
they were more abstract and were meant 
for reflective listening than social 
dancing. Thus, neither of these styles 
was particularly popular in Africa, and 
Fela's first attempts at playing jazz in 
Nigeria were doomed to failure. 
Regardless of his inability to attract 
large numbers of Nigerian jazz listeners, 
however, jazz remained an important 
catalyst for the synthesis of African and 
Western musical traditions. 
The mid-1960s found Fela affecting a 
compromise in his music, playing a 
style he called highlife jazz with his 
Koola Lobitos band. Songs UkeBonfo, 
Fere and Lo Wa Se Se combined the 
danceability of traditional highlife with 
elements drawn from jazz such as horn 
solos, elaborate horn themes, more 
complex harmonic progressions and bigband 
style of orchestration. Koola 
Lobitos' music also showed the clear 
influence of Afro-Cuban music in songs 
such as Oritshe and Abiara. However, 
Koola Lobitos' music did not meet the 
success Fela had hoped; Africa was 
falling under influence of African- 
American rhythm-and-blues music and 
popularity of highlife was rapidly 
declining. 
In 1969, Fela and his Koola Lobitos 
band took a year-long trip to the United 
States where, in addition to experiencing 
a political and cultural awakening, he 
was exposed to the latest stylistic phase 
of jazz. This was the free-jazz typified 
by the work of Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, 
Cecil Taylor and the later work of John 
Coltrane. In addition to representing a 
radical break with jazz traditions, these 
styles also carried strong political 
associations. Concurrently with the 
cultural awakening African-Americans 
were experiencing during this period, 
many African-American free-jazz 
musicians hoped to devise a non- 
Western musical logic which would 
resist comprehension and exploitation 
by white musicians. Linked to thie 
endeavour was an exploration of sonic 
parallels to non-Western musical 
traditions from Africa and India. Finally, 
free-jazz was perceived by many as 
expressing the anger and frustrations of 
the younger generation of African- 
Americans. As this influence of freejazz 
upon Fela took place concurrently 
with his political awakening, it was 
inevitable that the style's influence, with 
its strong political overtones, would be 
evident in his subsequent work. 
During the same period, there was also 
an indirect jazz influence on Fela 
transmitted via rhythm-and-blues music, 
another primary stylistic current in his 
later works. The best example is the 
music of James Brown, a major influence 
whose work had become increasingly 
politicized by the time of the latter's 
U.S. visit. Brown integrated free-jazz 
elements into his style to the extent that 
the would reinforce this political mood. 
Thus when, for example, in his 1970 
Super Bad, he asked his tenor 
saxophonist Sinclair Pinckney to 'blow 
me some Trane' (a reference to John 
Coltrane), he was making an implicit 
political statement as well as an obvious 
musical one. 
The influences of these various phases 
of jazz would be evident in Fela's artistic 
breakthrough, his Afrobeat music of the 
1970s. This music combined a James 
Brown-styled use of the rhythm section, 
a modal harmonic approach, jazz-sty led 
instrumental solos and ensemble 
passages, and indigenous percussion. 
These elements were all united by 
traditional West African approach to 
composition and structuring utilising 
traditional devices such as call-andresponse 
singing, percussive 
articulation, ensemble stratification 
(layering of parts), hocketing (simple 
parts combining to form complex 
structures), and extensive use of 
ostinatos (repeating pattern). The Afrika 
'70 band featured a number of strong 
jazz-styled soloists including Fela 
(saxophones and keyboards), Lekan 
Animasaun (baritone saxophone), 
Tunde Williams (trumpet), Igo Chico 
(tenor saxophone), and the masterful 
drum set player Tony Allen. Afrika '70 
Compositions from the 1970s such as 
Water No Get Enemy, Suegbe Pako 
and Who No Know Go Know 
demonstrate the seamless blend of 
highlife, jazz, Caribbean and soul 
elements in Fela's music. 
Since the late 1970s, Fela has continued 
to elaborate upon the Afrobeat 
conception according to both jazz and 
traditional West African points of 
reference. His Egypt '80band has nearly 
doubled in size in comparison to Afrika 
'70. He has doubled the size of the horn 
section, and included a rhythm piano 
which clearly recalls McCoy Tyners's 
'comping' accompaniment of John 
Coltrane. His compositions for Egypt 
'80 have become longer and more 
complex; recent arrangements such as 
Custom Check Point (1980s), Just Like 
That (1980s) snAMusic Against Second 
Slavery (1990s) demonstrate his matery 
as a big-band composer. The Egypt '80 
band has also introduced a number of 
11
talented new improvisers to the public 
including Keji Hamilton (bass guitar 
and piano), Rilwan Fagbemi (baritone 
saxophone), Yinusa Akinbosun (tenor 
saxophone). Olu Ifayehun (trumpet), 
Duro Ikujenyo (piano). Dele Shosimi 
(piano) and Nwokoma Stephen Nkem 
(trumpet) among others. 
At the same time, Fela has looked toward 
traditional models for inspiration. He 
has enlarged the size 
of the vocal chorus, 
integrated traditional 
drums such as the 
gbedu, and 
composed in 
traditional meters in 
works such as 
Government 
Chicken Boy (based 
on a typical apala 
pattern) or 
Confusion Break 
FELA 
& EGYPT 80 
WIL4. «*1W6> OUT 
Bone (based on 
traditional 12/8 
triplet rhythm). Since 
the early 1980s, he 
has referred to his 
music as 'classical 
African music', and 
the popularity of his 
work throughout the 
Black world reflects 
both his avowed 
cultural stance and the way in which 
elements of pan-African musical 
traditions have fused seamlessly in his 
work, resulting in a profoundly 'Black' 
musical mood. 
&"VH£A 
Some listeners have attempted to 
minimise the jazz element of Fela's 
music by comparing the band's 
instrumentalists unfavourably with 
African-American improvisers, citing 
the rigidity of Fela's formal structures, 
or dismissing it as mere popular music 
with political or high-art pretensions. 
These listeners neglect that one, virtuosic 
improvisation in the African-American 
sense has been the goal primary of these 
players, functioning as they do in an 
entirely different musical and cultural 
. review 
context; two, the boundaries between 
'high' and 'popular' art are not as distinct 
in West African culture as they are in 
the West; and third, the essence of jazz 
is not reducible to any single criteria 
such as complexity of improvisations or 
harmonic density. 
Recent neo-conservative definitions of 
jazz have to equate social dancing with 
frivolity, banality and lack of artistic or 
BEASTS O§ NO NATION 
$*, •;w»lSS*^S»>l^™;J»*i^-i««ls 
philosophical depth. These moves are 
clearly politically-motivated and 
attempt to position jazz as an equal of 
European art music by emphasizing its 
reflective, abstract qualities as a measure 
of its seriousness. Attempting to distance 
themselves from (frequently) counterhegemonic 
forms of African-American 
creativity such as rap, the neoconservative 
musicians strive to achieve 
approval of the dominant white culture 
during aperiod of increased support for 
the arts in general. The funk music 
which forms the musical foundation of 
rap and which informed Fela's Afrobeat 
is based on the same structural principles 
as much traditional music of West 
Africa. Thus, implicit in the neoconservative 
critique are the 
assumptions that one, seriousness of 
to designate creative work 
which falls outside of the functional or 
stylistic norms. In the case of African- 
Americas jazz avant-garde, it may be 
more precise to note that such musicians 
were attempting to introduce elements 
of world perming traditions into African- 
American jazz practice, integrating non 
musical artistic media such as dance 
and poetry. John Coltrane formed 
musical relationships with Nigerian 
percussionist Babatunde Olatunji and 
Indian sitar master Ravi Shankar. 
Ornette Coleman collaborated with 
Gnawa musicians in Morocco and 
traditional Yorubaand Hausa musicians 
in Nigeria. Miles Davis' ensemble of 
the 1970s featured West African, 
Caribbean and South Indian musicians 
and instrumentation, while Sun Ra's 
aesthetic purpose and social intent 
cannot be conveyed through a musical 
language based in the stylistic norms of 
the Black world; and, two, any definition 
of classicism must conform to the 
functional norms of European reflective 
art music, as opposed to those of 
Afrocentric social dance genres in which 
the boundaries between high, popular, 
traditional and contemporary are often 
indistinct. They neglect the fact that 
s o c i a l l y - f u n c t i o n a l 
communal music in West 
Africa has long been a vehicle 
for the most profound insights 
and that there have been 
phases of jazz in African- 
America in which 
danceability was an important 
criteria of success. 
The neo-conservative 
arguments are also based on 
a limited understanding of the 
jazz 'tradition'. The work 
most often excluded in the 
neo-conservative view is that 
of avant-gardemusicians like 
John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, 
Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra and 
Art Ensemble of Chicago. 
Derived from European 
culture, avant-garde has often 
been used as an umbrella term 
12
containing a deeper ritual significance 
than the local nightclub or the concert 
hall. These factors must be taken into 
serious consideration when constructing 
a composite, contemporary definition 
of 'jazz' which eludes simplistic criteria. 
A number of prominent jazz musicians 
acknowledged the influence of Fela's 
music on their work. Trumpeter Bowie 
played with Fela and Afrika '70 during 
an extended visit to Nigeria in 1977 and 
was featured as a soloist on a number of 
Afrika '70 recordings including 
Frustration, Dog Eat Dog and No 
Agreement. Bowie in turn has recorded 
Fela's Zombie with his own group, the 
Art Ensemble of Chicago. Vibraphonist 
Roy Ayers has also toured and recorded 
with Afrika '70 in Nigeria. Bowie and 
Ayers have made a number of guest 
appearances with Fela in the United 
States as has pianist Randy Weston. 
More recently, saxophonist Branford 
Marsalis has included samples of Fela's 
Beast of No Nation on his 1994 project 
Buckshot Le Fonque. It is thus clear 
that Fela's influence may be felt 
throughout various regions of jazz 
practice including the avantgarde, neoclassicist 
and fusion movements. 
Meanwhile, Fela's music has been the 
primary catalyst for the development of 
a movement of younger Nigerian jazzinfluenced 
players including his son 
Femi Anikulapo-Kuti, Bisade 
Ologunde, Kola Ogunkoya and Funsho 
Ogundipe. 
Fela Anikulapo-Kuti' s ultimate success 
lies in his linkage of counter-hegemonic 
socio-political protest, communal 
pleasure and a deeply-rooted mood of 
musical profundity; all of these have 
characterized the essence of jazz during 
performance traditions in their stage 
presentation. Thus, these musicians were 
Arkestra regularly included African 
percussionists and dancers and light 
different phases of its development. 
Thus, my conclusion is that - in addition 
to its contribution to African popular 
music, African-American funk, and 
world political music - Fela's work 
represents a significant contribution to 
the development of jazz. IGRI 
at the forefront of attempt to devise a 
culturally-aware presentation 
shows. The Art Ensemble of Chicago 
also draws strongly on non-Western 
13