Tony Allen

Serving as drummer and unofficial music director for Fela Kuti’s Africa 70 ensemble from 1968 through 1979, Tony Allen co-created Afrobeat and pioneered Afro-funk. Working on his own, he wove pop, jazz, folk, soul, makossa, hip-hop, highlife, R&B, and dub into his recordings while joining forces with hundreds of musicians spanning Eastern and Western lineages. More than thirty albums appeared during his years alongside Kuti, after which he launched his own output fronting the Afro Messengers on the 1979 release No Discrimination. The 1985 album Never Expect Power Always, also known as N.E.P.A., recorded with his Afrobeat 2000 group, carried his distinctive Afro-funk hybrid to fresh listeners within the post-punk circles of France and London. Critics hailed 1999’s Black Voices as the definitive showcase of his Afrobeat and Afro-funk fusions, whereas the subsequent Psyco on Da Bus captured the height of his avant-garde explorations. Returning to Nigeria in 2006, he revisited core Afrobeat on Lagos No Shaking (Lagos Is OK). The next year Allen joined Damon Albarn, Simon Tong, and Paul Simonon for the self-titled debut by their collective, The Good, The Bad & The Queen. Solo work resumed with the well-received Secret Agent in 2009. Blue Note issued his Tribute to Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers in 2017. One month before his death in 2020, Allen finished Rejoice, a collection of tracks cut with Hugh Masekela in 2010. Later releases, among them the 2021 Joan as Police Woman collaboration The Solution Is Restless and 2023’s JID018—an installment in Adrian Younge’s Jazz Is Dead series—further illustrate Allen’s breadth and lasting impact.

A self-taught player, Allen first took up drums at age eighteen while employed as a technician at a Nigerian radio station. Within nine months he had turned professional. Although he and Kuti had crossed paths on the Nigerian circuit in the early 1960s with separate groups, they began performing American-style jazz together only in 1964; soon afterward they adopted an African-inflected highlife jazz approach that they maintained for five years.

When Africa 70 formed in 1969, Allen and Kuti sought wider international attention. During their initial North American tour a few months later, Allen encountered the music of James Brown, Max Roach, and Art Blakey. Despite widespread praise, the band confronted persistent hardships—financial strain, racial prejudice, and state repression. Arrested amid the earliest of repeated government raids on Black townships in 1974, Allen endured three days in custody. The following year he issued his debut leader date, Progress. After closing his final engagement with Kuti and Africa 70 at the 1979 Berlin Jazz Festival, he continued leading Lagos until relocating to Europe in 1984. Following a brief stay in London, he settled in France in 1985, working as a session drummer for transplanted African artists including Ray Lema and Manu DiBango while releasing Never Expect Power Always (N.E.P.A.).

Activity slowed for the next decade, yet Allen resurfaced in the late 1990s with successive singles that led to Home Cooking in 2002. Reissues of his 1970s solo albums emerged around the same period, joined by Eager Hands and Restless Feet: The Best of Tony Allen, which surveyed his post-Fela output. A live album followed in 2004, and 2006 brought a return to Afrobeat foundations with Lagos No Shaking, tracked in Nigeria’s largest city.

Also in 2006 Allen helped establish the British alternative-rock group the Good, the Bad & the Queen with Paul Simonon of the Clash, Simon Tong of the Verve, and Damon Albarn of Blur; the ensemble’s well-received self-titled album appeared in 2007. An additional set of new Afrobeat material, Secret Agent, surfaced in 2009 alongside Inspiration Information, Vol. 4 with Jimi Tenor. He further contributed to Zap Mama’s Supermoon and ReCreation.

Black Voices received a 2010 remaster and appeared in unedited session form as Black Voices Re-Visited. Allen also united with Albarn and Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea in Rocket Juice & the Moon, whose self-titled album arrived in 2013. Solo recording resumed in 2014 with French trio the Jazz Bastards; the resulting Film of Life, issued by Jazz Village in October of that year, included appearances by Albarn, Nigerian-American singer Kuku, and the vocal ensemble Adunni and Nefertiti, reaching the Top Five of the World Music Albums chart.

Following a tour, Allen resumed collaborative studio work that encompassed sessions with the Moritz von Oswald Trio on Sounding Lines, the club single “All for You” with Jimi Tenor and Nicole Willis, and the track “2nd Chance” on Cerrone’s Red Lips. He also released Nu Guinea with his electronics-and-percussion outfit the Tony Allen Experiments and appeared on the Afro-Haitian Experimental Orchestra’s AHEO and Instituto’s Violar. May 2017 saw the four-track EP A Tribute to Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers on Blue Note, performed by an international sextet and septet. That September he issued the full-length The Source, recorded with saxophonist Yann Jankielewicz and featuring Albarn. He likewise performed on Oumou Sangare’s Mogoya. The Good, the Bad & the Queen delivered their second album, Merrie Land, in November 2018.

March 2020 brought the collaborative album Rejoice on World Circuit. Friends since Kuti introduced them in the early 1970s, Masekela and Allen had long discussed recording together; their schedules finally aligned in the U.K. in 2010, prompting producer Nick Gold to capture the encounter. The unfinished tapes of original compositions remained archived until Masekela’s passing in 2018. With the estate’s approval, Allen and Gold retrieved the masters and completed the project in mid-2019 at the original London studio, enlisting Joe Armon-Jones of Ezra Collective, Tom Herbert of Acoustic Ladyland and the Invisible, Mutale Chashi of Kokoroko, and Steve Williamson. The set proved one of Allen’s final major statements; he died in Paris on April 30, 2020, at age seventy-nine after suffering a heart attack.

Blue Note marked the first anniversary of his death with There Is No End in May 2021. Allen and producer Vincent Taeger had begun the project in 2019, completing early tracking and all drumming; Taeger and co-producer Vincent Taurelle then finished the record with contributors including Danny Brown, Sampa the Great, and Lava La Rue. Allen had also recorded overnight in November 2019 with Joan as Police Woman and Dave Okumu of the Invisible; those tracks appeared as The Solution Is Restless in November 2021. Additional posthumous material surfaced in 2023 as JID018, Allen’s entry in Adrian Younge’s Jazz Is Dead series. Drawn from 2020 studio dates, the album captured Allen laying down dense Afrobeat rhythms for Younge and accompanying musicians to build layered, hypnotic textures.