Tony Allen A Tribute To Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers (2017)

The drummer and unofficial music director of the late Fela Kuti's band, Africa 70, from 1968 until 1979, Tony Allen (born Tony Oladipo Allen) helped create the sounds of Afro-beat. With his solo recordings, however, Allen has refused to remain stagnant, incorporating dub and avant-garde hip-hop influences into his modern African dance music.

Whether he’s playing with Fela Kuti or Damon Albarn, the Nigerian drummer Tony Allen rarely compromises. “I don’t play funk or jazz,” he says. “I play Afrobeat.” This 25-minute mini-album, his first release for Blue Note, ostensibly pays tribute to one of the great hard-bop bandleaders, but Allen still refuses to deviate from his own personal pulse a jittery, back-to-front pattern that sounds like he’s constantly soloing. Allen doesn’t actually “swing” at all on these four standards associated with Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, instead putting each through his own Afrobeat prism.

On September 8, Afrobeat legend Tony Allen will release The Source, the Nigerian-born Paris-based drummer's debut full-length album for Blue Note Records, following the tantalizing 4-track EP release A Tribute to Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.

Drum legend Tony Allen has seen a childhood dream come true. He even says that when he made The Source (his debut album for Blue Note Records), it was the best recording in his whole life. Coming from Allen, that’s not a casual statement: he is 76 years old and his career goes back 50 years, not to mention recordings by the hundred. The saxophonist Yann Jankielewicz, who has been playing alongside him for nearly a decade, observes: “Tony has never played drums as well as this. He's never had as much freedom, never had as much power as he does today.”