One of the joys of the Greatest Hits format is its ability to telescope time, to essay the evolution of an artist within an hour or so. At their best, such discs can finesse convoluted history into an easily digested narrative.
The Best of the Black President 2 kind of fails at this aim, at over 150 minutes long. But it’s still an unreservedly recommended purchase to the Fela Kuti neophyte.
Fela’s back catalogue doesn’t lend itself to such compilation, for a number of reasons.
For one, few jams in Kuti’s worthy catalogue last less than 10 minutes – most much longer – so even though this set boasts two very full CDs (plus an excellent DVD of Fela’s 1984 Glastonbury Festival performance, if you plump for the deluxe edition, which you should), it only numbers 12 tracks.
For another, once he settled into the martial funk of his trademark Afrobeat sound, Kuti was less interested in evolution, and more interested in eking all possible inspiration from his unmistakeable sound.
That isn’t to say these tracks, plucked from throughout his career, are in any way samey.
This revolutionary sprawl stretches from the kinetic and restless carnival-riot of Black Man’s Cry – from his 1971 live collaboration with Cream’s Ginger Baker, and about as ecstatically adrenalising a 12 minutes as this writer could possibly stand – through to the meditative slow burn of He Miss Road.
The latter is a restless shuffle brought to life by Fela’s playful organ playing and the Africa ‘70’s luminous horns. Elsewhere, the searing Everything Scatter is a bristling 10 minutes of chicken-scratch guitar, choral chants, fiery sax and steroidal rhythm that captures funk at its most progressive.
While this release might struggle to encompass so vast and profound a career within its discs, its judiciously chosen tracks deliver a faultless introduction to Fela’s work.
His vivid life story – involving riots and revolutions, murders and multiple wives, fodder for the massively successful stage musical – often threatens to overshadow his music.
But collected here is sulphurous and fiercely funky magic that could hold its own against all comers, and is likely to provoke obsession within all who hear its righteous call.
Stevie Chick
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. Originally published on BBC Music.
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Weirdomusic Review: Fela Kuti – Anthology 2
Weirdomusic Review: Fela Kuti – Live in Detroit 1986
Buy Fela Kuti CDs from Amazon.com
Fela Kuti @ Wikipedia
Felaproject.net
Fela Kuti & Thetalkingdrum.com
As a format, the live album serves numerous purposes: memento for fans of a concert recently attended, historical document of an important point in a band’s career. But, all too often, it’s a cynical cash cow to fleece the faithful. The best, however, make you wish you’d attended the concert in question. So it is with Live in Detroit, a recently exhumed 1986 recording from the first American tour by king of afrobeat Fela Kuti’s final band, Egypt 80, a year after he was freed from a bogus sentence for smuggling in his home country of Nigeria.
Fela Kuti died back in 1997, and since then his popularity and reputation have grown as a new generation discovers the music of this extraordinary Nigerian musician, bandleader, composer and rebel politician. Quite right, too, for Fela was the originator of Afrobeat, the fusion of funk, jazz and Yoruba influences that continues to inspire musicians worldwide. And his life was so extraordinary and extreme that it’s no surprise that it became the subject of a hit Broadway musical.
