even before 1971, but they were not jazz oriented as such. But the rest of jazz-funk proliferated with Grover Washington and the others throughout the 1970s.
Soul, Funk, and Crossover Sounds
In the late 1960s new outside musical influences began to affect Fela’s music. Soul music, and the associated Afro fashion, was introduced to Nigeria in 1966 by the Heartbeats band of Sierra Leone12 led by Geraldo Pino (Gerald Pine). A period of experimentation took place between 1967 and 1969, with Lagos artists such as Fela, Segun Bucknor, and Orlando Julius creating various blends of Afro-soul. Orlando changed the name of his highlife band to the Afro Sounders in 1967, while Segun changed his band’s name from Soul Assembly to Revolution in 1969. Fela was experimenting with soulish songs like “My Baby Don’t Love Me,” “Everyday I Got My Blues,” and also “Home Cooking” in which he actually uses the word “Afrobeat.”
It is likely that is was in 1968 that Fela started to call this new style that combined highlife, jazz, salsa, and soul “Afrobeat” and launched it at the Kakadu Club, which that year he began to call his Afro-Spot.13 According to the 1982 interview with Fela by Carlos Moore,14 Fela coined the name Afrobeat to distinguish his sound from the soulish sound of Geraldo Pino, whose Heartbeats were very big in Nigeria at the time.15 Again, according to Carlos Moore, Fela was in a club in Accra listening to James Brown’s soul music on a record player in 1968 with the Ghanaian/Nigerian music producer Raymond Aziz when he invented the name.16 Incidentally, it was only in 1970 that James Brown actually played in Africa—when he toured Nigeria in December of that year.
Although Fela’s Afrobeat was beginning to emerge by the late sixties, its lyrics were not at first so politically and socially confrontational as they were to become later. Fela’s politicization and radicalization was accelerated when he went to the United States in August 1969 for ten months.
Sandra Iszadore began Fela’s political radicalization and collaborated with him musically.
While there he and his eight-strong Koola Lobotis group made a record called “Keep Nigeria One,” a patriotic song that supported the federal government during the 1967–70 Nigerian Civil War. He also met the African American singer Sandra Iszadore (Smith) at a show of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Los Angeles. Sandra was associated with the militant Black Panther movement of Stokely Carmichael and others, and she gave Fela The Autobiography of Malcolm X to read. It was then that Fela began to be “exposed to African history,” as he puts it. It was in the United States that his first real Afrobeat style—influenced by both soul-funk and modal jazz—came together. It was also while in Los Angeles that he began to call his band Nigeria 70.
The Africa Shrine, Africa 70, and Anikulapo-Kuti Are Born
Fela returned to Nigeria in 1970 with his new Afrobeat sound, and at first he and his Nigeria 70 band continued operating his Afro-Spot club at the Kakudu Club. This is a description of how the musician Tee Mac Omatshola first encountered Fela and his club at that time.17
My mother, Suzanna Iseli Fregene Omateye, had the exclusive hairdressing Salon Bolaji, and I just returned from Switzerland having obtained a degree in economics and a master’s degree in the flute. I took up a job with UTC (a Swiss department store group in Lagos) and was just forming the Afro Collection.18 I went from the UTC head office every lunchtime to my mother’s salon to eat some food. So in August 1970 I went there on a Friday and saw a slim gentleman sitting there. My mother introduced me to him as the son of her good friend Mrs. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti who was the first Nigerian lady to drive a car (and my mother was the second). She told me that her girls were doing the hair for Fela’s wife, and so I sat beside of Fela and we talked. I told him that I studied classical music in Switzerland and France and he told me that he is playing Afrobeat and jazz. He invited me to come to his Afro-Spot club next evening where his manager Felix received me. I was taken to Fela’s dressing room filled with girls. Fela sat there with a big joint in his mouth; it smelled bad and I asked him what the hell he was smoking! He said, “Natural Nigerian grass!” I joined him on stage [later] with my flute and I had the feeling that my fingers were playing on their own. Fela and the band loved my performance and I played many more times with him in the next twenty years.
I should add that Sandra Iszadore briefly joined Fela in Lagos in 1970. In fact he even made one song with Iszadore on a later trip by her called “Upside Down” that was released by Decca West Africa in 1976. This is about a man who travels the world where the telephones, light supply, transport system, etc. all work in an orderly way. However, when he comes back to Africa he sees plenty of land but no food, plenty of villages but no roads, plenty of open space but no houses. In short, education, agriculture, communications, and the power supply are in confusion. Fela’s reference to electrical failures is a quip on the state of NEPA, the Nigerian Electrical Supply Authority, which in the 1970s broke down ten to twenty times a day.
It was in 1971 that Fela moved from the Kakadu Club to the larger Surulere Club, changed the name of his band from the Nigeria 70 to the Africa 70, and renamed his Afro-Spot venue the Africa Shrine, which included a small shrine. By this time he had developed the idea of his “comprehensive show” in which his band would take a break in the middle of the dance set, change into animal skins, and return to play a floor show that included dancing and funny novelty acts. According to the band’s hand-drummer Daniel “J. B.” Koranteng, Fela wore a costume made out of snakeskin, another musician a leopard skin, while J. B. himself wore one made from a lion skin.
In 1971 Fela teamed up with Ginger Baker (formerly with Eric Clapton’s band Cream). The British rock drummer had crossed the Sahara Desert that year and made a film of the journey,19 as well as making a visit to Ghana’s veteran master drummer Kofi Ghanaba (Guy Warren). Baker subsequently went into partnership with a Nigerian and helped set up Nigeria’s first multitrack studio, ARC Studio
During the summer of 1971 the Africa 70 played in London with Ginger Baker at the Abbey Road Studios in London to record the album Fela Live with Ginger Baker. It was there that Fela first met Paul McCartney, who later, in 1973, was to visit Lagos on a recording trip with his band Wings and who got into a confrontation with and Fela at the Afro-Spot club in Lagos when Fela accused McCartney of trying to steal or woo away some members of the Africa 70.20
In London the Africa 70 played at the Cue Club, the Four Aces, and 100 Club and also toured the country. “J. B.” Koranteng told me that when they played in Wales and the band marched up to the stage for their “comprehensive show” section of the performance dressed in animal skins, the crowd panicked. Some started rushing for the door and others tried to jump out of windows, until Ginger Baker cooled them down and explained it was all part of the show.
It was in 1972 that Fela released his much-loved Yoruba Afrobeat “Sakara Oleje” about loudmouthed braggarts. That was also the year that the Africa 70 toured Ghana in a program organized by Stan Plange and Faisal Helwani. This included a performance for the leader Colonel Acheampong, as the new military government of Ghana was pro-Nkrumahist and still radical at that time. So Fela was quite comfortable performing for this military leader. Fela also played for and “yabbied” the university students at the Legon campus and the African Youth Command in Tema.
Fela talking to the Ghanaian military head of state Colonel Acheampong during a show in Accra in 1972.
In 1972 J. K. joined Fela after returning from abroad, and in late 1973 Fela relocated the Africa Shrine to the Empire Hotel in Mushin, diagonally opposite his house. There too he set up an actual shrine dedicated to Kwame Nkrumah and surrounded by
