The Best of the Black President 2

This is consistently great music: a sublime mix of jazz, funk and a dreamy groove. Fela Kuti created a whole new genre of music – Afro-beat – with American funk rolled over African drum patterns: James Brown whisked out of the America and jerked back to the bush. Fela had studied in America, in the very belly of the beast, and brought back a Muscle Shoals-type horn line to the complex polyrhythms that propelled his beat. The genre has swept the globe. There is no question that his achievement is monumental. These two CDs are just the cream of the 50 albums being prepared for reissue as a 26-CD set, along with the inevitable documentary film. This set contains some of his greatest tunes, such as ‘Monkey Banana’, ‘Mr Follow Follow’ and ‘Everything Scatter’, which propelled his name to universal acclaim in the mid-1970s. Each song here is the side of an album, 11 to 16 minutes in length. His songs are long and lean on the horns. He makes the guitar a percussion instrument, adding its tight interjections to the scratchy susurration of shekere, conga and snare drum. Today, Fela’s home Kalakuta in Lagos has been refurbished by the government and turned into a shrine and museum. Like most tigers, Fela is most safely approached as a stuffed specimen. However, his outraged politics are still relevant today and the fact he sings in pidgin English means his music will remain universally accessible.