Tony Allen, musician, 1940-2020

In the spring of 2017, Tony Allen, the Nigerian drummer who helped to pioneer “Afrobeat” (a hybrid of jazz, funk and west African “highlife”), released a four-track EP, A Tribute to Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers.

For Allen, who has died at the age of 79, this recording was a return to the source. It was, he said, hearing Blakey’s records on the radio in Lagos in the late 1950s that set him on a path to becoming “perhaps the greatest drummer who has ever lived”, as the musician and producer Brian Eno put it.

Allen was a “jazz lover from day one”, he told the BBC in 2014. A denizen of Lagos’s club scene in the period immediately before and after Nigeria gained independence in 1960, he always “focused on the drummer” when watching a band.

Tony Allen was born in 1940 in Lagos and started playing the drums when he was 18. Soon he decided he wanted to earn his living through music, though his parents would have preferred him to pursue his vocation as a radio technician. “Back then in Lagos,” Allen recalled, “musicians were more or less thought of as beggars — or worse.”

Eventually, they relented and he secured his first regular gig with an outfit called the Cool Cats, led by the trumpeter Victor Olaiya, known as the “evil genius” of highlife.

Allen’s first hero was the American drummer and band leader Gene Krupa. But discovering Blakey was a kind of epiphany. “I decided to switch to Art Blakey’s approach, because it sounded different to me — almost like magic.”

The young Allen set himself some “homework”: mimicking Blakey’s volcanic polyrhythms. Around the same time he came across an article in the magazine Downbeat by another great of American jazz, Max Roach, on the use of the hi-hat cymbals, operated by a foot pedal and largely neglected by the drummers who were working in Lagos at the time.

“My drum style sounded different from others,” he said. His distinctively jittery, syncopated sound also owed a great deal to his use of the bass drum. Instead of playing a single beat, he would play two.

“The bass drum patterns are unique to me,” he insisted. They also brought him to the attention of Fela Kuti, with whom he would form the musical relationship that defined his career.

In 1964, Kuti had recently returned to Nigeria after spending four years in London studying music. He wanted to form a band and was auditioning for a drummer. He happened upon Allen, who remembered him asking: “How come you are the only guy in Nigeria who plays like this — jazz and highlife?”

They began playing jazz together in a band called the Western Toppers before staking out a more adventurous approach, mixing jazz and highlife. After a visit to the US in 1969, where the influence of funk became the final piece in the musical jigsaw we now recognise as Afrobeat, Kuti formed an ensemble called Africa (later Afrika) ‘70, and named Allen its musical director.

Together, they recorded more than 30 albums on which sinuous, extended musical vamps underpinned by Allen’s drums were fused with Kuti’s increasingly politically militant, pan-Africanist lyrics.

Kuti said that “without Tony Allen, there would be no Afrobeat”. But by the late 1970s, the strains were beginning to tell. Allen lost patience with the swollen entourage that followed the band on tour and eventually left in 1979, complaining that the hangers-on “were sapping Fela of his force, of his music”.

After spending a few years in London, Allen moved to Paris, where he lived for the rest of his life. He married Sylvie Nicollet there in 1987. They had three children. He had four other children from a previous relationship in Nigeria.

Asked why he never returned to live in the country of his birth, Allen said: “It’s all misadministration and corruption, survival of the fittest. It’s a complete motherfucker of a place.”

During the 1990s and 2000s, he was in high demand as a session player, and worked with artists including Air, Manu Dibango, Groove Armada, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Grace Jones. In 1999, he recorded Black Voices, the first in a series of increasingly adventurous solo albums.

Allen continued to collaborate with younger musicians, and in 2014 he declared that he was “still learning” and looking “towards the future”. His last record was released a little over a month before he died, and the final live appearances of his life took place in London in March, where he was abetted by sidemen from the UK capital’s newly flourishing jazz scene.