Made Kuti, scion of a Nigerian musical dynasty, strides centre stage

For Made Kuti, scion of the Nigerian music dynasty that started with his grandfather Fela and has continued with his father Femi, a career in the family business was more a question of when, not if. “When I was 14, 15, I already knew the direction I wanted to head,” he says.

Last year, the 25-year-old’s debut album, For(e)ward, was released as part of a father-and-son double album, Legacy +. It delivered an impressive feat: the younger Kuti played all the instruments — from jazz drums and piano to saxophone, trumpet and guitar — during daily 14-hour recording sessions at a Paris studio, before recording vocals for the eight tracks in Lagos. In November, those efforts yielded his first Grammy nomination — the eighth for the Kuti clan. On January 31, he will find out if he has won.

Both men were in Europe when the nominations were announced and an excited Kuti ran around the tour bus screaming. “It was like a nitrous [gas] boost,” he says when we meet during rehearsals at the New Afrika Shrine in Ikeja, Lagos state, successor to the spiritual home of Afrobeat. “I didn’t think this experimental sort of work was going to get recognition from musicians all over the world.”

Half a century ago, his grandfather, the radical Fela Anikulapo Kuti, pioneered the Afrobeat genre, mashing highlife, jazz and funk polyrhythms with sociopolitical commentary. Today Made, tall and reserved, is decked out true to Fela’s Afrobeat style, his bare-chested frame in slim pants as he rehearses. His performances are just as commanding as Fela’s, but he has swapped the trademark spirited Kuti energy for the measured calm of a Zen master.

The industry has discovered the success of . . . sex and gimmicks that bring popularity, [so] music as an art is now suffering’

The Afrobeat tradition is evident on Made Kuti’s album, although critics are divided: one called it a gesture to the future of the genre; another said it had less of Fela’s spontaneity and free-form funkiness. None of that bothers Made — full name: Omorinmade (Yoruba for “the child that walks into royalty”) — who is keen to achieve success on his own terms and stretch the style. “I want my music to be experimental,” he says. “I want to design ensembles to play my music.”

Born a year before Fela’s death, Kuti was only three when he first picked up a trumpet. His father got him a tutor soon after, and when the Shrine relaunched in 2000, the four-year-old was the opening act. By eight, he’d joined Positive Force, his father’s band, and at 17 he was studying music composition in London at Trinity Laban Conservatoire, his grandfather’s alma mater. Today, he plays at least four other instruments comfortably.

As a child, Kuti says he was mischievous, often disappearing for hours to play football, fond of testing the durability of new shoes by leaping over tables at the Shrine. In his teens, he railed against his school authorities for insisting that neckties be worn in sweltering Lagos heat “because you think it’s ‘proper’ to do so, but what’s ‘proper’ is colonial”, he says. “It’s boiling, you’re not providing electricity, the ACs are not working, but if I slack it a bit, you punish me. So I have to suffocate myself for eight hours every day.”

His school did not have history in its curriculum — a feature, not a bug, of the Nigerian system — triggering a desire in Kuti to learn about pan-African figures such as Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba and Ghanaian liberation leader Kwame Nkrumah, whose posters still hang at the Shrine. He also read voraciously: books such as Thomas Pakenham’s The Scramble for Africa, on Europe’s colonisation of the continent, came in handy. That quest for knowledge also brought him to music tastes such as Japanese rock and electronic jazz.

His musical, political and historical interests have informed the philosophy he brings to his work, which deals with Nigeria’s problems such as government incompetence and corruption — a common topic for Afrobeat — and broader global themes such as racism. On “Different Streets”, he laments: “These songs were talking about his present/Not what was to be/We must now understand just how scary it is/That we are facing the same problems from the ’70s.”

He is saddened by the current wave of insecurity and emigration in the country: “Every single member of my band has a story of theft . . . You’re sitting in a car and you’re not safe any more in Nigeria. Anybody on the street, if you give them an economy-class ticket to the States and just tell them to go, they will go. They don’t need to know where they’re going, upkeep, nothing.”

Some of Kuti’s contemporaries have clinched Grammy nominations too as they have driven Afrobeats, the latest iteration of Afrobeat, on to the global stage. Over the past few summers, the music of performers such as Wizkid, Davido and Burna Boy have found fans around the world. But purists and critics regularly point out Afrobeats’ flaws: the name aggregates different sounds under one umbrella and the sound favours hedonism and the glamorisation of wealth rather than the socially conscious message of its progenitor.

Made is quick to applaud “these obviously talented people that have found a way to express themselves” through Afrobeats, despite little government support for the arts in Nigeria, but is concerned about the shortcuts some of these musicians take.

“What worries me is that because . . . the industry has discovered the success of love and sex and gimmicks that bring popularity, music as an art is now suffering,” he says. “A lot of our most prolific artistes can’t harmonise their own melodies . . . or read sheet music.” Young people now interested in music think that a traditional training is a “gateway to failure”.

In February, Kuti launched his 14-person band, The Movement, and has plans to expand it into something more like an orchestra that plays Afrobeats too. During weekly rehearsals at the Shrine, which sometimes go on for as long as eight hours, he tweaks music arrangements and cups his ear in search of stray tones as his band members tune their instruments. His second project, a still-untitled EP, is due in February, according to Kuti’s manager.

The goal, he says, is to be a great musician who was also a Kuti and not just another great Kuti musician. “I don’t think being nominated for the Grammys makes me a better musician than anyone that wasn’t. Having that recognition, I’m not naive enough to be so egotistical to believe that I’ve made it.”

‘For(e)ward’ is available from Bandcamp

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