This is the second of two parts examining the relationship, similarities and differences between James Brown and Fela Kuti. While timestamps are given, it's well worth your time listening to any Fela Kuti song in full, and enjoying the complete experience. Why have a few seconds of brilliance when you can have 25 minutes?

The One, funk drums and Tony Allen’s four limbs

In Fela’s ‘Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense’ (1986), the climax arrives around 23:30 minutes in (after many raucous, joyous sections you’d have thought were climaxes). When the vocals return at 24:17, there’s a tornado of noise with horns playing wild, unresolved phrases with their emphasis on unpredictable beats. It’s a whirlwind of Ones. There is no One. Everything is the One. Not everything’s on the One, but everything is the One. Brown would never stand for this. He would want the emphasis clear cut. Brown’s music was clearer, easier to make sense of – no less riveting, but less multifaceted.

But when Fela used the heaviest emphasis, he placed it on the One. Listen from 24:35, and for that crucial first beat on “Me and you no dey for the same u-category.” Those horns hit with the same emphasis and intensity as any of James Brown’s funk.

On Brown classics like ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’ and ‘Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine’, the chord progressions and melodies are familiar after two or three bars, and each time the One comes back it’s foreseeable. It feels good, but it’s not unexpected.

Whereas during moments like those on ‘Teacher’, as well as providing a sense of euphoria, the One brings relief. The preceding cobweb of horns is gripping, but also dizzying. The One and the returning chorus let you know where you are again.

As discussed in part 4, following percussion-led breaks in ‘O.D.O.O.’ (1989) and ‘Teacher’, Fela reintroduces melody with blasts of horns. In the break in ‘O.D.O.O.’ from 27:50, all the instruments aside from percussion drop out and don’t return until 28:59. The listener has had almost half an hour of harmony and melodic development, and suddenly there’s only rhythm. Even the bass, which has played a simple nine-note figure pretty much throughout, disappears. The contrast between melody and a pure focus on rhythm makes the horn riff even more exhilarating when it returns on the One.

On earlier songs, Fela used the One in a way more akin to Brown. For instance, during ‘Zombie’, perhaps the closest Fela ever came to ’70s Brown funk, that bouncy bass note at the start of the two-bar line is reliable. It’s going to be there. The chicken scratch guitar (very James Brown, or very Jimmy Nolen) is going to be there.

As Alexander Stewart noted in his enlightening essay, ‘Make It Funky: Fela Kuti, James Brown and the Invention of Afrobeat’, the drums in both Brown’s funk and Fela’s Afrobeat placed heavy emphasis on the One. Clyde Stubblefield, drummer on tracks like ‘Cold Sweat’ and ‘Funky Drummer’, said, “Always hit the One.” The bass drum, whether played by Stubblefield or Jabo Starks, would almost always take care of that beat.

Another major similarity was an emphasis on the last eighth note of a four-beat loop, i.e. the last “and” in “one-and-two-three-and-four-and”. As Stewart says, this “sets up the return to beat one.”

Stubblefield said, “[Starks and I] didn’t use the toms much. We just used the snare and the bass drum and the cymbals. (...) But we never used the toms, never, for nothing, and it’s amazing. I was wondering why we have these drums up here.” The toms would only be used for the drum roll at the start of a show.

Tony Allen, drummer for Fela until 1979, would approve of the inclusion of cymbals in that short list. Hi-hats were a key to his sound: “watching drummers playing in my country, I knew that something was wrong somewhere. Why is it that they don’t use their hi-hats?” Allen was influenced by jazz drummers like Art Blakey and Max Roach, who in turn had been influenced by African drummers. “Art Blakey lived in Ghana for two years. I could feel that from his playing. (...) he has the influence of the African... touches, you know?”

Allen said of Blakey, “on the records he’s sounding like not one drummer to me. I had to ask myself: how many drummers are playing on this? Two, three drummers? But no. Only one guy. Art Blakey.”

Allen himself received many such compliments, owing to his ability to play a different rhythm with each of his four limbs. He said, “A good drummer has two legs and two arms and they're all playing different things."

Brian Eno wrote of Allen’s grooves, “it’s hard to isolate the part that Tony Allen is playing because he’s constantly moving around it.” During any given bar in ‘Alagbon Close’, for example, the snare may be hit on every quarter-note beat or only on offbeats, and the cymbals may be tapped in a consistent pattern or added as flourishes. Allen explained his constant variation: “When I’m bored of a particular beat, I need to create another one.”

‘Alagbon Close’ is also a notable exception in the bass drum not playing on the One. Allen hits the snare on the One, but doesn’t play the bass drum until the “and” eighth note between the two and three.

In almost every famous Brown funk track, the snare hit on the two and four. This was rarely the case in Fela’s music, which makes Allen’s beats less familiar sounding to Western listeners.

Stewart notes further differences in Allen’s drumming when compared to Brown’s funk: “the more balanced syncopation (occurring in Allen’s grooves in the first half of the measure as well as the second half), and the more frequent sounding of the bass drum. This usage of the bass drum seems reflective of traditional West African practices in which the largest drum is often the lead drum.”

In songs such as ‘No Agreement’, and ‘Yellow Fever’, two quick bass drum hits occur at the start of the bar: on the One and on the "e" sixteenth note in “one-e-and-a-two”.

“Accumulation and subtraction” and Key Changes

As Aaron Leitko shrewdly observed for Pitchfork, Fela’s music is “constantly moving and mutating, but [it] also conveys a sense of stasis. Unlike jazz, the songs aren’t shaped by chord changes or modulations, but the gradual accumulation and subtraction of melodic and rhythmic gestures.” Listening to Fela demands an attention “less concerned with events like verses and choruses and more attuned [to] gradual build-ups and changes in density.”

A trademark of Fela’s compositions was the gradual introduction of instruments in a song. In ‘Pansa Pansa’, first there’s only drums and keys; then only drums and bass; then drums, bass, and guitar; then another guitar; then a third guitar; two minutes in a saxophone for the first time. It’s three minutes by the time the full horn section has arrived.

Instruments are added and subtracted, with songs alternately sparse and feeling impossibly full. Lengthy songs allowed space for contrast between sections, and unhurried (not necessarily slow) build-ups and multiple crescendos.

The length of Fela’s compositions was likely influenced by his appreciation of Western classical music. Asked who his favourite musician was, Fela said, “Handel. Western music is Bach, Handel and Schubert. It’s good music, cleverly done. As a musician, I can see that. Classical music gives musicians a kick. But African music gives everyone a kick.”

The first time Brown really started stretching out with extended funk grooves was on 1973’s The Payback. It’s possible that he was influenced by Fela’s taste for longer tracks (1971’s ‘Egbe Mi O (Carry Me)' and ‘Na Poi’ lasted 13 and 25 minutes, and in ‘72 ‘No Agreement’ 15 minutes, for example), but it’s also possible that Brown was influenced by American ’70s artists such as Funkadelic, Sly & The Family Stone and Miles Davis who themselves had released extended groove-focused tracks early in the decade.

While sections of Fela’s compositions could be differentiated largely by this accumulation and subtraction, Brown would more often utilise a key change. This would often take place in his beloved bridge sections, notably on tracks like ‘Cold Sweat’ (which Fred Wesley, not in the band at the time of its recording, viewed as “musically incorrect” by conventional theory) and ‘Sex Machine’. These bridges provided, as Brown put it, a “release” from the main groove.

Improvisation

Although neither Brown’s or Fela’s music was categorically jazz, the two shared influences from jazz and their music both often featured improvisation. Brown’s choices as a bandleader and spontaneity and Fela’s lengthy, multi-section compositions meant improvised solos were a common theme. Brown would often have his favourite musicians solo on command, most famously asking Maceo to “blow” and getting the band to “give the drummer some”, prompting that famous drum break from Stubblefield.

Brown let the improvisation extend to his vocals. Stubblefield talked about Brown’s impromptu writing and recording. “A song like ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’ (...) ‘I Got The Feelin’’, all that – it was right there out of his mind. He was good at that, and that’s why today you don’t understand a lot of the words he’s saying on the record, ’cause he’s making up stuff.”

Brown’s “So good, so good, so good” in ‘I Refuse To Lose’, discussed in part 4, seems less a pre-conceived, carefully written line than involuntary, audible enjoyment of the horn riff. In ‘Hell’, before the line, “It’s Hell tryin’ to do right / By everyone you know,” Brown fumbles through another with similar sounds, half-singing, half-mumbling. The lyrics in ‘Give Me Some Skin’ seem almost entirely conceived on the spot. According to the Internet, “I am from Alaska, I’m the king of new pop / So happen!” are just two of the ‘Say what now?’ lines.

Politics and Protest

Fela and Brown were both overtly political. Brown recorded ‘Don’t Be A Drop-Out’ in 1966 (the information on YouTube is incorrect) and campaigned for education with Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The revolutionary ‘Say It Loud - I’m Black and I’m Proud’ came the following year and, in Brown’s words, “It was badly needed at the time. It helped Afro-Americans in general and the dark-skinned man in particular.”

In Fela’s case, protest led to numerous beatings and arrests, and multiple imprisonments. In 1977, Nigeria’s military regime sent a thousand soldiers to Fela’s commune, Kalakuta (declared a republic), who before burning it to the ground, raped the women, beat the men, and threw Fela’s mother from a second-floor window. She died in the following weeks.

It is often reported that the success of ‘Zombie’ in 1976—its lyrics mocking soldiers who mindlessly followed orders—led to these consequences. While Fela’s music had contained protest and satire for years, ‘Zombie’ was perhaps the most pointed criticism of the military regime. Other accounts report that it was not ‘Zombie’, but rather Fela’s boycotting of FESTAC, a government-led celebration of African artists and musicians that prompted the attack.

Either situation is absurd: either a song, a piece of music with words, or choosing not to play songs for the government, incited such vile acts and lead to death.

This did not deter Fela from protest, neither in his actions or his music. He and his wives delivered a coffin to the head of state. In the years that followed, Fela called out the president, the head of telecommunications company ITT on ‘I.T.T. (International Thief Thief)’), and the country’s leaders on ‘V.I.P.’ (“Vagabonds in Power”), detailed the attack on his commune on ‘Unknown Soldier’ (its title referring to the police report blaming the attack on “unknown soldiers”), and recounted his carrying of the coffin in ‘Coffin for Head of State’. ‘Sorrow Tears and Blood’ is commonly perceived to be another reference to the attack on Kalakuta, but according to the sleeve designer was written in response to the South African police’s brutal response to the Soweto uprising.

Fela’s continued protests led to more physical abuse. One of Fela’s managers, Rikki Stein, has said, “By the late 1980s, all the beatings and broken bones started to take their toll, so that he couldn’t pick his saxophone up.”

Call-and-Response

Fela used call-and-response in many of his songs. Usually his vocal would lead and his backing singers would answer, but sometimes the horn section would respond. In ‘Just Like That’ (from the Teacher album, 1986), from 16:15, a horn riff (descending in pitch two times, then returning to the first) responds to each of Fela’s lines.

Vocal call and responses were major features of earlier tracks like ‘Yellow Fever’ (with the choruses of “Teacher”, “Foolish”), ‘Sorrow Tears and Blood’ (“Them regular trademark,” “Hey, yeah”) and ‘Authority Stealing’ (“Argument, argument,” “Thief, thief, thief”, “Catch am, catch am”). On Teacher, sometimes the line between lead singer and backing singers blurred, and Fela took on more of a supporting role, as in the latter stages of ‘Teacher’ and ‘Just Like That’.

Brown’s most famous call-and-response track was ‘Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine’, where Bobby Byrd responds to Brown’s calls with “Get on up!” 50 times. The duo perform similarly frenetic vocals on ‘Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved’.

Percussive Vocals and Imitating Instruments

Brown enjoyed trading sounds with his saxophone and trombone. As discussed in part 3, he got Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker to join him in vocal-and-horn duets.

In ‘Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense’, there’s a fantastic section starting at 10:45 in which Fela’s backing singers imitate each phrase he plays on his saxophone. “All you have to do is sing what I play on my horn.”

Though he enjoyed riffing with his horn players, Brown’s vocals would more often resemble drums. In his autobiography, Brown described his funk period starting with ‘New Bag’: “I had discovered that my strength was not in the horns, it was in the rhythm. I was hearing everything, even the guitars, like they were drums.” Every part of his band was placing more importance on rhythm, and he did the same with his voice.

While funk tracks like ‘New Bag’ and ‘Cold Sweat’ do feature vocal melodies, a key feature of the vocal is Brown’s ‘Ha!’s and ‘Uh!’s. As observed by T.R. Hummer, these sounds arrive on offbeats, adding further syncopation to the drums and bass. Listen to the first ‘Ha!’ in the second bar at the start of ‘Cold Sweat’. It doesn’t fall neatly on a “one-two-three-four” pulse. Just as Stubblefield's drums are meant to make you move and feel, rather than contribute any literary meaning, so are Brown’s grunts, yells and cries. He’s using his voice as a drum.

Similarly, in ‘Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense’, after around 17:20, Fela makes percussive noises seemingly in response to the horns, and then in anticipation of Allen’s snare (probably recorded previously, given the evidence of this video).

Keyboard Playing

The electric piano in Fela’s ‘O.D.O.O.’ (played by Keji Hamilton) functions as a space-filling instrument to keep the momentum going. In between euphoric blasts of horns that becomes a motif, and first appears around the 3-minute mark, keyboard chords fill space so that every beat feels like it’s moving forward to the horns returning.

The piano in ‘Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense’ (also played by Hamilton) has the same role. From 23:30, after the percussion-led break and Fela’s final, urgent “Yaaaaa!”, the horns come back in and the piano has an essential part to play in keeping momentum going between blasts of trumpets and saxophones.

While Fela used sparseness and empty beats more as his career progressed and his music generally became slightly more sombre (as on these two songs), when a section called for joy or energy, or both, often he would pack each bar with sound.

James Brown’s organ playing often performed a similar function. On ‘Sex Machine’, Brown’s organ (from 1:05, 3:14 and 4:40) is more concerned with rhythm than advancing the chord progression. At times chords fill every eighth note, cramming space in contrast with the stop-start guitar.

On ‘Escape-Ism’, Brown’s organ plays a supporting role between saxophone squeels from St. Clair Pinckney. Notice from 4:53 the organ filling space in a subtle, low register in what is otherwise a bare bones funk groove.

Fela's music will be examined further in future articles. In the following parts of this series, we’ll explore how funk dipped its dancing feet into other genres, influencing jazz, rock, rap and electronic music.