- country:Nigeria
- style(s):Afrobeat
- label:Universal Music
- gender:male
- artist posted by:Comet Records
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The contours of his incommensurable musical journey, which ended with his sudden – one could be forgiven for saying untimely – passing shy of his 80th birthday in April 30th, 2020, are well-known: Born to a Nigerian-Ghanaian family, the rhythms of his parents' Ga, Ewe, and Yoruba cultures, and the wider musical universe of the Bight of Benin, inhabited him from a young age. They were soon joined by the swing of the great jazz age and bebop drummers he so greatly admired: From Gene Krupa to Max Roach, to Tony’s hero Art Blakey.
As much as any of the virtuoso drummers who inspired him, Tony Allen created his own, immediately identifiable musical creole, a language that redefined the sound and rhythms of the instrument across multiple genres and eras. Gestated in the cultural cauldron of late colonial and post-independence Lagos, Tony's ground-breaking Africana fusion emerged and matured into brilliance during his 15 years playing behind Fela Kuti, blossoming even further when he stepped out of Fela's shadow to forge his own serpentine path as a bandleader and artist. As the album before you so well demonstrates, the language he created was as supple and pleasing to the ear as it was complex and difficult to decipher, moving with ease across the avant-garde of modern popular music on both sides of the Black Trans-Atlantic – from jazz to highlife, funk to electronica, hip hop to the full spectrum of African music and its American and European diasporas.
Miles famously said that the essence of music inhabited the “space between the notes.” In a similar vein, Blur and Gorillaz frontman Damon Albarn explained that what made Tony a singular musician was his ability to create space, “the space of Tony... to allow other things to inhabit the mind.”
"I play yours, you play mine. The music never ends."
The wisdom of Tony Allen's words was as deep as his grooves, and these two sentences, which announce the dozen songs that follow, truly capture the spirit of There is No End. Tony’s motivating concept and desire was to work with younger artists, and especially the new generation of rappers, and give them voice in a time of global turmoil when music has never been more important – not necessarily as a "weapon" for the future in the manner of Fela's violently political songs, but also as medicine to heal a fractured world today.
For all those who knew him, he was a deeply spiritual man whose life's mission was not just to create a new musical language, but to pass it on to subsequent generations. In thinking back on the incredible process of creating this album without Tony physically present to guide him, producer Vincent Taeger remarked that his friend and mentor "was a teacher without speaking... a drummer and a guardian, with a great artistic vision and that vision filled the songs even after he had left us." Ben Okri, like everyone else involved in this valedictory album, had a very similar experience, declaring in awe that "this man could have lived another 150 years and kept creating new worlds. He had become the master shaman of his art. He knew himself and his mind. He wanted the album to be open to the energies of a new generation... but like a great mathematician or scientist who found a code of for a new world, with just a few beats, he created this extraordinary canvas."
For his last album, his thoughts were for the younger artists who continued to flock to him, especially in the fraught historical and political moment in which we live. “I want to take care of youngsters; they have messages and I want to bring them on my beat. The idea is to transmit to the young generation, to mix different universes – the hip hop world to the Afrobeat world.”
Featured artists include Skepta, Sampa The Great, Lava La Rue, Danny Brown, Koreatown Oddity and many others.