Seun Kuti Premieres A New Song at the Shrine

Seun Kuti and Egypt 80 performed last night at the New Africa Shrine in Lagos, their first Shrine appearance in 2013. The performance was sparsely attended; probably only 100 or so in the audience, baffling for a band that toured all over the globe last year including sell-out performances in the US, UK, Australia, and Japan. It wasn't because the tickets were outpriced either. I hardly spent ten bucks including my gate fees, drinks, and taxi money in a city known for high prices. 

Egypt 80 led off a bit after 11:00 pm with Fela’s Dog Eat Dog and then proceeded through a warm-up set of an hour and a quarter, with Showboy vocalizing and directing the horns. Seun came on at about 12:30 am dressed in red pants. The crowd was..shall we say…interesting? First a big rat ran across the dance floor, then an older woman in full-length local garb and high headdress got out front and danced wildly, at one point flinging her headdress, bag, and shoes onto the middle of the floor, collapsing, then getting back up and continuing to dance for the rest of the night. A whole lot of people were taking poor quality hand phone videos of the show, which never cases to baffle me since the quality is worse than a 1980s VHS camcorder, but nobody seems to care. 

Highlights of the set included the frenetic and always-crowd-pleasing Zombie, then Seun’s rap preceding Slave Masters, where he compared locals working for multinationals down in Lekki with slaves living in master’s house in exchange for an easier life than their brethren. 3% of Nigerians thinking everything is fine. About 2:00 am Seun rapped about Kalakuta; this week was the anniversary of the 1977 police attack on Fela’s compound that left Fela with broken bones and his mother beaten so badly that she would ultimately die from her injuries. That led into the première of a new composition dedicated to Kalakuta. Here is a somewhat fuzzy Zoom recording of the world première piece, which hopefully will spur you on both to see Seun Kuti and Egypt 80 live on tour and to buy their next recording.

Zombie, Oh Zombie

Seun Kuti, Fela in the Background

Seun Kuti and Egypt 80 played their first post-Felabration gig at the New Africa Shrine in Lagos last night. The crowd was sparse since it was the long Sallah holiday weekend when many people travel out of the city, and besides much of the local musical energy had been spent earlier in the month. Seun and Egypt 80 had just played at the Shrine a week ago - their Felabration set didn't start until the middle of the night and I couldn't get anyone to go out into the daunting Lagos midnight to catch the show with me. What I missed last Saturday was that, unannounced, elder brother Femi Kuti sat in with Seun and their father's band, apparently the first time Femi has played with Egypt 80 in 15 years and the first time Fela's two sons played together with their father's band in Lagos since Fela's death in 1997. It was videoed by Sahara TV and can be seen on Youtube (my bandwidth here in Nigeria is terrible and I hope I will actually get to watch it one of these days). 

Last night was good for the listener as the smaller crowd made the Shrine more pleasant than usual. The show started at 11:00 pm. Showboy led the band through a longer-than-planned warm-up set since Seun did not appear until about 1:00 am. He kicked off with Fela's Zombie, his customary (and exciting) set opener. It was a good one, channeling his father on alto sax and vocals as well as in the hilarious Zombie dance. In the subsequent hour and a half I stayed around, Seun only played one other tune and had just started on a third when I left due to the late hour. He gives his band mates plenty of room to stretch out, plays a strong and confident alto, and in general has continued Fela's jazzy, improvisatory approach to afrobeat that keeps the music fresh and interesting. Having Fela's original rhythm section anchor the band doesn't hurt either.

Egypt 80's Rhythm Section - These Guys Played With Fela. No Wonder Egypt 80 Sounds So Good.

Showboy had been at my house earlier in the day for my weekly Afrobeat lesson and we worked on Zombie at my behest. I had jumped in a bit over my head; I found the tune impossible to master instantly and have been working on it for a couple of weeks just to get it under my fingers. The tempo is killer and on tenor sax, the primary lick jumps up and down across the break at high speed. Thanks to the marvel of modern digital technology, I slowed the 1977 album track down to 80% until I got my fingers moving and then sped it back up to 100% after about a hundred iterations. The instrumentals sound OK at slow speed but the vocals are just wrong! By the end of the day I got it, finally, finally. Showboy is a hard taskmaster since he was there at the creation of the original and I really had a sense of accomplishment when he smiled and said I could stop for now.