Tony Allen

Born in Lagos, Nigeria on July 20th, 1940, Tony Allen was a versatile drummer known as one of the pioneers of afrobeat music, which mixes jazz with African rhythms and a cross beat. Over many years he performed and recorded with Fela Ransome Kuti and his band Afrika 70 and later worked with British rocker Damon Albarn on his The Good, the Bad & the Queen project. He started on percussion as a teenager and played in his hometown with the highlife band Dr Victor Olaiya and the Cool Cats, Agu Norris and the Heatwaves, The Nigerian Messengers and The Melody Makers. He met Kuti in an audition in Nigeria and they went on to make more than 30 recordings together. After he left Afrika 70, Tony Allen released several singles, which were later collected on the album Home Cooking in 2002 and, settled in Europe, he put out a series of albums such as Black Voices, Live and Lagos No Shakin. The Damon Albarn project, with accompanying album, followed and the British musician was quoted widely as saying Tony Allen was the best drummer in the world. The two worked with Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers on the 2013 album Rocket Juice & the Moon and he played with French trio, the Jazz Bastards, on the 2014 release Film of Life. Continuing to record prolifically over the course of his seventies, he returned in 2017 with a new album entitled The Source before teaming up with techno heavyweight Jeff Mills on the 2018 EP Tomorrow Comes the Harvest. Just months after having his life chronicled in a critically acclaimed documentary by Opiyo Okeyo and reuniting with Albarn once more to record the Gorillaz and Skepta collaboration “How Far?”, Tony Allen sadly suffered a fatal aortic aneurysm on April 30th, 2020 in Paris. He was 79 years old.