MASTER DRUMMER OF AFROBEAT - Duke University Press

“Tony Allen is best known as the hands and feet behind
Fela Kuti’s explosive Afrobeat, and his playing is both
fabulously propulsive and melodic, in a way that might
seem paradoxical, but makes perfect sense once you’ve got
your feet in motion. . . . Simultaneously breaking up the
rhythms and reassembling them in one loose- limbed, easy
rocking motion, his playing is at once apparently effortless
and breathtaking.”
—Mark Hudson, The Daily Telegraph
“Were someone to lend me a time- machine to catch
great bands of the past, Fela and Allen’s Afrika 70 band
in Lagos circa 1972 would be one of the first stops. It was
then [that] Bootsy Collins, James Brown’s bass player, went
backstage and told [band members that] they were ‘the
funkiest cats on the planet’ and Paul McCartney, in Lagos
to record Band on the Run, said they were the best live
band he’d ever seen.”
—Peter Culshaw, The Observer
“An octopus- like polyrhythmic machine, Allen was to
Fela and Afrobeat what Melvin Parker/Jabo Starks/Clyde
Stubblefield were to James Brown and funk: These drummers
simply deepened and changed the pocket of popular
music forever.”
—Matt Rogers, The Village Voice
“Few percussionists . . . can claim to have invented a
rhythm—but that’s what Allen did when he added his
propulsive rhythms to the music of Kuti and together they
created the sound the world came to know as Afrobeat.”
—Nigel Williamson, The Independent