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artist.....: Tony Allen
album......: The Source
year.......: 2017
label......: Blue Note
5768329
source.....: CDDA
moodswing..: Jazz
releasesize: 113.65 MB
tracks.....: 11
length.....: 64:18
encoder....: VBR LAME 3.98.4 -v0
quality....: avg. 247kbps
scenealized: 09.14.2017
Drum legend Tony Allen has seen a
childhood dream come true. He even says
that when he made The Source (his debut
album for Blue Note Records), it was
the best recording in his whole life.
Coming from Allen, thatÆs not a casual
statement: he is 76 years old and his
career goes back 50 years, not to
mention recordings by the hundred. The
saxophonist Yann Jankielewicz, who has
been playing alongside him for nearly a
decade, observes: ôTony has never
played drums as well as this. He's
never had as much freedom, never had as
much power as he does today.ö
The Source is the Nigerian-born Paris-
based drummer's first full-length album
for Blue Note, following the
tantalizing 4-track EP release A
Tribute to Art Blakey and the Jazz
Messengers. Blue Note is one of the
most prestigious names in jazz and a
label that has opened its sphere of
creativity considerably wider since its
renaissance in the 1980s. The Source
manages to represent the label's
classic era at the same time as it
symbolizes Blue Note's innovative
present. The jazz here navigates its
way back to the source in Africa,
creating a sound that is totally
captivating.
The best albums always tell a story.
This one takes us back to the source of
Allen's art as a musician, in other
words, to Nigeria in the latter half of
the 20th century. Tony Oladipo Allen,
who was born in Lagos in 1940, never
played a traditional instrument: right
from the beginning, his interest was
for a distant relative of the ancestral
percussion family, namely, the drum
kit. He taught himself, serving his
apprenticeship while working as a
technician for Nigerian national radio,
all the time listening to records by
American masters such as Art Blakey,
Max Roach and Kenny Clarke, the eminent
drummers of the bebop and hard bop
eras.
His life changed totally in 1964 when
he made the acquaintance of Fela Kuti,
whom he would accompany for the next 15
years, first with Fela's Koola Lobitos,
an emblematic highlife band that was a
model for all modern African music
groups, and then when Fela led Africa
70, for which he developed a new music
language: Afrobeat, which combined
Yoruba rhythms and funk instruments
with themes of revolution. Alongside
Fela, Tony recorded some 20 albums and
put his rhythm-signature to each of
them. From then on, Afrobeat would
propel a career that saw him pursue his
own projects while collaborating with
everyone from Oumou Sangare to Damon
Albarn (in The Good, The Bad & The
Queen).
In early 2017, Tony began preparing The
Source, the next step in the musical
and spiritual voyage that he has
undertaken from Africa to America and
beyond. To share writing tasks and take
care of the arrangements, he called on
Jankielewicz, with whom he has worked
since 2009 and the album Secret Agent.
They began by getting together to
listen to and exchange their favorite
records: Lester Bowie, Charles Mingus,
Art Blakey, Gil Evansà albums that
served as a compass to guide them on
their way, as if they were navigators
of old scrutinizing a constellation.
ôTony belongs to those musician-
architects who know how to build on a
drum pattern with rare precision,ö says
Jankielewicz. ôHe can hear every
instrument before it makes a sound.ö
This particular architect's worksite
was the Midilive studio (Vogue's former
recording facility), whose walls in the
suburbs of Paris contain equipment that
is purely analog. ItÆs a rare studio,
and itÆs worth underlining that the
recording went onto tape and, from the
sound-take to the mixing and cutting,
not a single digital byte was consumed
in the process. That goes some way
towards explaining the exceptional
texture of the sound you hear in the
album.
Surrounding Tony are some of the best
musicians on a Paris scene that is
difficult to call ôjazzö due to its
highly changeable nature: Jankielewicz
alongside saxophonists Remi Sciuto and
Jean-Jacques Elangue, trumpeter Nicolas
Giraud, trombonist Daniel Zimmermann,
bassist Mathias Allamane, pianist
Jean-Philippe Dary, and keyboardist
Vincent Taurelle, who produced the
album with Bertrand Freselà a French
cast to begin with, but with the
addition of guitarist Indy Dibongue
from Cameroon who, like Tony,
contributes an indispensable African
pigment to this palette. 11 excellent
players in total would finally deliver
The Source, along with one notable
guest: Damon Albarn, who adds an
ethereal piano part to ôCool Cats.ö
The album sparkles in the variety of
its timbres and the diversity of its
colors. Each of the 11 instrumental
tracksùall new originals co-written by
Allen and Jankielewiczùbring forward a
particular instrument: Giraud's trumpet
on ôBad Roadsö; the bass of Allamane on
ôCrusinÆö; Dary's piano inside ôOn
Fire,ö and Sciuto's bari sax on ôWoro
Dance.ö With ôCool Cats,ö it's the turn
of Elangue and his tenor, while
Zimmerman's trombone is featured on
ôWolf Eats Wolf.ö And throughout,
TonyÆs indelible signature, a unique
way of hitting skins or a cymbal, its
main characteristics a caressing,
almost ethereal energy, and a
formidable efficiency.
The music on The Source creates its own
milieu. It shines like the African sun
on ôPush & Pull,ö becomes contemplative
with ôTonyÆs Blues,ö then hypnotic in
ôLife Is Beautiful,ö then dresses in
the urban colors of dusk on ôEwajo.ö
Where is the jazz, where is the
Afrobeat, in this insistent swirl of
the music? Nobody knows. But nor should
we ask the ocean's calm or restless
waters to differentiate between
currents from the river Niger and those
from the Mississippi.
psst, more info at www.bluenote.com
01 Moody Boy 06:34
02 Bad Roads 05:48
03 Cruising 06:02
04 On Fire 06:17
05 Woro Dance 06:39
06 Tony's Blues 05:00
07 Wolf Eats Wolf 05:37
08 Cool Cats 04:22
09 Push and Pull 05:57
10 Ewajo 05:35
11 Life is Beautiful 06:27