HOUND presents...
Artist.......: Tony Allen
Album........: The Source
Label........: Blue Note
Genre........: Jazz
Catnr........: 5768329
Source.......: CD (LP)
Rip.date.....: 2017-09-14
Str.date.....: 2017-09-08
Quality......: 889kbps/44.1kHz/2 channels
Url..........: http://www.bluenote.com
track title time
1. Moody Boy 6:33
2. Bad Roads 5:48
3. Cruising 6:01
4. On Fire 6:17
5. Woro Dance 6:39
6. Tony's Blues 5:00
7. Wolf Eats Wolf 5:37
8. Cool Cats 4:22
9. Push And Pull 5:56
10. Ewajo 5:34
11. Life Is Beautiful 6:26
Runtime 64:13
Size 408.77
Release Notes:
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 RΘmi 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.
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