It’s the 34th annual Copenhagen Jazz Festival. MAGNET’s Mitch Myers translates the action.
These days, everybody is down with Fela Kuti and the Afrobeat sound, but what about the Afrofunk style? Representing the truest exponent of Afrofunk is legendary drummer Tony Allen, who was an integral part of Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s band, Africa 70, for more than a decade (1968 through 1979). Nowadays, the Lagos-born drummer lives in Paris and has played with a wide range of modern musicians including Blur/Gorillaz mastermind Damon Albarn, who has joined Allen along with Clash bassist Paul Siminon in the Good, The Bad And The Queen and, more recently, along with Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea in a group project strangely entitled Rocketjuice And The Moon.
The bottom line is that Allen is a master drummer who brings his own distinctive sound to any group he plays with. For this summer season Allen brought his own band to the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, performing outdoors at sunset as part of the Jazz By The Sea series. Allen’s group is a solid mix of French, African and American musicians, and although he doesn’t have any spellbinding female dancers in his band like Fela did (or Femi Kuti or Seun Kuti do), they still put on an entertaining, danceable show. Declining to speak of political or social concerns because “talking doesn’t change things,” Allen spoke to the crowd through his music, engaging in long, intrinsically rhythmic chant-songs like “Don’t Take My Kindness For Weakness.”
I spoke with one of Allen’s guitarists before the show. He looked very familiar, and it turned out to be Andre Foxxe, a Detroit-bred musician who came up as a teenager playing with George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic. Foxxe said that while he’s still devoted to Clinton and the P-Funk, Allen’s intricate African rhythms are the real thing and not nearly as easy to perform. Foxxe also said both Clinton and Sly Stone are totally off crack these days, so who knows how reliable of a reporter he is. Anyway, Allen’s band is just getting it together this summer, and although they were clearly under-rehearsed, they still had no problem getting the Copenhagen crowd up and dancing. Have you ever seen the Danish get funky? It’s a trip.
After moving and grooving with Allen, the only thing to do was chill out with some introspective avant-garde. Heading over to the amazingly beautiful Danish Parliament buildings within a large annex that houses the ornate little Theater Museum/Court Theater (the Teatermuseet i Hofteatret; built in 1767), I watched a super-serious performance by an arty group led by saxophonists Lotte Anker and Tim Berne called Still Arriving. This Danish/American collective included violinist Mat Maneri, cellist Hank Roberts, electric guitarist Marc Ducret, bassist Nils Davidsen and drummer Gerald Cleaver. The heady group played a few shorter pieces, then after a quick break performed a full-blown suite, all composed by Anker. It was challenging and offbeat but not hard to take, with lots of sonic squeaks and moans and long overtones. It was the polar opposite of Allen’s Afrofunk, and I dug them both
