I really didn’t like the shiny, frilly multicolored costume, plus [sombrerotype] hat. We were playing “Jumping Jack Flash,” the Rolling Stones, etc. But it wasn’t something that jelled with my soul, and who would like to be part of a band named like they were Mexicans? On the other hand, Fela I found intriguing and very smart as he had his signature designed shirts, which were almost collarless.
Despite the fact that the Koola Lobitos did not sport Latin costumes they were in fact influenced by Latin music to some degree—as in the late 1960s Fela was not only drawing on jazz, soul, and R & B, but also on Latin salsa music: as in the songs “Oritshe/Orise” and “We Dele.”10 “We Dele” is in a minor-key bluesy-jazz style, and “Orise” is more highlifish, but both use Latin-style horns to accompany and/or respond to the vocals.
This Latin touch in Fela’s music may have come from several sources. Fela was an avid listener of modern jazz, and the Cuban mambo had made a big impact on jazz from the late forties, such as with the “Cubop” associated with Dizzy Gillespie, the Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo, and Stan Kenton’s Afro-Cubists band. Then came the “pachanga” dance craze of the 1960s that swept across the globe, including Africa,11 followed in the late sixties by the salsa (hot sauce) music that was created in New York with its large Latino population. Salsa went on to influence American soul and R & B when Cuban congas were added to rock and funk bands, and there was a new Latin “bugalu” dance craze among the youth that went international.
The Latin tinge is reflected in a number of the Afrobeat songs Fela composed after 1970. One is “Jeun Ko’ku,” which opens with a Latin horn fanfare and utilizes a Caribbean clave rhythm. Other Latin and Latin-jazz-influenced songs are the mid-1970s “Water No Get Enemy,” “I No Get Eye For Back,” “Who No Know Go Know,” and “Na Poi.”
Despite the Spanish tinge in Fela’s music, his main musical direction in 1968 was highlife-jazz and soul.
This is what Johnny Opoku-Ayeampong has to say on the matter:
In 1968 he seemed to be looking for a new sound and had split the repertoire into the jazz highlife which we already knew, and something more soulish. So it was of two types, something called Afro-highlife and the other genre was dubbed Afro-soul. For me the Afro-highlife was only slightly different from the Afro-soul, which I preferred because it was less jazzy, less highlifish, and perhaps a bit more danceable—though not quite as funky as the American soul which by then had literally taking over most of our mixed repertoire at the time. It could have been deliberate as throughout all his music, one could detect that he wanted to be different, but it was quite subtle in those days. Also I think the Afro-soul was mostly sung in English or pidgin and the Afro-highlife mostly in Yoruba. Musically I did not immediately warm up to him because for most of us teenage musicians horns and highlife were not exciting and challenging enough. Also we had no horn players in our midst and other horn players around were older, too formal in their approach and would only play in B♭, C#, etc.—which was a pain for the average guitarist. We were then doing all the horn parts on the guitars until we progressed to the organ, mainly due to the advent of the Heartbeats influence [resident in Ghana 1964–68]. However at the gig at the Lido Fela played alone on the piano—a jazzy bluesy piece which suddenly gained my utmost respect and admiration.
Opoku-Akyeampong did not see Fela play again until early 1971 when Fela came to Ghana again and did one of his shows at the Labadi Pleasure Beach in Accra. By this time the Fela’s band was called the Africa 70, the soul and funk influence was more pronounced, and Afrobeat had crystallized. According to Opoku-Akyeampong Fela had by then become so popular that there were huge crowds at the event, and here he describes the music.
One thing which struck me after absorbing the early music was the undeniable influence of James Brown, like his danceable 1967 “Cold Sweat” single and albums which I loved that he released in 1968–69. That’s where Fela got his rhythm section, [where] the bass, drums, and guitars came from. Perhaps Fela “Africanized” it the more with the percussion, but the rest was all his own creation. Of course none of this detracts from this great man’s musical genius. If anything it is a true testament to his creativity, and I wish he had acknowledged it as such…. Again Fela accidentally coinvented jazz-funk. No one but James Brown had attempted anything quite like that before ’71. And I don’t recall J. B. doing anymore of those instrumentals. But I must be careful here to say that Booker T. and the M.G.’s also did some inspiring dance instrumentals even before 1971, but they were not jazz oriented as such. But the rest of jazz-funk proliferated with Grover Washington and the others throughout the 1970s.
Soul, Funk, and Crossover Sounds
In the late 1960s new outside musical influences began to affect Fela’s music. Soul music, and the associated Afro fashion, was introduced to Nigeria in 1966 by the Heartbeats band of Sierra Leone12 led by Geraldo Pino (Gerald Pine). A period of experimentation took place between 1967 and 1969, with Lagos artists such as Fela, Segun Bucknor, and Orlando Julius creating various blends of Afro-soul. Orlando changed the name of his highlife band to the Afro Sounders in 1967, while Segun changed his band’s name from Soul Assembly to Revolution in 1969. Fela was experimenting with soulish songs like “My Baby Don’t Love Me,” “Everyday I Got My Blues,” and also “Home Cooking” in which he actually uses the word “Afrobeat.”
It is likely that is was in 1968 that Fela started to call this new style that combined highlife, jazz, salsa, and soul “Afrobeat” and launched it at the Kakadu Club, which that year he began to call his Afro-Spot.13 According to the 1982 interview with Fela by Carlos Moore,14 Fela coined the name Afrobeat to distinguish his sound from the soulish sound of Geraldo Pino, whose Heartbeats were very big in Nigeria at the time.15 Again, according to Carlos Moore, Fela was in a club in Accra listening to James Brown’s soul music on a record player in 1968 with the Ghanaian/Nigerian music producer Raymond Aziz when he invented the name.16 Incidentally, it was only in 1970 that James Brown actually played in Africa—when he toured Nigeria in December of that year.
Although Fela’s Afrobeat was beginning to emerge by the late sixties, its lyrics were not at first so politically and socially confrontational as they were to become later. Fela’s politicization and radicalization was accelerated when he went to the United States in August 1969 for ten months.
Sandra Iszadore began Fela’s political radicalization and collaborated with him musically.
While there he and his eight-strong Koola Lobotis group made a record called “Keep Nigeria One,” a patriotic song that supported the federal government during the 1967–70 Nigerian Civil War. He also met the African American singer Sandra Iszadore (Smith) at a show of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Los Angeles. Sandra was associated with the militant Black Panther movement of Stokely Carmichael and others, and she gave Fela The Autobiography of Malcolm X to read. It was then that Fela began to be “exposed to African history,” as he puts it. It was in the United States that his first real Afrobeat style—influenced by both soul-funk and modal jazz—came together. It was also while in Los Angeles that he began to call his band Nigeria 70.
The Africa Shrine, Africa 70, and Anikulapo-Kuti Are Born
Fela returned to Nigeria in 1970 with his new Afrobeat sound, and at first he and his Nigeria 70 band continued operating his Afro-Spot club at the Kakudu Club. This is a description of how the musician Tee Mac Omatshola first encountered Fela and his club at that time.17
My mother, Suzanna Iseli Fregene Omateye, had the exclusive hairdressing Salon Bolaji, and I just returned from Switzerland having obtained a degree in economics and a master’s degree in the flute. I took up a job with UTC (a Swiss department store group in Lagos) and was just forming the Afro Collection.18 I went from the UTC head office every lunchtime to my mother’s salon to eat some food. So in August 1970 I went there on a Friday and saw a slim gentleman sitting there. My mother introduced me to him as the son of her good