Femi Kuti / King Sunny Adé
Harbourfront Centre. Saturday, July 4, 2009.
I was really looking forward to this double-header at Harbourfront with much more anticipation than usual — a chance to see two superstars of Nigerian music. Very much a co-headlining kind of deal, as both artists got extended, two-hour sets. And although he was up first, King Sunny Adé was the undisputed champion of the night for me, turning in what felt like the best set I've seen this year.
Maybe the sun had something to do with it. In a full switch away from the cold breeze of the day before, Saturday turned out to be warm and sunny, and as I took my spot I had plenty time of sit and read my paper and absorb the late afternoon sun pouring on the back of my neck. Once again, given the crowd, I'm glad I went down early — there's no way I'd have lasted through such an extended night of entertainment without a spot to sit. So the fact that the sun had lulled me into a mellow sort of state probably had something to do with the receptive state I was in when the dozen players in the band took the stage to start playing.
An all-male affair, King Sunny Adé's band included percussion and several talking drums; bass, drums and synths; plus three co-vocalists, even though everyone sang. The large ensemble sounded like there were exactly enough players on stage to produce the masterful brand of jùjú music made famous by Adé, a master pop synthesist who expanded the Yoruban traditional music, based on the rhythms of talking drums, with a wide variety of influences — none of which is essential to know, as the rhythm and energy speaks for itself.1
The show was also a compelling visual spectacle. Many of the songs came with their own little ritualized interactions between Sunny and the other singers — at one point miming tugging on a rope, later passing around a metaphorical hot potato. And then as a topper, the band was joined by two female dancers, who came out to vigourously shake their tail fathers. It was while urging them on that Sunny picked up his guitar, the only time during the night he would flex his virtuoso guit chops.
In retrospect, I'm mildly at a loss to explain as to why I was so into this — but that's one of the reasons to go to concerts, isn't it? For those rare moments where your self can get past itself and just feel the music in an unmediated way. Which, despite the intoxicating tools that can help it along, usually just has to come over you of itself. There was simply a presence to the show that transformed itself into one of those ineffably sublime moments.
Although it doesn't capture the entire whatyoucallit of the occasion, you can check out a track from this set here.
After that, Femi Kuti had his work cut out not to be upstaged. Added to that, in my my mind at least, he was also competing with his younger brother Seun, who I'd seen in the same venue almost exactly a year earlier. That was a fantastic, sweaty gig — non-stop action from a crew that included many veterans from Fela's band. The matchbook cover version of the critical consensus on the two Kutis is that while Seun was playing his father's songs with his father's band, Femi was doing more to push forward the boundaries of Afrobeat.
Regardless, Femi took the stage to driving Afrobeat, as if you show he can play it straight-up, and powerfully so, when he wants to. From the start, the crowd were standing, and would pretty much stay that way for the duration. Femi was backed by a ten-piece band (including five horn players) plus three dancer/backup singers, and came with his own conversational shorthand, ending anything requiring a response from the crowd with a ululating "la-la-la-la?", which the crowd would answer back with a "la-la-la-la!" To my ears, the wider palate of influences2 that he brings to his version of Afrobeat really came out in the middle of the songs, when the traditional groove would give way to jazzy exploration or some other excursion away from the music's centre.
While he was certainly the undisputed leader of the band, conducting the players and generally weaving their parts into a rich, textured whole, he wasn't entirely stingy with the spotlight, granting the various ensemble members their solos. For his own musical contributions,besides vocals and his many appeals to the crowd, he pitched in on sax, trumpet and keyboards, the latter especially bringing Fela to mind as he laid down Miles Davis-like flattened drones. Some of his music — including some horn solos where he seemed to be reaching for some notes he couldn't quite nail — had the sense of being slightly deliberately "off", the broken note that brings everything else into brilliant focus. Ultimately, I found myself more enjoying the music despite the excursions than because of them, which may be why I left feeling that this set was not the equal of Sunny Adé's — nor of Seun Kuti a year ago. Which is not to say this wasn't a pretty good show — the band was excellent, the tunes were pretty solid, and Femi was a pretty charismatic presence on stage, filled with amusing monologues and discourses on the state of Africa and the world, the Shrine, Nigerian politics, expatriates and more. All told, a fabulous night. What luck we have, living in a city where he get to see incrdible concerts like this — and for free!
1 Of course, that indicates that I was enjoying the music on a different level than the large ex-pat contingent to the crowd, many of whom were singing along to every song.
2 At one point, Femi reeled off a list of his influences: "Do you know Dizzy Gillespie? Do you know Miles Davis? Do you know Duke Ellington? Do you know Tanya Tucker? Do you know Billie Holliday?" Strangely enough, I seemed to be the only one gawping around, wondering, "did he just say Tanya Tucker?"
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