Fela Kuti's fusion of west African chant, gospel call and response, and pounding funk remains one of the enduring musical hybrids of worldwide pop. It's been decades since the music of this Nigerian musical revolutionary and political activist - who died from AIDS-related illnesses in 1997 - first caused a stir in the United States. But his concerts, four- and five-hour marathons of entrancing, repetitive beats and stirring invective, are still cited by jam bands and jazz musicians as models of free-floating exploration. The crime is that his massive discography, which includes several memorable live albums, has been in disarray, available here only erratically.

Along comes his son Femi Kuti to rectify the situation with his own new take on the Afrobeat style. Femi sings and plays saxophone, though not quite as lustily as his father. He favors the same empowerment rhetoric that made Fela such an important voice, but tempers the message with attempts at consciousness-raising ("Truth Don Die"), as well as pieces devoted to horny pillow talk ("Beng Beng Beng").

Much has changed since the glory days of Afrobeat in the Seventies and Eighties, but Femi knows better than to mess too much with his father's incendiary music. Throughout the showy Shoki Shoki, he treats Afrobeat's basic rhythm formula as sacred, adding only slight embellishments and updates. The one exception is a provocative reworking of "Blackman Know Yourself," by the Roots. His refinements include a blasting, assertive horn section and a latticework of rhythm guitars that swerves in and out of the mix, nudging things gently but insistently forward. Rather than giving the music an annoyingly superficial modern sheen (like so many world artists), these tweakings provide genuine vitality, and though old Felaheads may not derive much nourishment from Femi's vague themes, the prayerful "What Will Tomorrow Bring" and the prowling "Look Around" are nonetheless squarely in the Fela mold, expressions of internal resolve powered by a surging beat-wise intensity.

The Fela career retrospective Black President shows the wisdom of Femi's conservative approach. A member of his father's band for years, he certainly remembers that when it was firing at peak power, the massive ensemble achieved an intoxicating propulsion, an effortless-sounding churn fueled by the friction of steady, recurring phrases and frenetic ad-libbing. Whether singing or preaching or playing, Fela thrived on that contrast, and the material here - which includes deliciously loose tracks from such landmark works as No Agreement, I.T.T. and Coffin for Head of State - sets a high bar for Femi. Though Fela's musical contributions were often ignored because of his strident political expressions, the late agitator was way ahead of his time (if not a pioneer) in using repetitive looping elements as the basis for genuinely hypnotic trance music. (RS 835)

TOM MOON

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(Posted: Mar 2, 2000)