Fela Kuti

Between the highlife-jazz of the mid-1960s and his last album in 1992, Fela Anikulapo Kuti recorded about fifty albums, and this box gathers all of them: 51 albums on 29 CDs, most discs pairing two original LPs, plus rarities, two previously unreleased tracks and a DVD. Played in sequence, it follows Afrobeat from its first experiments to the long protest pieces of the Egypt 80 years.

The story starts with Koola Lobitos 64-68, the band he formed in Lagos after studying at Trinity College of Music in London, still playing highlife with jazz horns. The '69 Los Angeles Sessions catch the turning point: a year in America, contact with the Black Power movement, and a new sound built on James Brown's funk, Yoruba rhythm and the drumming of Tony Allen. With Afrika 70 the records of the early 1970s, Open & Close, Afrodisiac, Shakara, Roforofo Fight, Gentleman, Confusion, fix the form: one or two tracks per side, interlocking guitars, riffing horns, Fela's organ and saxophone, call-and-response vocals in pidgin English.

From the mid-1970s the songs turn into direct confrontation with the Nigerian state. Expensive Shit, Alagbon Close and Kalakuta Show answer police raids on his Kalakuta Republic compound; Zombie mocks the army's blind obedience, and the soldiers' attack on Kalakuta in 1977, in which his mother Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti was thrown from a window and later died, is the background to Sorrow Tears And Blood, Unknown Soldier and Coffin For Head Of State. Shuffering And Shmiling, I.T.T., Teacher Don't Teach Me Nonsense, Army Arrangement and Beasts Of No Nation carry the attack into the 1980s, with Egypt 80 and pieces stretching past twenty minutes, up to Underground System in 1992.

The live side is here too: Fela With Ginger Baker Live!, recorded in London in 1971 with Ginger Baker trading solos with Tony Allen, Live In Amsterdam, and a version of Mistake from the 1978 Berlin Jazz Festival. The last three discs collect long tracks that did not belong to the album pairings, among them I Go Shout Plenty, Perambulator and Colonial Mentality.

The DVD A Slice Of Fela (52 minutes) brings together excerpts from the documentary Music Is The Weapon, footage from the Berlin Jazz Festival, a performance of Teacher Don't Teach Me Nonsense and a conversation with Bill T. Jones and Carlos Moore.

Deluxe edition box from Knitting Factory Records, first issued in 2016: 29 remastered CDs and one DVD, with a 52-page booklet containing a biography and album-by-album commentary by Chris May.