Whether he’s playing with Fela Kuti or Damon Albarn, the Nigerian drummer Tony Allen rarely compromises. “I don’t play funk or jazz,” he says. “I play Afrobeat.” This 25-minute mini-album, his first release for Blue Note, ostensibly pays tribute to one of the great hard-bop bandleaders, but Allen still refuses to deviate from his own personal pulse – a jittery, back-to-front pattern that sounds like he’s constantly soloing. Allen doesn’t actually “swing” at all on these four standards associated with Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, instead putting each through his own Afrobeat prism. Moanin’ is reinvented in straight eighths, Politely is played in a rocking 6/8 rhythm, while A Night in Tunisia is transformed into a series of wonderfully jerky, disjointed riffs. Throughout, Allen’s Parisian septet improvises inventively around these unusual meters, most impressively on the Drum Thunder Suite, where one of Blakey’s many flirtations with West African music is, in turn, Africanised.
