Tony Allen - The Source

With his Blue Note-debut, The Source, Nigerian drummer Tony Allen sees a childhood dream come true.

Allen says this is the "best in my life," and with a career spanning over 50 years, that's quite the confession for the Afrobeat pioneer and former Fela Kuti fixture. The Source represents Blue Note's classic era while symbolizing the label's innovative present.

Guardian UK 4 Stars - reviewed by John Lewis

Classic Blue Note releases of the 1960s are filled with tracks that exoticise Africa, with names such as Afro Blue, Afrodisia, Ghana, Niger Mambo, Mr Kenyatta, The Man from Tanganyika and so on. Five decades later, Blue Note’s latest signing Tony Allen – the Nigerian drummer who powered Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat – is turning the tables and exoticising Blue Note’s hard-bop.

The Source builds on Allen’s recent mini-LP of Art Blakey covers (10" Vinyl LP only), but this time he and musical director Yann Jankielewicz invoke other jazz legends. Ewajo recalls Miles Davis’s angular modal jazz; On Fire is based around a Dizzy Gillespie-style chromatic trumpet riff; Cruising evokes Duke Ellington’s tone poems; Push and Pull sounds like an ecstatic New Orleans marching band. Each is set to one of Allen’s herky-jerky drum patterns and a restrictive ostinato bassline, but Allen’s Parisian band explore each theme in detail, with some garrulous, impressive solos from the likes of saxophonist Rémi Sciuto and trumpeter Nicolas Giraud.