There Is No End

2LP Vinyl! How can one account for the singular genius of Tony Allen? The contours of his incommensurable musical journey, which ended with his sudden - one could be forgiven for saying untimely - passing shy of his 80th birthday in April 30th, 2020, are well-known: Born to a Nigerian-Ghanaian family, the rhythms of his parents' Ga, Ewe, and Yoruba cultures, and the wider musical universe of the Bight of Benin, inhabited him from a young age. They were soon joined by the swing of the great jazz age and bebop drummers he so greatly admired: From Gene Krupa to Max Roach, to Tony's hero Art Blakey. And at the center of that mix, the inimitable blending of American jazz and West African traditions by Ghana's own Guy Warren (Kofi Ghanaba), whose journey from highlife acolyte with E.T. Mensah to jazz innovator powerfully shaped Tony's musical horizons. As much as any of the virtuoso drummers who inspired him, Tony Allen created his own, immediately identifiable musical creole, a language that redefined the sound and rhythms of the instrument across multiple genres and eras. Gestated in the cultural cauldron of late colonial and post-independence Lagos, Tony's ground-breaking Africana fusion emerged and matured into brilliance during his 15 years playing behind Fela Kuti, blossoming even further when he stepped out of Fela's shadow to forge his own serpentine path as a bandleader and artist. As the album before you so well demonstrates, the language he created was as supple and pleasing to the ear as it was complex and difficult to decipher, moving with ease across the avant-garde of modern popular music on both sides of the Black Trans-Atlantic - from jazz to highlife, funk to electronica, hip hop to the full spectrum of African music and its American and European diasporas......