Tony Allen: Jazz Is Dead 18

Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad's Jazz Is Dead continues its mission "to exalt the legacies of iconic musicians who have shaped the fabric of jazz across generations, genres and continents." The label's summer 2023 album features the late great Tony Allen. Jazz Is Dead 18 presents the Nigerian jazz and Afrobeat drum legend, who passed in 2020, alongside multi-instrumentalist Younge and an eight-piece horn section. It is gritty, elemental stuff and should ring the bell of most, if not all, of Allen's seemingly ever-expanding multitude of admirers.

The liner notes tell us that Jazz Is Dead 18 was recorded at Linear Labs in Los Angeles in August 2018. The notes provide no other clues about the album's genesis and gestation, nor about why it has had to wait five years for release. So what follows is speculative, based purely on reading between the grooves...

In August 2018 the musicians gathered in Linear Labs with the head arrangement for an extended jam around a horn riff and drum rhythm inhabiting Allen's latter-day signature intersection of jazz, Afrobeat and hip hop. After run-throughs, they tracked perhaps fifteen minutes of music. The session ended and Allen moved on to the next city on his tour schedule. Sadly, no further sessions with happened.

Following Allen's passing, and slowed down by pandemic restrictions, Younge and Muhammad wove their post-production remix magic to create an album that runs just shy of thirty minutes (the usual length for a Jazz Is Dead disc). Opening track "Ebun" is a more or less unadorned six minutes from the live-in-the-studio recording, with Allen's kit well to the fore and a kicking beat which drives everything elegantly before it; the everything in question being a tough Afrobeat-inspired horn arrangement and concise solos from flautist Scott Mayo, tenor saxophonist Jaman Laws and one of the two baritone saxophonists, David Urquidi and Jacob Scesney (baritones are as fundamental to an Afrobeat horn section as a tenor was to a late 1950s hard-bop quintet).

The remaining seven tracks have Younge and Muhammad employing a studio technique pioneered by Jamaican dub producers in the 1970s: using studio tech to create "versions" of the source track, with the various mixes emphasising different instruments and textures, creating more or less new tracks. Younge also drops in overdubbed organ, electric piano and marimba.

That, or something like it, is the most likely recording scenario. But the precise process is unimportant. It is the end product that counts, and this one counts up to 3.5 going on 4 stars.

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