Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s music, Afrobeat, has had a long and unlikely afterlife since he died in 1997. “Red Hot & Riot Live!,” which started a two-night stand at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Friday, wasn’t a rediscovery but one more affirmation.
In Brooklyn: Foreground, from left, Les Nubians with CuCu Diamantes and, rear from left, Andres Levin, John Medeski and Keziah Jones.
Presented on World AIDS Day, Friday’s concert was a reunion for many of the musicians who appeared on “Red Hot & Riot,” a 2002 anti-AIDS benefit album. (Mr. Kuti died of H.I.V.-related illness.) The concerts were also benefits, for African Services Committee, which helps immigrants with H.I.V. and AIDS.
The African contingent onstage included Les Nubians, Cheikh Lô, Amadou et Mariam, Keziah Jones and, most important, Mr. Kuti’s drummer, Tony Allen, who was the mainspring of Afrobeat. Mr. Kuti’s songs were already hybrids of African and American music, and “Red Hot & Riot Live!,” with Andres Levin of the Latin alternative band Yerba Buena as musical director, also bounced them toward the Caribbean.
In Nigeria, Mr. Kuti was an incorrigible rebel, defying the government and denouncing corruption in his songs; he was repeatedly arrested, beaten and jailed. Afrobeat set Mr. Kuti’s righteousness and defiance to African funk that dug in for a long siege. He mixed Nigerian rhythms with James Brown and jazz, and his songs take their time, vamping along at adamant medium tempos and taking turns among vocals, solos and brawny horn riffs. Afrobeat smolders and seethes, determined and danceable.
Instead of waning with time, Afrobeat has proliferated. Two of Mr. Kuti’s sons have led bands featuring his former sidemen. Mr. Allen has been making his own albums and collaborating widely. Bands like Antibalas, from New York City, have been picking up Mr. Kuti’s old songs and writing new ones in his style.
“Red Hot & Riot Live!” didn’t try to recreate the bitter intensity of Mr. Kuti’s own performances. It concentrated on the groove and let the protests — against poverty, war and what one song called the “colonial mentality” — speak for themselves. Yerba Buena, which has two drummers of its own and a Latin percussion section, was the core of the stage band, which included Meshell Ndegeocello on bass, who tinctured the Afrobeat bass lines with passages of thumb-popping and hints of reggae, and John Medeski on keyboards, playing flinty 1970s-style funk solos edged with distortion.
And it had the groove: not just from Mr. Allen’s drumming in some songs, with its subtle bass drum thumps and fastidiously shifting high-hat cymbal syncopations, but from an Afrobeat horn section anchored by Alex Harding’s forceful baritone saxophone.
There were guest rappers: Dead Prez, a duo that brought its own rhymes about ghetto survival. Yerba Buena’s own singers, Pedro Martinez and CuCu Diamantes, sometimes brought out the ancestral connections between West African music and Afro-Latin incantations, and the percussion could layer rumba into the Afrobeat. The Africans — even Mr. Jones, from Nigeria, who sang and played some bluesy lead guitar — didn’t imitate Mr. Kuti; they expanded his music from Nigerian to pan-African style. Cheikh Lô moved from an ominous whisper to the soaring lines of Senegalese griot singing in “Shakara”; Les Nubians, with Ms. Diamantes, were both flirtatious and assertive in “Upside Down” and “Water Not Get Enemy.”
The concert gave ample reason for the survival of Afrobeat. The music offers plenty of room for allies and kindred spirits, without ever surrendering its own stubborn identity.
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