Out of Africa

It can begin in the belly — “the Belly” of Django Gypsy Kitchen and Saloon, specifically. This downstairs dance club on Peachtree Street is the bohemian burrow where DJs Samba, Tabone, Tenisio, Changes Disco International and Ausar spin “Riveting Rhythms” Wednesdays. And what begins is a beat — Afrobeat, a rhythmically and politically charged musical fusion that communicates beyond stylistic and national barriers.

It can begin in the belly, though it can as easily be found in the heart or the head. It’s the global drumbeat that runs through and alongside Afrobeat, a musical fusion whose term and context were coined in the ’60s by Nigerian activist Fela Anikulapo Kuti. It’s a beat for those who won’t be beaten down, an insistent funk forum that also anchors a dialogue for social justice and responsibility. And Afrobeat’s legacy can be heard inside the musical compositions of Atlanta artists such as Wale Oyejide, Mausiki Scales and the Common Ground Collective, and Kalakuta Moziak; resonating within club mixes of DJs including Karl Injex and Kemit; and broadcast during Ausar’s “Kalakuta Show,” which airs Tuesdays 2-4 p.m. on WRFG-FM (89.3).

But wherever it’s celebrated, Afrobeat and those inspired by it never stray too far from the essence of sankofa — a West African concept that roughly means one must reclaim the past to move forward.

Afrobeat’s past is irrevocably intertwined with that of Fela — an innovator referred to as familiarly yet reverently as a Miles (Davis) or (John) Coltrane. Born to anti-colonial nationalists, Fela seemed destined to lead an upheaval, though you wouldn’t know it from his earliest band. He assembled that band while studying music in London and it basically mixed jazz with Ghana’s calypso-tinged highlife genre. Meanwhile, the funk of Georgia’s own James Brown — itself a continuation of African call-and-response traditions — was influencing playing styles around the world. Funk’s framework filtered throughout countries such as Sierra Leone, Togo, Ghana, Guinea and Nigeria, where there was already highlife, palm-wine (a brassy, Brazilian-influenced bar-room form), jùjú (think dubby Nigerian blues) and Apala (rousing, vocal Muslim music of the Nigerian ethnic community, Yoruba).

“Back before Afrobeat, they didn’t have as many instruments in Africa outside percussion, but slowly the British military bands brought the big brass,” says Ausar, a WRFG radio programmer who showcases Africa’s rhythmic foundations and contemporary interpreters. “So by the late ’60s, Afrobeat has access to the percussive horns, funky guitars and broken rhythms from many places.”

Fela began innovating with the help of drummer Tony Allen (still active today) by fusing his African musical roots — Yoruba’s talking rhythms and highlife’s big-band structure — with funk’s perpetual groove and jazz’s improvisational formations. Afrobeat’s final integral element, however, didn’t come until after Fela brought his band (Koola Lobitos, renamed Nigeria 70, later renamed Africa 70) to North America in 1969.

“Fela then came to Los Angeles and hooked up with Sandra Izsadore, who taught him about the Black Panther movement, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, etc.,” Ausar says. “This is why Afrobeat is a fusion of jazz, funk, traditional African rhythms and politics; it is like no other musical force because you have every aspect of the African-American Diaspora in one form.”

When he returned to Nigeria, Fela combined linguistic facets and politics similarly to how he arranged Pan-African instrumentation. Fela used elements of Yoruba and Nigerian English until he eventually settled into a pidgin — a broken English — spoken by much of the West African working class. He made it clear that he spoke directly to and for the people, by simply and forcefully addressing inflammatory issues of resistance and responsibility. Hopeful analogies — such as water being proof of undeniable, unbreakable, essential good for which to strive — peppered Fela’s works even as other tracks chronicled the “Sorrow, Tears & Blood” spilling in the wake of police brutality.

Throughout his career, which spanned nearly 80 albums until his AIDS-related death in 1997, Fela’s alternate humanist reality came up against conflicts with multinationals and corrupt heads of state. The Nigerian junta repeatedly and maliciously raided Fela’s Kalakuta Republic — a “utopian” counterculture commune/recording studio — and his Afrika Shrine nightclub/pulpit. He was jailed repeatedly.

“Kids get into Afrobeat for the stance, as Fela was a larger-than-life rebel,” says DJ Karl Injex, who will DJ alongside Ausar and Soulsinger at Les Fleur de Lis Café on Saturday, Oct. 14, in honor of Fela’s birthday.

“But on the most simple, powerful level, Afrobeat’s persistent presence comes from its raw ability to bring people together, get them amped,” Injex continues. “At the right moment, I can drop a Fela track from Django to Tokyo and people get emotional and excited as a whole; it’s party and political party music.”

Education. Exasperation. Perspiration. Afrobeat classically addresses all three. And it’s beneath some part of this shadow that any local son of the ‘beat must shine.

On the extended transcendental jam end of Afrobeat’s spectrum, much like New York’s Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, is Mausiki Scales and the more than 30-person strong Common Ground Collective (variations of which perform every last Friday at Apache Café and at assorted festivals).

In addition to his role as a bandleader and keyboardist, Scales works as a professor in the Georgia State University African-American studies department and Morehouse history department. He espouses music that expands perspective both with and without blatant politics. As he explains, there are those moments when “you may not remember the church sermon, but you can feel the release.” Even when not explicit in song, Scales considers it imperative to remember Afrobeat’s deeper history of escape to not just a better now, but also to a better than. Part of the same continuum as Sun Ra’s solar Arkestra to Parliament-Funkadelic’s Mothership or Arrested Development’s “another place,” Afrobeat features maverick odes to rising above oppression.

“Afrobeat is a powerful underground tool for all children of the funk to develop social awareness ... a noble collective movement that maintains its integrity and a strong interest in what individuals continue to bring to its style,” says Scales, who intends to further develop components at Morehouse on rhythmic Diaspora and extrapolates his perspective on the aforementioned sankofa on his MySpace blog (www.myspace.com/mausikiscales).

Grant Park-based, Nigerian-bred Kalakuta Moziak observed first-hand tyranny’s toll. The guitarist toured with Fela’s last band and will release a CD, Investigation, in 2007. “For the opportunity to continue the political message of Afrobeat, [the United States] is the best place,” Moziak says. “Because you can be a journalist but you don’t have to worry about someone killing you for writing. Fela was getting a beating. But America is blessed, and people should use the freedom of information to reflect on the Afrobeat, which is music that lasts because it reflects on life.”

Nigerian-born Morehouse graduate Wale Oyejide does just that — freely reflect on social issues. On his latest release, Africahot! — The AfroFuture Sessions, Oyejide uses an elemental digital sampler to craft tracks that ignore the boundaries between funky Afrobeat, jazzy British broken_beat and chunky American hip-hop. Cobbling together shards with a modern DIY-swagger, Oyejide sets himself apart musically while furthering the global dialogue on what issues to sweat and when just to sweat.

“There’s a catharsis you get from a crowd anthem, a track you can play in a club and people go nuts,” says Wale, who cites producers such as J. Dilla as inspirations for such. “All people can relate to dancing. But when you know people have been even further affected — that it’s not just about snap your fingers, do a step, but it’s actually inspiring people to be more aware of what’s happening around them — it’s that much more poignant.”

“I think Wale is lyrically taking a similar line [to classic Afrobeat] in the way he addresses global issues but in a way that’s speaking to the individual rather than pontificating on a grand scale,” Injex says. “It’s more visceral, showing a young guy trying to work out things like AIDS and war and what gets in our way as a society.”

Since the days it first swallowed funk and pidgin, Afrobeat’s strength is how adaptable and forward-friendly its vernacular remains. Afrobeat has inspired several strains of Afro-Futurism, which is a philosophy that uses technology and science fantasy to explore the black experience. The sound has affected various DJs and electronic producers from the New York deep house of Osunlade to the soulful jump-n-funk of Philadelphia’s Rich Medina. Afro-Futurism has even been found thematically echoed by non-African nu_jazz artists including Germany’s Jazzanova and Japan’s Kyoto Jazz Massive.

“Fela said he was bringing ‘the weapon of the future’ to the people — music that speaks not only in the verse but in the rhythm,” Ausar says. “It is music that has inspired and influenced so many to further this organic movement.”

Open to toothsome rhythms and digesting issues, Afrobeat can begin in the belly, ending up as both a ravenous hunger and a kick in the gut to spark change.