“I play yours, you play mine. The music never ends.” The wisdom of Tony’s words was as deep as his grooves, and these two sentences, which announce the dozen songs that follow, truly capture the spirit of There is No End, released on April 30th on Decca France. For a man “born into rhythms,” the thousands of grooves he recorded, the innumerable more he performed on stages the world over, the collaborations from Fela and Ginger Baker half a century ago to Damon Albarn and Bernard Purdie today, all make it clear that while the album before you marks the coda of a legendary career, it will inspire generations more musicians, artists and fans who hear it.
There is No End is a very unique album. Tony’s motivating concept and desire was to work with younger artists, and especially the new generation of rappers, and give them a voice in a time of global turmoil when music has never been more important – not necessarily as a “weapon” for the future in the manner of Fela’s violently political songs, but also as medicine to heal a fractured world today.
Renowned Nigerian novelist and poet Ben Okri, whose words and voices are featured on the mesmerizing first single “Cosmosis,” explains it this way: “We were in the studio with Damon Albarn and Remi Kabaka and Tony said, ‘I lay out this universe in which dreams can come forth,’ and then I understood that for him the beat he lays out is like this textual landscape. It has a psychic structure or DNA of a universe of music for which Tony had worked out a kind of mathematical basis for it in his elliptical beats, and then an invitation to dream could been given.”
But Tony Allen’s journey, at least on this plane, ended before most of the rappers had the chance to record. Luckily, he and producer Vincent Taeger had already recorded the grooves before he left us. As Vincent explains, “Tony’s idea was to give rappers the space to breathe and freely create. He wanted really not to just do Afrobeat, but rather something new and open, with very different sounds for the drums for each song and feels and tempos that were really grounded to the core in hip hop.”
To create this tapestry Tony and Vincent delved into some of the most iconic songs in the hip hop canon, with Tony literally jamming on his drums while listening to them on the headphones. Not to copy the beats already there, but rather invoke the more elemental beats only someone as deeply rooted as he could hear inside them. From this distillation of some of the great American hip hop grooves through the essence of West African rhythms from whence they originally came, magic was once again made. Tony had produced a collection of beats and grooves that, even after his passing, could inspire an entire album. As Tony put it while conceptualizing the album, “I want to make something very much in the present but also bring the young rappers back home.” That is, hip hop with his unique spiritual personality and flow.
Making that tradition even more alive was the fact that “Cosmosis” is the one song on the album that was recorded live with all the main instruments playing together. Indeed, the groove came together just as Tony, Damon Albarn and Nigerian-British rapper Skepta had finished tracking their collaboration, “How Far?” for the Gorillaz. Okri wrote the lyrics “in a way as a tribute to Tony because it was written to ask ‘How do you absorb a cosmos or integrate a cosmos, enrich a world, infiltrate in the highest possible way and change the mentalverse, the spiritverse – it’s by cosmosis.
In thinking back on the incredible process of creating this album without Tony physically present to guide him, Vincent Taeger remarked that his friend and mentor “was a teacher without speaking… a drummer and a guardian, with a great artistic vision and that vision filled the songs even after he had left us.” Ben Okri, like everyone else involved in this valedictory album, had a very similar experience, declaring in awe that “this man could have lived another 150 years and kept creating new worlds. He had become the master shaman of his art. He knew himself and his mind. He wanted the album to be open to the energies of a new generation… but like a great mathematician or scientist who found a code of for a new world, with just a few beats, he created this extraordinary canvas.”
Indeed, There is No End leaves us a blueprint for a music to match the new age desperately trying to be born. Every musician with a heart, a groove and a soul would do well to study and cherish it.
Tracklist
- Tony’s Praeludium
- Stumbling Down (Featuring Sampa The Great)
- Crushed Grapes (Featuring Lord Jah-Monte Ogbon)
- Très magnifique (Featuring Tsunami)
- Mau Mau (Featuring Nah Eeto)
- Coonta Kinte (Featuring Zelooperz)
- Rich Black (Featuring Koreatown Oddity)
- One Inna Million (Featuring Lava La Rue)
- Gang On Holiday (Em I Go We?) (Featuring Jeremiah Jae)
- Deer In Headlights (Featuring Danny Brown)
- Hurt Your Soul (Featuring Nate Bone)
- My Own (Featuring Marlowe)
- Cosmosis (Featuring Ben Okri + Skepta)
- There’s No End
