Our inability to appreciate what we have and have built will always lead to others picking those gems up and turn them into a money making machine and also in the process,put these people on a level of respect which we as fellow country-men have failed to do,rather we are more intent on praising the people who have totally ruined this nation and are actively working towards tearing it apart
Remember growing up and would be with my dad as he drives and havng a heated arguement with my father over fela and right now,I can imagine what my dad would think of what that man prophesised and what is happening now


“MOVE!” Bill T. Jones commanded. “Rhythm, rhythm, rhythm!” He was airborne, being lifted and carried across the stage of the Eugene O’Neill Theater by four dancers, perfecting their timing in a climactic ritual scene. It was hands-on choreography while an actor who would actually be carried, Kevin Mambo, observed from the wings. Mr. Jones, a pre-eminent modern-dance choreographer who won a Tony Award for his work on “Spring Awakening,” was rehearsing his full-scale debut as a Broadway director: “Fela!,” based on the life and music of the Nigerian bandleader and political rebel Fela Anikulapo Kuti.

Fela who? On Broadway?

Those are basic questions that “Fela!” faces when it opens on Monday. The show has moved from a widely praised Off Broadway production, last year at 37 Arts, to the larger and more mainstream realm of the Broadway musical — from 299 seats to 1,050. Amid theaters filled with more recognizable fare — movie adaptations, revivals, jukebox musicals — “Fela!” seems downright quixotic. Although the music that Fela invented, Afrobeat, and the central events of “Fela!” are familiar to Africans, in the United States Fela (as Kuti is usually called) is largely unknown except by African-music devotees and fans of political music.

“We have an uphill battle,” said Stephen Hendel, the producer who started the project, “because we don’t have a recognized star, and Fela is an international artist and musician who’s outside the mainstream of American culture.”

The goal “Fela!” has set for itself is to be true to his music and his impact while reaching a Broadway musical audience. It is, inevitably, a translation, but one governed more by respect and ambition than by show-business routine. “Fela!” juggles the conflicting demands of Mr. Jones’s own artistic leanings — in a celebrated career that has often pondered history, race and sexuality — and the commercial imperatives of Broadway, where theatergoers’ idea of African music might begin and end with “The Lion King.”

There’s also the legacy of Fela himself, well documented in recordings and films from the 1970s until his death in 1997, that is cherished by fans for whom he was already a musical and cultural hero. “There are people who, when they heard we were going to make a musical about him, were very upset,” Mr. Jones recalled. “Because Fela’s underground, and Broadway’s mainstream.”

That shifted with the Off Broadway production last year. Early in its run Ahmir (Questlove) Thompson, the drummer for the Roots — the long-running hip-hop group that is now the house band for “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” — saw an early preview that prompted him to write a post for his mailing list and his blog declaring “Fela!” to be “the BEST MUSICAL EVER CREATED.” Celebrities, from Alicia Keys to Susan Sarandon to Stephen Sondheim to Jay-Z, began showing up nightly; word of mouth spread exponentially.

Longtime Broadway producers wanted to sign on, but Mr. Hendel was leery of pressures that they might bring to make the show “more quote Broadway unquote,” he said. Now Jay-Z is among the producers, and Mr. Thompson is an associate producer. A rebellious, police-taunting, raunchy, politically conscious, dope-smoking character like Fela could easily make headway in hip-hop culture — and he has the beats to back him up.

Reviewing the Off Broadway production last year for The New York Times, Ben Brantley called it “one helluva party.” He added, “In giving physical life to Mr. Kuti’s songs of political rage, sorrow and satire, Mr. Jones and company offer exciting music and its social context in one breath.”

In Africa, Fela, who died at 58 of complications from AIDS, is a figure to rival Bob Marley as both a musical innovator and a symbol of resistance. Afrobeat, the style he forged in the early ’70s, combined African rhythms and messages with the jazz and funk that Fela absorbed during his education in Britain and the United States. Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Yoruba rhythms, Afro-Cuban mambos, James Brown, John Coltrane, Nina Simone and, yes, Frank Sinatra all flowed into his music, which sounds exactly like none of them.

Afrobeat is insinuating but hard-headed, with stubbornness encoded in its sound and its lyrics. Its grooves are unhurried and hypnotic, with guitar, bass and drums locked into repetitive patterns while voices and horns leap freely. On Fela’s albums songs stretch 10 to 20 minutes, in long, tension-and-release forms. Each track is an excursion through verses, choruses, jagged horn-section lines, call-and-response vocals with Fela’s backup singers and dancers (who were his wives), individual solos and bruising full-band attacks.

It’s music of steadfastness and endurance, of uncompromising determination. It’s also, of course, dance music, made for long nights in clubs. Within the grooves Fela’s lyrics denounce corruption and injustice, call for African values and challenge authority.

Fela was defiant by both instinct and ideology, and he was repeatedly arrested, beaten and imprisoned for his opposition to a succession of Nigerian regimes. In 1977 soldiers burned down the compound where he lived with his wives, musicians and entourage — a pivotal episode in the Broadway show. Afterward Fela changed his name from Fela Ransome Kuti to Fela Anikulapo Kuti; “Anikulapo” means “he who carries death in his pouch.”

Fela was a complex, willful and often contradictory man. “I probably wouldn’t get along with him,” Mr. Jones said with a laugh. Fela was born into a privileged family; his father was an Anglican priest, and his mother was a feminist leader.

Yet he was also a hedonistic rock star, flaunting big marijuana spliffs and his 27 wives — his “queens.” Despite his education he adopted the voice of the poor, singing in a lower-class pidgin of English and tribal languages, and insisting that he was promoting an “authentic African” culture to defy a lingering colonial mentality. And though Fela was shaped by strong women, notably his mother, he claimed that true African women should be submissive. While “Fela!” is largely celebratory, it also notes its hero’s inconsistencies.

“I’m not interested in hagiography,” Mr. Jones said. “Fela Kuti is a sacred monster, and no progressive, democratic-leaning society should be without one — this provocateur, this enfant terrible.” Mr. Jones said he was attracted to the character because he was willing to suffer for his beliefs. “I’m pretty sure that’s what he was about,” he said. “At least that’s what we make him in the show to be about.”

“Fela!” the Broadway musical — complete with exclamation point in its title — is slightly less insubordinate. Its running time is a conventional Broadway two and a half hours, shortened from the Off Broadway versions. But otherwise, “Fela!” shakes up its environment, making a Broadway theater look like a club.

The chronology of the show, set in 1978 but including events from the 1980s isn’t fully accurate, Mr. Jones allowed. Like Fela it prefers the mythic to the mundane and presents its story not through linear narrative but in songs, explosive dances, recollections and flashbacks loosely woven through a performance that Fela gave at the Shrine, his club in Lagos, Nigeria’s capital. It relies on the simmering beat of his music and the indefatigable dancing of an ensemble that regularly spills offstage and into the audience.

The band, with members of the Brooklyn Afrobeat group Antibalas at its core, ambles on stage and starts playing before curtain time. But “Fela” is clearly a theater work, not a concert.

Fela is onstage for all but two minutes in a role so demanding that the show has two leads: a shifting schedule of five performances a week by Sahr Ngaujah, who originated the role, and three by Mr. Mambo, who joined for the Broadway run.

To embody Fela, Mr. Ngaujah said he had been studying documentary footage for the last four years. “The speaking patterns, the way he smokes a cigarette, the way he lights marijuana,” he said. “ Even the way he turns to left and right. Because he had been beaten so many times, there were restrictions on his bone structure.”

Mr. Jones’s choreography draws on what Fela’s queens did onstage — some serious bump and grind — but isn’t confined by it. “It also had to be held together with other vocabulary,” he said, “with virtuosity that says something about form and energy and meaning. Our dancers are amazingly wholesome, athletic, lifted, trim. Fela’s women were real women.”

The music follows an even trickier path between reproduction and reinvention. When Antibalas was formed in 1998, its mission was to preserve Afrobeat “as it was created,” said Aaron Johnson, Antibalas’s trombonist and the music director of “Fela!” The songs were written for all-night parties, not tight Broadway shows.

In early workshops Mr. Jones and the playwright Jim Lewis, with whom he wrote the book for “Fela!,” envisioned purely imagistic scenes based around Fela’s songs, in a clublike setting with a dance floor. Pragmatism intervened. Mr. Jones recalled: “The people who were putting money into this thing said: ‘No, no, no, no. You need to make more concessions to telling a story — something that starts somewhere and goes somewhere.’ That was hard.”

Much of the music of “Fela!” echoes the original recordings: dense, burly and unswerving, though by necessity the songs are excerpts from Fela’s longer compositions. Although Antibalas has devoted itself over a decade to mastering Fela’s original approach, Mr. Jones wanted to rework material for the stage.

The show uses supertitles for Fela’s pidgin lyrics, illuminating some songs that even longtime fans may not have understood. It also lets women take over some lead vocals, something Fela did for only one song in his career. The show’s most Broadwayish moment is “Trouble Sleep,” a ballad sung by Lillias White, the Tony-winning actress who plays Fela’s mother.

Mr. Jones also pushed Mr. Johnson and Jordan McLean, Antibalas’ trumpeter and Mr. Johnson’s fellow arranger, to probe and disassemble the old Fela tracks. “Bill was trying to get us to show parts of this music that nobody realized were there,” Mr. Johnson said.

“He’d say, ‘I need more melodic information,’ or ‘I want another counterline,’ or ‘I want four voices singing at once.’ And we’d go back to the Fela recordings, and go to the trumpet solo and the saxophone solo and the keyboard solo. Sometimes you might think it’s new music written for the show, but every bit of melodic information came from Fela in some way, shape or form.”

Meanwhile Antibalas is maintaining its purist credentials by playing its regular Afrobeat repertory — Fela songs and its own — in a late-night residency on Thursday nights at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn, starting Dec. 3. “Fela!” is also providing another boon for purists. With the opening of “Fela!” on Broadway, Knitting Factory Records has issued “The Best of the Black President,” a two-CD anthology of Fela’s music packaged with a documentary DVD. The label plans to release all of Fela’s nearly four dozen albums on CD and LP, including some that never appeared on vinyl in the United States.

Fela’s music has had a persistent afterlife. His sons Femi and Seun each lead their own Afrobeat bands, and his family still runs the Shrine in Lagos. Antibalas is now just one of countless Afrobeat bands in the United States and around the world. There have been Fela tribute albums, like the 2002 anti-AIDS “Red Hot and Riot,” and tribute concerts. Early this year Focus Features announced that it was developing a film biography of Fela. (A spokesman said the director, cast and release date had not been named.) Perhaps a Broadway musical wasn’t so improbable after all. And wisely, this one is built on rhythm.

“Obviously it’s a departure from the conventional American musical,” Mr. Hendel said. “But I’m hoping that audiences respond to its authenticity.” He added, “We’re not going to dumb it down.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/theater/22fela.html?pagewanted=all


Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXTU3GW_s0g&feature=player_embedded#t=0

Intrestn

We get the picture but isn't that write-up too long?

Zedric: We get the picture but isn't that write-up too long?

and we wonder why Nigerians are becoming more dumb as the days go on....if you cant read....better start selling fish

milehigh06:


and we wonder why Nigerians are becoming more dumb as the days go on....if you cant read....better start selling fish

Who the fück are you? Is this how u spend ur life? Cussing out random people on the internet? Are u mentally derailed or something? You read the whole article, right? Now tell me how it increased your cgpa or got u a job. Silly goat with no life ambition, reading all internet articles to atleast find a purpose for his directionless life. Werey