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Today, Afrobeat music is mainstream enough that you can hear Fela Kuti tunes at Chipotle. The colorful life (many arrests, a polygamous marriage to 27 women) and sinuous music of the groundbreaking Nigerian bandleader and political rebel (who was usually just billed “Fela”) is the subject of a hit Broadway show. But when Antibalas, New York’s best-known Afrobeat group, first formed, Fela was barely known in the US.
“There were bits and spurts where he was a little bit more in the limelight,” says Martin Perna, the baritone saxophonist who founded Antibalas in 1998. “But neither he nor the genre of music that he created, Afrobeat, were ever household names.”
That’s starting to change — and Antibalas has had much to do with it, including the “Fela!” show.
“Almost every member of Antibalas worked on that show, in some way, shape or form,” says trombonist Aaron Johnson. “We were trying to contrive a piece of theater that would then be done eight times a week, hopefully for years to come.”
They’ve succeeded. As Fela’s music began to be reissued — around the time Antibalas was gathering steam — he has become a folk hero.
Then came the Broadway show. Its blue-chip celebrity investors included Jay-Z, Beyoncé and Will Smith. “Fela!” was a smash, nominated for 11 Tony Awards in 2010, and won three before closing this month. The hot British film director Steve McQueen is working on a movie adaptation.
Though the band, who’s fifth album, “Antibalas,” is out Tuesday, followed by a concert at Williamsburg Park Saturday, was deeply involved with its creation, at no point was Antibalas ever the “Fela!” house band.
“That’s been a real misconception,” says Johnson. “By the time we hit Broadway, there were only three horn players from Antibalas. That was it.”
Onstage the Brooklyn ensemble likes to stretch things out — much as Fela did at his own legendary hours-long concerts in Nigeria.
“Afrobeat,” Perna explains, “is more characterized by musical relationships between the instruments — all these different things being in dialogue with each other.” As the relationships keep changing, so does the music. “We can take them to a different place,” Perna adds.
“Fela!,” says Johnson, “has been great because it’s introduced a lot of people to the music. But an Antibalas show is the real thing.”
Perhaps unexpectedly for a group so identified with Fela, Antibalas had seldom performed the Afrobeat master’s material outside of the musical.
“I’ll read about how Antibalas started as a Fela tribute band, and I’m like, ‘where did they get that?’ ” says Perna. “He was an inspiration. But when we began really to sink our teeth into Afrobeat, it was like, ‘We’ve got to focus more on this, because this requires that much more discipline to really pull off.’ ”Even more complex are the tangled lines that connect Antibalas to a group of similarly minded bands playing funky music of all sorts in Brooklyn. The locus of this activity is Daptone Records, a label run by Gabriel Roth, who played bass with Antibalas early on. Roth’s main gig is as bandleader with Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings — the same band that helped back Amy Winehouse on her breakthrough, “Back to Black.”
“There was a point from 1998 to about 2001 where Antibalas and the Dap-Kings were sharing five or six members,” says Perna with a laugh. “We got to a point where both groups couldn’t exist at the same time. We had to pick our allegiances.”