When Fela Anikulapo-Kuti invented Afrobeat in the early 1970s, he definitively pulled ahead of an entire generation of highlife bandleaders who were trying to move the music to the next phase by blending West African highlife with James Brown styled funk. Fela was able to pull ahead of the crowd because he was a brilliant composer, but also because he had a powerful secret weapon: Tony Allen, an equally brilliant drummer who passed away in Paris last week, aged 79. He had come up playing in the highlife bands of Victor Olaiya, Adeola Akinsanya, Eddie Okonta and others, and he was simultaneously inspired by Max Roach, Philly Joe Jones, Elvin Jones and other American jazz drummers. This made the crucial difference in Fela’s music; while all the other highlife bandleaders were grafting African structures over American funk backbeats – typified by Manu Dibango’s epochal “Soul Makossa” – Allen realised that he could take the music to the next level by making it more rhythmically complex, not less. He fused the complexity of jazz drumming with the complexity of traditional African drumming and used that to give Fela’s music a more persuasive grounding on the African side of the Afro-funk equation. In the process, he invented the signature drumming style of Afrobeat – a rhythmic language so potent that it powered Fela’s increasingly militant musical profile. When he left Fela in 1979 after years of being underpaid and put in harm’s way, the Afrobeat they created together had already been stamped onto the world sonic map as one of the most dynamic styles of dance music created in the 20th century.

Tony Allen’s post-Fela opening shot was No Discrimination, a very funky and underrated set recorded in Nigeria that – with its burbling synths, envelope filters, wah-wahs and phase shifters – showed that unlike Fela’s austere, ideologically driven music, he was open to all of the new sounds coming from funk. His music was aimed squarely at the dance floor, but always with a message. His next shot was NEPA (Never Expect Power Always), recorded in 1984 at the beginning of the world beat era when African musicians like Fela, King Sunny Ade, Salif Keita and Youssou N’Dour were beginning to broaden their international audiences. NEPA continued the approach of No Discrimination, with Tony making use of the latest technology, and its driving rhythms had a major impact on the club scene.

The truth is that Tony could keep better time than any drum machine, but his emigration to Europe coincided with the increasing mechanisation of dance music. This created struggles for him throughout the late 1980s and 90s that left him demoralised, as he was forced to submit to the demands of trendy producers who replaced his real-time drum tracks with electronic drums. But his career began to gradually revive after Fela’s death in 1997, which opened a market for other Afrobeat performers and stimulated an interest in vintage Afrobeat. In this context, Allen’s career started to flourish and, in partnership with his very simpatico manager Eric Trosset, it continued on an upward trajectory until the very end of his life. Steadfastly refusing to take the easy route of playing music he had recorded with Fela, he pursued his own path of collaborating with a wide range of artists, fusing Afrobeat with a variety of styles and traditions. For the next quarter of a century, he worked with other African artists such as Hugh Masekela, Manu Dibango, Ebo Taylor and Ray Lema, electronic icons such as Jeff Mills, Carl Craig, Moritz von Oswald and Doctor L (Liam Farrell), experimentalists such as Jimi Tenor, jazz players such as Ernest Ranglin, Courtney Pine, Parliament-Funkadelic alums such as Michael ‘Clip’ Payne, Gary ‘Bone’ Copper and Amp Fiddler, and a host of rappers and vocalists worldwide. Of all of these latter-day collaborations, his work with Blur’s Damon Albarn brought him the widest mainstream recognition – projects such as The Good, The Bad & The Queen, Gorillaz, and a superstar collaboration with Albarn and Flea from The Red Hot Chili Peppers called Rocket Juice And The Moon.

When I began working with Tony on his autobiography Tony Allen: Master Drummer Of Afrobeat (published in 2013), it was in the middle of a period when he was releasing atmospheric, dubbed out Afrobeat albums such as Black Voices and Home Cooking. Having grown accustomed to hearing him play in the context of Fela’s big band music, it took me a while to get used to this sound. But as I travelled around Europe with him, sometimes playing soprano sax in his band, I came to groove with this music as the soundtrack to Tony’s new life in Europe. His music was thriving in dance clubs across the continent and among devotees of Afrobeat worldwide. It found a place in the coffeehouses of Amsterdam, jazz festivals around the world, and the various Afrobeat revivals.

I got another angle on this music the more I spent time in Tony’s apartment in the Parisian suburb of Courbevoie, where his residential apartment block was set in the midst of an impossibly dense network of hi-tech, glass and steel skyscrapers (local headquarters of transnational corporations such as IBM, Verizon, Bougyes, Nokia, Vodafon and many others) which can be seen all the way from downtown Paris. Set against the horizon of a city that maintains its historical character through strict zoning regulations that limit the height of buildings, Courbevoie stands out against the Parisian horizon like a sci-fi version of the land of Oz, a hi-tech cityscape that undoubtedly informed the Afro dub sound of Tony’s later career.

Aside from his recording projects, Tony spent the last two decades performing around the world with a band that changed size depending on the occasion, but was generally scaled down to a quintet or sextet. As nominal lead vocalist, he would most often utter proverbial asides and fragmentary melodies while he grooved the band on with his drumming. The dense polyrhythms of West African music reflect a cultural preference for rhythmic complexity, but they also reflect a hierarchical social order in which bandleaders can live like kings while employing large bands that they pay in pennies, if at all. Playing minimalist Afrobeat with a quintet reflected the fact that not only did Tony want to make money, but he also wanted to treat his musicians fairly. And the core musicians of his gigging band, such as Rody Cereyon and Cesar Anot (bass), Claude Dibongue (guitar), Fixi (trumpet), Nicholas Giraud and Yann Jankielewicz (saxophones) and Jean-Phi Dary (keyboards), repaid him with loyalty, staying with him until the end of his life. He took them around the world, playing small clubs as well as prestige venues in major cities such as the Royal Albert Hall and Barbican Centre in London, Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall in New York, and the House of World Cultures in Berlin. His last albums found him returning full circle to his earliest jazz inspirations, playing mostly acoustic Afrobeat jazz on albums like The Source and his 2017 Tribute To Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers.

Unlike most African musicians striving to get a break in Fortress Europe, the final quarter of a century of his life was a triumph: a constant whirlwind of activity, with Tony receiving the abundant recognition that he most definitely deserved as one of the premier drummers of the post-Second World War era. But throughout his life, it was his powerful yet flexible groove that kept his vision clear, his spirit strong and his heart steady as he reinvented himself over and over. That groove will inevitably continue to take root on every continent of the world, even as we mourn its silencing in the hands of the master.