MikePadgett.com

Seun Kuti & Africa 80

— After a deliciously long intro, the youngest Kuti races through a short but sweet set.”

Seun is the youngest son of the late Fela Kuti, the politically active leading light of Afrobeat. Having grown up in the thick of that scene, Seun now heads Africa 80, the second incarnation of his father’s band, playing the same energetic mix of funk, jazz, rock and highlife that electrified West African music in the 1970s.

Cheerfully arriving onstage after a characteristically long prelude, it becomes rapidly clear that the tall, young Kuti has every bit of his father’s innate cool. The band, taut and heavy on syncopated percussion, rattles along effortlessly and from the get go, no-one in the audience is left standing still. Kuti is comfortable as a frontman, swapping between voice and sax parts, contorting his body and throwing shapes during the solos of his colleagues.

The music ebbs and flows and there are no gaps between tracks. The rhythm of a hot, dry African evening descends upon the Ancienne Belgique, a special sense of time and place that can be felt, indistinct yet insistent, in the spirit of the rhythms and the brass punctuations.

Kuti’s socially aware lyrics, often delivered in mantra-like repetitions, remind us of the family legacy: to effect change through music. “Let me tell you something about the financial crisis,” admonishes Kuti during a brief interlude, as the band continues its incessant rhythm at half volume in the background, “the rich tell us that if we don’t save their banks, we’ll all be poor. Well, most of us have already been poor for a long time.”

All too quickly, it was over. Even if the pace was admirably hectic throughout, with its appetite piqued the crowd was still expecting more than a single, one-track encore. Indeed as the house lights went up, there was a palpable feeling that the climax of the night had still to be reached but the damp streets of Brussels were all that was left to us.