Femi Kuti expands legacy of Afro-beat legend Fela

    Femi Kuti, 48, is the first-born son of a legend. It is not an easy life constantly being measured against a man who changed African music, but Kuti has forged a brilliant career of his own.

    “I can’t run away” from Fela’s legacy, he says in a conversation while on the road with his 14-piece band, which arrives Saturday at Metro. “In a way, I’m much luckier than my father, because he went through a lot to make music. He went through a lot just to live.”

     Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the late Nigerian saxophonist and revolutionary, pioneered a militant brand of African funk called Afro-beat, openly opposed his country’s dictatorial government and was beaten, jailed and constantly harassed for his troubles. All the while, he released a steady stream of politically charged albums and performed thousands of epic-length concerts worldwide with a band numbering nearly 30 members. Over the decades he became a venerated and outspoken voice of truth in Africa and an international superstar. When he died in 1997, a million people attended his funeral in Lagos, Nigeria. In recent years, the saxophonist’s life and music were celebrated on Broadway in the hit musical “Fela!” and a movie of his life is in the works.

    Against this inspiring and potentially daunting backdrop, Femi Kuti has carried on his father’s legacy with passion, cutting out some of his father’s personal excesses – the multiple wives, the open use of marijuana – while putting the focus on expanding the music and its uncompromising message. His latest album, “Africa for Africa” (Knitting Factory), names names in Nigeria’s government as it decries patronage and corruption, and sets it to a furious Afro-beat soundtrack that incorporates not only funk, but Caribbean, Latin and hip-hop influences.

    Is he ever concerned that the government will come after him and his family (he has a wife and nine children) as it once did his father?

        “Of course, but it would be very difficult to stop someone like me, to censor me or put me in jail without there being an outcry,” he says. “I’m not smarter than my father, but I am more careful. I knew when they were coming for my father, and I learned. I have a lot of contacts in and outside of Nigeria. People know where I am, I keep myself very clean. My family knows the story of my father and we are all careful together. Even my oldest (15-year-old) son, he has to make sure the door is locked when he goes to school and be aware of what people around him are doing and saying. We are all aware of the dangers. But fear is out of the question.”
       
    Kuti was a rebellious teenager, angry that his father discouraged him from attending college to play in Fela’s band.
 
    “My father had a huge ego, and demanded a lot,” he says. “Most times I was angry. I was so angry that he didn’t teach me. It was a frustrating time of my life. It is still very difficult for me to be at ease. People say you have done so much but I cannot rest. I have to play a minimum of six hours every day. I am never satisfied.”

    That tireless work ethic made him an integral part of his father’s band, and their relationship improved. “What he did made me work harder, to constantly challenge myself,” Femi says.

        His father asked him to take over his band, but Femi wanted to establish his own music, even as he inherited his father’s political moxie.
       
        “There are too many problems in Africa not to deal with these issues in music,” Kuti says. “The lack of electricity, bad roads, no health care, poverty. We have ‘democracy’ in Nigeria, but it is just as corrupt and more hypocritical than before. We get promises and gestures, but still the government is lining its pockets at the people’s expense.”
       
        Can music change the world, as his father believed?
       
        “My father gave everyone a voice with his music; people realized they were not alone,” he says. “And in this way, music can affect change. It can be small, slow. But it will come for sure. A generation will eventually come that will realize corruption is not the answer for Africa, and the music will be a factor. My father’s albums, my albums, have documented the road to that realization.”
       
        In the meantime, Kuti continues to live and work in Lagos under less than ideal conditions for his music, even though he could hire musicians and book studios anywhere in the world to further his career.
       
        “When we’re in the middle of recording (at his studio in Lagos) the electricity goes off all the time,” he says. “It’s like being on a battlefield. I have to think about security because people walk in while were recording, complete strangers. The music is fighting to make its way out. It’s not like that in Los Angeles and Paris. I could go there to record, but being a fighter I want to be at home and record with my touring musicians. The people who hear the music know I feel their pain because I am living it with them. If I went somewhere else, I would be no different than the politicians I criticize.”
       
        greg@gregkot.com
     
Femi Kuti and Positive Force: 9 p.m. Saturday at Metro, 3730 N. Clark St., $25; etix.com.