Reducation of America and Final Piece of Political Puzzles that spurred Joe Biden To Declare He Is Ready for a Second Bid? The Nigerian drummer who set the beat for US civil rights and our special link with Carlos Santana, Mickey Hart and Harry Belafonte, 96!
Reducation of America and Final Piece of Political Puzzles that spurred Joe Biden To Declare He Is Ready for a Second Bid? The Nigerian drummer who set the beat for US civil rights and our special link with Carlos Santana, Mickey Hart and Harry Belafonte, 96!
Exclsuive Reports By Ben Edokpayi ©
WordCount 2021
BBC “Three years before Rosa Parks’ bus boycott, Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji protested against racial segregation in the southern states of America. He was part of a generation of Africans who played an important role in the fight for racial justice in the US — and continue to do so, writes the BBC’s Aaron Akinyemi.
“The leaders in the 50s and 60s provide me with a great deal of inspiration,” Nigerian-American activist Opal Tometi, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, told the BBC.
When Martin Luther King Jr delivered his historic I Have a Dream speech during the March on Washington 57 years ago, around 250,000 people attended the event, including prominent figures such as James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier.’
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-53985119
“Hollywood’s Holy War on Africa” — Master Drummer Babatunde Olatunji, On his 96th Birthday, a Reprint of an exclusive interview. I think the Pioneer drummer inspired Joe Biden’s Africa Summit.
Before Fela, there was Babatunde Olatunji aka Baba.
I met Baba early in the 90’s in Oakland after a performance that included some members of Jerry Garcia’s Grateful Dead (for a Newswatch feature article interview), and was surprised to find out the remarkable influence this drumming impressario had on music worldwide.
His collaborative work spans almost every musical genre ranging from sessions with the debonaire Harry Belafonte (considered to be the best looking black actor of his time in Hollywood), Herbie Mann, Aretha Franklin, Harry Belafonte, James Brown, Mickey Hart, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach and Carlos Santana who turned Baba’s originally penned “Jingo” into a worldwide hit in the 60’s.
My meeting with Baba also afforded me the opportunity to interview Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart, Zakir Hussain, as well as Sikiru Adepoju (my good friend when I was in Richmond who knows of my friends T, Kimberley Porter and Kidada Jnes).
Adepoju is one of the most sought after African drummer’s in the SF Bay Area.
So how did they spin Harry Belafonte, and then Prince Harry into this White Supremacy from the bedroom to the boardroom Maze? All because of June 1991.
Carlos Santana and Mickey Hart on Babatunde Olatunji
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF1dnAFjT6s
This story first published in 1990 in Newswatch Magazine is previously unavailable online.
By Ben Edokpayi ©
In the 1950’s when American’s where yet to catch on to the pulsating rhythms of African music, Babatunde Olatunji, 64, was already creating waves with his drumming.
His first album “Drums of Passion” released by Columbia Records in 1959, virtually brought African music out of the closet. And this was long before American mUSical connoisseurs got hooked on the makossa sounds of Manu Dibango, the juju beats of Sunny Ade, Youssou Ndour’s mbalax music, Fela Anikulapo’s Afro-beats or Mariam Makeba’s sonorous rendition of the click song.
But even after 40 years as a musician, not many people in Nigeria, his own country, know Olatunji.
He is bitter about this lack of acknowledgement of his ground-breaking efforts. Olatunji told Newswatch in Oakland, California: “Before you acknowledge something, you have to appreciate (it) first. We do not appreciate what we have. I know that our governments do not care about the significance of our cultural heritage; they do not have an idea how important it is towards our survival in the 21st century and beyond.”
“Baba” as Olatunji is fittingly known among musicians in the US, arrived America in 1951 on a Rotary International scholarship to attend Morehouse College, a distinctive black college in Atlanta, Georgia. About the same time with my Uncle. They were both contemporaries of MLK, Junior. Which is what exclusively inspired this peace for the Vanguard Newspapers.
https://www.vanguardngr.com/2015/01/early-trek-american-education/
At Morehouse, Olatunji was alarmed at the level of ignorance about his homeland. The general perception of Africa then was largely based on Tarzan and his Jane escapades in the Tarzan movie series. “I called it Hollywood’s Holy War on Africa,” said Olatunji.
Barely a year into his undergraduate programme, Olatunji formed his musical group to entertain and inform his fellow students at Morehouse. The group whose first performance in 1953 was the Osisiganyan, a dance drama adapted from the delta area of Delta State, included Godwin Odenigwe, a professor and former advisor in Shehu Shagari’s cabinet; Olu Akinwowo, a professor of sociology at Ondo State University and the late Essien Etukudo (My senior uncle), a permanent secretary in the former South Eastern State and some African Americans. I understand they all met Martin Luther King, Junior in Atlanta in the early 50's.
Before long the virtuoso drummer had become a fixture on Atlanta’s social whirl. He began giving talks about African culture and music, always taking his drums along for a full effect.
Olatunji later moved to New York University graduate school where he completed his PH.D in public administration. The expectation was that he would return home. But he did not. He remained in New York to pursue a career in music. He told Newswatch, “I have very many friends in high places back home. They can read the Wall Street Journal, so can I. My drumming has college and university education and I am happy doing what I do.”
Olatunji has performed before almost every Nigerian leader from Tafawa Balewa to Olusegun Obasanjo. In the 1960’s as president of the All African Students Union of the Americas, he worked with Martin Luther King jr., the late civil rights leader and Tom Mboya, the late Kenyan politician, to seek scholarships for about 400 East African students to study in the United States.
In 1959, eight years after he reached America, Columbia Records released “Drums of Passion”, his first album, to an enthusiastic audience. “Drums of Passion”, an across-the board hit, was the first album to bring African music to Western ears, firmly establishing Olatunji as Africa’s most visible musical export at that time.
The release of this album virtually opened the door to fame but not fortune for Olatunji. Thirty two years on and over five million copies in sales, Olatunji still feels short-changed by his recording company. Said he: “I should be a multi-millionaire by now, but at that time I didn’t understand the contract and know how I should collect my musical rights.”
Instead, others have reaped from where Baba sowed.
Perhaps, the biggest beneficiary of Olatunji’s art is Mickey Hart, the drummer of Grateful Dead the popular American rock group.
Newsweek described Hart as “one of the world’s great collectors and players of drums, bells, chimes, gongs and cymbals.”
He is also the author of “Drumming on the Edge of Magic” a 1990 publication about the beauty and power of the drums.
Hart came across the magic of Olatunji’s drumming in the 1970’s and there was an instant musical bonding, leading to Hart’s production of the Nigerian’s last two albums: Drums of Passion; the beat in 1986 and Drums of Passion; The invocation in 1988.
According to Hart, “Olatunji was the one who turned me on to talking drums. He was a big influence on me. Now here I am almost 30 years later, playing with him and producing him.”
Olatunji has also collaborated musically with the world’s best rock, soul and jazz artistes including Harry Belafonte, Herbie Mann, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Lou Rawls, Dizzy Gillespie, who interviewed in Nigeria; Max Roach, John Coltrane and Carlos Santana, whose early hit song Jingo is a reworked version of Olatunji’s song.
Coltrane, the great jazz musician was studying African music at the Olatunji Centre of African culture in the heart of Harlem, New York, at the time of his death in the 1960’s.
Olatunji has written many musical compositions, including the scores for the Broadway and Hollywood productions of “Raisin in the Sun”. More recently he assisted fellow Morehouse alumnus, Bill Lee, with the music for “She Gotta Have it”, the hit film starring Bill’s son, Spike Lee.
The path Olatunji blazed with his drumming has recently contributed to a new trend in America: Hyphenated therapy, which emphasizes the healing effect of drumming. In a recent interview with Newsweek Olatunji said, “drumming helps man be at peace with himself. He can find the centre.”
Baba now divides his time between teaching the art of drumming at his New York school where he charges $642 a week per student and frequent trips to other countries to teach the power of African drums.
What has made this man’s drumming so captivating to the extent that he would be featured as part of Newsweek’s June 24, 1991 cover on Drums, Sweat and Tears? Simple. The immense sound of his Yoruba rhythm/drumming “scalds until you can feel the lumidity coming out the ground …. Resonating like a poly-rhythmic high mass.” His dedication to the ceremonial and sacramental role of the drums also remains untouched by western influences.
Baba told Newsweek, “I can’t allow the drums to be relegated to the background because music is all about timing and rhythm. If there is no timing in it, you can’t move. The young musicians are now putting rhythm into Bach and Beethoven and making people jump to it.”
By the way this cover was published soon after my Richmond reunion with T, Kimberley Porter and Kidada Jones; and a year after I interviewed Quincy Jones in Los Angeles. #Hex
Olatunji, who poured the libation at the ground-breaking ceremony for the permanent building of the Nigerian embassy in New York, is not just the progenitor of what has now become world beat in musical lingo.
He has also paved the way for artistes like Sunny Ade and Ebenezer Obey to make it big in the United States. Said he: ‘I was the one who signed through my school to get Obey his first visa to tour the US. Four thousand people came to the Manhattan centre to watch him. Sunny Ade’s first visit was also possible through my school, but these people come to the US now and don’t even give me a ring.”
Olatunji’s benevolent disposition spurred him to the idea of a benefit concert by prominent African musicians in the mould of Bob Geldorf’s 1986 Band Aid Project. Olatunji’s project called “Voices of Africa” has been on the drawing board since 1986. Said he “I set the project up, talked to all the big African artistes who came to tour the US — Masekela, Makeba, Black Mambazo, Okosuns.
I wrote letters to Obey, Sunny Ade, Fela, Dibango, Toure Kunde, Super Dynamo, Ndour. I did a promotional video on the show’s concert and then when we were supposed to have a big show in Lagos to kick off, nobody showed up.”
Olatunji is still sore over the failure of this project because of what he calls his colleagues’ uncooperative attitude. But he remains resolved to see African artistes do more for their people because “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
PS: Olatunji passed away in 2003.
Photos — Essien Etukudo, First Clerk of the Eastern House of Assembly in pre-independence Nigeria (seen in his ceremonial British-styled outfit) performed in an African Cultural troupe with Olatunji at Morehouse College.
He ended up being separated from his family during the Nigerian civil war and served in the think-tank of the late Biafran leader General Odimegwu Ojukwu.
In my interview with Olatunji in 1990, he was alarmed at the level of ignorance about his homeland. According to him, the general perception of Africa was largely based on Tarzan and his Jane escapades in the Tarzan movie series, a negative stereotype still perpetuated in some parts of the west today.
White America Reflect On This! I was trailed for this June 1991 interview with Babatunde Olatunji, a few weeks after they trailed me and my three Hollywood Girls in Richmond!
What Is The Problem With Virginia and Black Intellectuals?
And who would be your recommendation Carlos Santana? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPLV7lGbmT4
