An Afrobeat to Celebrate the Eclectic

Kronos at 40 Begins at Lincoln Center

By JON PARELES

Published: July 25, 2013

Kronos Quartet isn’t exactly the first thing that comes to mind when the Nigerian bandleader Fela Anikulapo Kuti is mentioned. Afrobeat, funk, protest, defiance and dancing are a lot closer to the top of the list. Afrobeat, the style Fela (who died in 1997) forged from James Brown’s funk, 1960s jazz, African drumming and finger-pointing lyrics about exploitation and corruption, was music for dancing all night in steamy clubs; it was far from the realm of the string quartet. So “Red Hot + Fela,” at Damrosch Park on Wednesday night, made an unlikely starting point for Kronos at 40, five days of free concerts at the Lincoln Center Out of Doors festival celebrating the determined eclecticism of the Kronos Quartet over four decades.

Kronos’s role at this concert was modest. It accompanied two Fela songs, in arrangements that found Minimalist patterns and drones in the Afrobeat groove, turning Fela’s “Sorrow Tears and Blood” from an exhortation into an elegy. The quartet also joined the opening group, Superhuman Happiness, playing the string parts in the film score by the group’s leaders for the AIDS documentary “How to Survive a Plague.”

The concert’s musical director was the saxophonist Stuart Bogie, a member of the Brooklyn Afrobeat group Antibalas and the leader of Superhuman Happiness. Straightforward Afrobeat wasn’t the concert’s main agenda. With songs by Fela and others, it was Afrobeat refracted through rock, funk and hip-hop. Afrobeat’s insistent repetition and chattering horns were prominent, but so were clear echoes of a previous New York City take on Afrobeat: the sound of Talking Heads from that band’s early-1980s “Stop Making Sense” era.

Members of Antibalas were in the pit band for “Fela!” on Broadway, and principals from that cast — Sahr Ngaujah, who played Fela, and Abena Koomson — were the concert’s main singers. The Antibalas horn section also beefed up some songs.

Mr. Bogie’s ensemble backed singers and rappers from Africa and the United States: M1 from the New York hip-hop group Dead Prez; Kalmia Traver and Alex Toth from the Brooklyn band Rubblebucket; Bajah from Sierra Leone; Baloji from Congo (rapping in French); and Ahmed Abdullahi Gallab from Sudan (via the New York band Sinkane). The rappers rhymed, fast and righteous, about African roots and historical memory, and the members of Rubblebucket and Sinkane sang their own songs, situated between Afrobeat and American funk.

Tony Allen, the drummer from Fela’s band in the 1960s and ’70s, whose understated but adamant beat was the foundation of Afrobeat, appeared for two songs — switching the group’s usual beat from a rock-rooted stomp to something rolling and rumbling and seething. And an unannounced guest, Angelique Kidjo from Benin, turned Fela’s feminist statement “Lady” into a dancing manifesto. (“Lady” also featured a hard-riffing solo by Ms. Traver on baritone saxophone.) It was as close as the concert got to vintage Afrobeat, and it testified to the stubborn power of Fela’s music.