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Fela's Passion Lives On in All-Star Collaboration

By Gerard L. Farrow
Black College Wire

The music of the late Fela Kuti lives on with the album "Red Hot + Riot." The music reaches to touch listeners more deeply than most pop music. More touching is its purpose.

The collection is the effort of various artists from soul, pop and hip-hop to raise money to support Red Hot's AIDS awareness and relief efforts in Africa and around the world.

Red Hot is the leading international organization for AIDS relief.

A list of top-selling artists, including D'Angelo, Roy Hargrove, Macy Gray and Sade, lend their talents. It's a who's who.

Artists you wouldn't likely associate with such a project, such as Nikka Costa and Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers, make wonderful contributions on the Kuti classic "Water No Get Enemy."

The song features D'Angelo on lead vocals, Macy Gray on background vocals and Roy Hargrove on trumpet. Hargrove makes his way to this project from straight-ahead jazz, but has worked on D'Angelo's "Voodoo" and former classmate Erykah Badu's "Mama's Gun."

No one could have sounded better on this project than Hargrove.

He seems to be the trumpeter of choice for pop music projects. Listeners just don't hear young trumpeters Nicholas Payton or Ray Vega contributing the same way.

Rodgers is the primary guitarist throughout the album. In case you might have forgotten how good he was as a member of Chic, he provides the listener with a distinct reminder.

"Shuffering+Shmiling" features Dead Prez, Talib Kweli and Bilal. The song questions the ways of organized religion. It is a protest, suggesting that Europeans came to West Africa and used religion to control African people.

The hip-hop curve on the song is another example of Dead Prez's thought- provoking content that does not apologize and refuses to pull punches.

This line is one of many that sets the tone of the remake: "Sending our prayers to the clouds/I want my heaven now/ freedom on earth/ and if the preacher ain't with us then we taking his church . . ."

Kuti mixed Nigerian rhythms and melodies with American funk and free jazz to create his unique "Afrobeat."

The mix of American and traditional World Music musicians like Cheikh Lo adds a blend you don't find on most albums of this magnitude.

Most projects like this are thrown together in a matter of a month and have more delays than an airport at Christmas.

This album sounds well-crafted. As a fan, I noticed the absences of Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean, who normally jump at projects like this. I was also surprised that so many artists got clearance by their labels to work with the project.

The passion in Fela's music lives in these artists. That passion is beautifully transformed into an effort that will help in the fight against the AIDS epidemic in his native Nigeria.

Gerard L. Farrow is a student at North Carolina Central University. He writes for The Campus Echo.