The Death of Tony Allen, the Drummer Who Built Afrobeat's Sound

Tony Oladipo Allen, the Nigerian drummer whose playing helped invent the Afrobeat genre, died of a heart attack in Paris on April 30, 2020, at age 79. He had lived in France for years by the time of his death, part of a long stretch of his career spent based in Europe after leaving Nigeria.

Allen’s central contribution to African music came through his eleven-year partnership with singer and bandleader Fela Kuti, whom he joined as drummer and eventually musical director of the band Africa ‘70 from 1968 to 1979. Together the two musicians built a genre from scratch: Afrobeat fused West African highlife and traditional rhythms with American jazz, funk and soul influences into a large-ensemble sound in which every instrument functioned as part of an interlocking rhythm section, anchored by Allen’s distinctively fluid, polyrhythmic drumming style, a four-limb independence technique so dense that Fela Kuti himself once said Allen’s playing sounded like four drummers at once.

Fela Kuti himself credited Allen as indispensable to the sound they created together, reportedly remarking that without Tony Allen, there would be no Afrobeat, a level of credit rare for band leaders to extend to a sideman and a measure of how central Allen’s drumming was to the genre’s actual musical architecture rather than merely its rhythm section. The two musicians eventually parted ways in 1979, with Allen citing insufficient recognition and compensation for his contributions to the band’s sound, after which Allen pursued a long solo career that continued for four more decades, recording with a wide range of collaborators across jazz, electronic and hip-hop scenes in the years that followed.

Allen’s death drew tributes from musicians across genres and generations who cited his drumming as a direct or indirect influence on their own work, a reflection of how thoroughly Afrobeat’s rhythmic vocabulary, largely his own invention alongside Fela Kuti, had been absorbed into broader global popular music well beyond the genre’s Lagos origins. His death came amid the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, a period that claimed several prominent musicians globally, though reporting at the time attributed his death specifically to a heart attack rather than to the virus.