Performance

Afrobeat

0 upcoming performances in New York

Afrobeat here refers to Fela Kuti’s Nigerian-born form: a tightly arranged blend of jazz harmony, funk rhythm, and politically charged ensemble music built to move as one long argument. At Jazz at Lincoln Center, Ulysses Owens Jr. and Michael Olatuja frame that lineage alongside the later Afrobeats umbrella, tracing how West African and diaspora pop absorbed older highlife and club rhythms in the 2000s and 2010s. New York has hosted Afrobeat since its downtown clubs and activist stages, where big bands kept its communal discipline alive. The music’s significance is structural: it treats groove as both dance engine and social critique.