Artist: Tony Allen
Album: There Is No End
Genre: Afrobeat, Funk
Label: Blue Note
Released: 2021
Quality: FLAC (tracks)
Tracklist:
- Tony’s Praeludium (0:29)
- Stumbling Down (feat. Sampa the Great) (2:31)
- Crushed Grapes (feat. Lord Jah-Monte Ogbon) (3:18)
- Très magnifique (feat. Tsunami) (3:23)
- Mau Mau (feat. Nah Eeto) (3:09)
- Coonta Kinte (feat. ZelooperZ) (3:08)
- Rich Black (feat. Koreatown Oddity) (4:19)
- One Inna Million (feat. LAVA LA RUE) (3:21)
- Gang On Holiday (Em I Go We?) (feat. Jeremiah Jae) (3:04)
- Deer In Headlights (feat. Danny Brown) (4:03)
- Hurt Your Soul (feat. Nate Bone) (2:59)
- My Own (feat. Marlowe) (3:46)
- Cosmosis (feat. Ben Okri & Skepta) (4:45)
- There’s No End (0:26)
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One of the defining characteristics of the late Tony Allen’s drumming was his capacity to switch register at a moment’s notice. His is typically a hard-swinging, syncopated groove that can be sharply interrupted by a burst of air through the hi-hats and a rattling fill on the toms, making us aware of his presence not just as a solid sideman but as a spacious soloist, too.
This casual rhythmic code-switching made Allen such a formidable collaborator, working with everyone from Fela Kuti to Damon Albarn, techno producers Moritz von Oswald and Jeff Mills, and jazz luminary Hugh Masekela. True to form, before his death in 2020 he was working on this wide-reaching collaboration, an album of rhythms for a new generation of rappers to expound upon.
The result is the feature-laden There Is No End, posthumously arranged by producer Vincent Taeger. Allen’s beats – already sampled in tracks by everyone from J Cole to Missy Elliott, Nas and Mos Def – work familiarly and head-noddingly well on opener Stumbling Down, perfectly blending with Zambian rapper Sampa the Great’s scattering, polyrhythmic flows, while the grizzled baritone of LA’s Tsunami intersects satisfyingly with the reverb-laden Afrobeat on Très Magnifique.
The most interesting music here comes when Allen’s metronomic work gets chopped up and made thrillingly alien: Danny Brown’s off-kilter whine tripping over a triplet bassline on Deer in Headlights; poet Ben Okri’s dub lyricism on the vamping Cosmosis, and the spacious, Wu Tang-referencing swagger of Hurt Your Soul, slowing Allen down to a menacing crawl.
Unlike the cobbled-together feel of many posthumous releases, There Is No End plays as a cohesive record because of Allen’s capacity to slot into place behind seemingly any collaborator without diluting his innate sense of rhythmic style. The album is a tantalising glimpse of the varied records Allen might have gone on to make; as it stands, it will no doubt inspire others to continue to shape the multitude of work he left behind into giddy new forms.
by Ammar Kalia