While percussionist Tony Allen is most commonly associated with Afrobeat—the genre that he and Fela Kuti popularised in Nigeria in the late ’60s—it’s hardly where his journey ended. Allen, who died in Paris on 30 April 2020, began drumming in his late teens, emulating the styles of Max Roach and Art Blakey. When he met Kuti in Lagos, Allen's highly tuned sense for jazz drumming—fluid and flexible, powerful but deeply indebted to the groove—became elemental to the Afrobeat sound, which also folded in influences from American soul and funk to West African juju and highlife. Allen and Kuti's work in the band Africa ’70 was as much a liberating musical force as a political one, couching anti-corruption messages in that most seductive of intoxicants: an irresistible beat. A restless creator, Allen never stopped experimenting. His ’80s and ’90s output saw him exploring elements of R&B and hip-hop. And his reach was further extended in the 2000s, when he was rediscovered by crate-digging DJs and tastemakers who put him on the radar of future collaborators like Damon Albarn (The Good, the Bad & the Queen), techno pioneers Jeff Mills and Moritz von Oswald and international pop sophisticates Sébastien Tellier, Air and Charlotte Gainsbourg.