Yinka Olatunbosun
Lekan Babalola, a two-time Grammy award-winning percussionist, is living up to his reputation as an innovative musician with this new 11-track album titled Lakaye. Released on Oyeku Meji Records, the album is a mix of jazz, funk and world music with the signature touch of Afrobeat. It opens with “Time Come” (4:23) which is a tribute track to the percussionist’s father, Olayiwola Babalola for his contribution to gospel music composition. Babalola’s father was a leader of the church choir and an accordionist. As a composer, his father would have him sit down to play the drums or the cowbell while he was composing and arranging songs. This childhood experience became very influential in his music career.
“Time that has come’ for acknowledging the Age of Aquarius in the world, for each person shall be judged according to one’s deeds,” Babalola explained.
The song “Your Highness”, with a video shot in Lagos, precisely Lagos Island, is an Afrobeat track that eulogises Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the Afrobeat pioneer. Babalola was a former band member with Fela, with first-hand experience in the evolution of Afrobeat and Fela’s promotion of African ideology. It seeps into other tracks such as “Whirlwind”, a tribute to Oya, one of the Yoruba godesses known as the icon of wind and guardian of cemetery.
The album title track “Mr Lakaye” has an overwhelming pop influence, re-evoking ‘80s pop and soul train fever. With rap vocals-a surprise- from RTKAL warring with saxophone and trumpet, Babalola’s hook runs above the electric guitar. RTKAL is a Birmingham born and bred rapper. The Under-30 finalist brought his can’t-kill energy to the track that’s dedicated to the Yoruba icon of metal and iron Ogun, beseeching him to make the path clearer for human endeavours. That striking electric guitar element in the track is reflective of the British musicians’ rock credibility and something more profound as Babalola would later reveal in a chat.
“Electric guitar is the contemporary element of Ogun in our contemporary life; the patron of technology,” he says. The Yoruba world-view forms a powerful crust in Babalola’s work. He satisfies the curiosity of his western audience with the bulk of mythology and history that he breaks down beat after beat.
The last track on the album “Omi”, which means water, pays homage to Yemoja, the goddess of fertility and the orisha (deity) of the oceans.
Babalola has lived in UK since 1980 when he went to study automobile engineering at Chelsea College of Aeronautical and Automobile Engineering with a Lagos State scholarship. Instead, he made a detour, dropped engineering for music. After enrolling at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design where he studied filmmaking, he secured a master’s degree at Northern Film School. His percussive skills were honed when he joined Samba Samba band and later Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers Band. He jointly won two Grammy awards. Armed with a slew of international collaborations – including working with music greats like Prince, Tony Allen, and Ali Farka Touré (with whom he won his first Grammy), Babalola has a fiery presence on the drums.
His long-standing romance with European culture and music in particular yielded another fruit: an English wife, Kate Luxmoore with whom he has five children. Luxmoore has been his music collaborator and composed a few of the tracks in the album. One of them is Canning’s Court, inspired by medieval dance that took place in a barn on a farm called Canning’s Court, in Dorset to celebrate the transition from autumn into winter. “JB Goes to Lagos”, a joint composition by Luxmoore and Babalola attempts to cross-pollinate African and British cultures. “John Barleycorn” is a traditional English folksong with an Afrobeat twist. The song portrays savagery inflicted upon John Barleycorn, using barley’s harvesting cycle as metaphor.
Other songs in the album include “Funky Mama”, which is dedicated to the unconditional love of a mother towards her children. That same sentiment ripples through another track “Wet Nurse Trad” with subject matters motherhood.
Other Luxmoore’s compositions on the album include Apple Wassail narrating a traditional form of wassailing practised in the cider orchards of Southern England during winter to protect the apple trees from harmful spirits.
An English folk song, “I Gave My Love”, is yet another tidy composition by Babalola and his wife Luxmoore. Babalola explained the history behind the song, which was accented by beautiful, breezy sounds of flute.
“‘The Riddle Song’, also known as ‘I gave My Love a Cherry’, is an English Folk song, apparently a lullaby, exported by settlers to the Americas but originates from the Anglo-Saxons who would set riddles for the person they wished to marry. If you could answer the riddle you were wed,” he explained.
As a creative emblem of self-identity, Lakaye echoes Babalola’s Afro-British heritage.
Babalola’s previous albums include Songs of Icon (2006), Kabioye (2005), and 12 Package (2005).
