THE NEW YORK TIMES REVIEWS SEUN KUTI'S PERFORMANCE AT THE HIGHLINE BALLROOM

Seun Kuti, playing saxophone at the Highline Ballroom on Tuesdasy

In Fela's Spirit, His Son Keeps Afrobeats Bristling
 
When Seun Kuti had his shirt off, dancing through the end of a sweaty, magnificently funky set at the Highline Ballroom on Tuesday night, the tattoo across his muscular shoulders was visible: “Fela Lives.”

Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Seun’s father, was the creator of the hardheaded, protest-minded Nigerian funk called Afrobeat, which has now spread worldwide. When Fela died in 1997, the 14-year-old Seun took over as the singer, alto saxophonist and leader of Fela’s band, Egypt 80. Since then, Seun Kuti has emerged as far more than a caretaker for his father’s style.

In his own songs — particularly those on his new album with Egypt 80, “A Long Way to the Beginning” (Knitting Factory) — Seun Kuti makes sure that Afrobeat still bristles. Where Fela’s music often moved at smoldering medium tempos, Seun’s newer songs are faster, more insistent. The arrangements have added new layers of dissonance to give the songs more bite. And the underlying call and response of Afrobeat, with terse motifs traded among the band’s percussion, horns, guitars and singers, has turned denser and less symmetrical; now, little overlapping outbursts cascade across the band, like sporadic flash fires. Songs may have just two chords, but as they stretch out, they reveal dozens of compositional ideas.

Between the two generations of Kutis, the targets of the lyrics have changed very little. Like his father, Seun Kuti lashes out at corruption, economic inequality, indifferent governments and predatory Western financial interests, as he did in the hurtling, furious “I.M.F.” He introduced “African Airways” as “a parody about the African economic system,” with a Western pilot, an African co-pilot, World Bank radar and Chinese engines; eight minutes into its brisk, chattering modal groove, the percussion erupted for “heavy turbulence!”

Partway through the set, Mr. Kuti launched into a lecture that delved into economic strife, food supplies and — moving forward from his father’s male chauvinism — respect for women’s intellectual power. That led into a song, in Fela’s steadfast, slow-rolling style, that paid tribute to the “Black Woman”: “She struggle to go to school/she struggle to vote.”

Robert Glasper, the genre-stretching jazz keyboardist, produced “A Long Way to the Beginning” with Mr. Kuti, and he sat in on “Higher Consciousness,” a song about unrest and violence in Nigeria. Mr. Glasper meshed its groove with Minimalist repetition of percussive chords and arpeggios and a suggestion of “A Love Supreme” — a more benign Western intervention.

Throughout the set, the music changed constantly as the propulsion surged; the power of the rhythms redoubled the urgency of the messages, while the two backup singers rarely stopped shimmying. Mr. Kuti’s Afrobeat makes its politics physical, its anger into momentum.