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The parallels
between the lives of Femi Sanyaolu and Fela Kuti are startling. Born 30
years apart to illustrious Egba families from Abeokuta, Ogun State,
both were sent off to England to study, by parents who dreamed of their
sons returning to Nigeria with degrees in medicine. Both men had other
ideas, and rebelled against the wishes of their parents. In England
both turned their attention to music. In the course of their careers
both men would go on to create musical genres that fused African and
Western influences: Fela’s ‘Afrobeat’; Femi’s ‘Blufunk’ (blues + funk).

And, quite
remarkably, both men would go on to change their names. Fela (born
Olufela Ransome-Kuti), after a period of immersion in the black
consciousness philosophy, transformed into Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Decades
later Femi Sanyaolu moved in the opposite direction, embracing the
anglicization that Fela spurned, emerging as ‘Keziah Jones.’

Jones has a ready
explanation for his curious decision to jettison his Yoruba name for an
English-sounding one. It’s an intriguing one, revealing a sense of
mischief. “I’m playing a kind of game, where you go to a record shop
and see ‘Keziah Jones’, you buy it, and think, aha, I recognise the
funk and the rock and the blues and the jazz, but it’s African, and
he’s called Keziah. I’ve got you already. And then you come to the
concert – it’s all over. That’s why I did it.” (The raison d’être for
‘Keziah Jones’ – he could have settled for any other Western-sounding
name – is even more intriguing: “Mr. Jones is like Everyman, but Keziah
Jones is a certain type of Everyman”).

He has no apologies
for the kind of expedient thinking that produced ‘Keziah Jones’. It’s a
win-win scenario for him: a change of name but with no underlying
change in artistic consciousness means that he can escape being crammed
into an ethnic niche on account of his name, while still retaining the
freedom to do the kind of music he wants to do. “It’s a different way
of doing the same thing; I’m still talking about Africa and Nigeria and
identity, but basically my music is available all over the world, in
the biggest markets,” he says.

Six albums later,
it’s clear that his strategy has worked for him. His debut single,
‘Rhythm is Love’ was a worldwide hit; albums Black Orpheus (2003) and
Nigerian Wood (2008), spent 63 and 43 weeks respectively on the French
charts.

Deal or no deal

Despite the
parallels between the path that he and Fela traced, Jones is eager to
highlight – and emphasise – the fact that they belong to different
generations. While one person witnessed the age of Independence, and
the accompanying hope; all that the other saw was a country of broken
dreams. “I was born in a different time, I wasn’t born in Fela’s time,”
Jones says. For him Fela’s era was one of “looking from the inside
out”, while his was the reverse.

Born during the
Nigerian Civil War, Jones left Nigeria for England when he was eight.
It was around that time that he discovered music. For the next decade
hobby (music) and obligation (school) contended for his attention.
School eventually lost out, just after his A-levels. Also to taste
defeat was the genteel upbringing that was a product of his
aristocratic background (a father who was a wealthy businessman and a
high ranking chief of the Egba kingdom): the guitar-wielding Jones
spent his days busking in the streets of London.

Somehow he managed
to strike a deal with his father. “Give me two years. If I don’t make
it in two years I’ll come back and work for you,” he told the old man.
In 1991 he left London for Paris by ferry, guitar in tow. The busking
continued. Much of his time was spent in and around the Paris Metro.
One day, outside a café, a stranger walked up to him and asked if he
had a demo tape. He didn’t. The man took him to a studio and helped him
record one. Soon after Jones returned to London. The two years were
almost up. He got a manager, who recorded a video that, by a stroke of
serendipity, came to the notice of the Parisian who had months earlier
helped him make a demo tape. By this time the Parisian owned a record
label.

Still only in his
early twenties, the prodigal son returned to Nigeria. Only, in this
case, not to beg for forgiveness, but to say ‘I told you so!’ Not only
did he have his debut album in hand, there was also a small fortune (a
six-figure sum in pounds sterling) to go with it. “The kind of money I
was given, [my father] just couldn’t argue,” he tells me.

Jones hasn’t looked
back since then. Roughly every four years since then, he has released a
new album. His most recent, ‘Nigerian Wood, appeared in 2008. Its title
track is an inventive reinterpretation of the Beatles 70s hit,
‘Norwegian Wood’. While the older song hints of a quiet sexual
restraint, the newer one seethes with sexual energy, playing on the
phallic associations of “wood”, “timber”, “teak” and “mahogany”. “We
don’t have the same type of fetishisation of the body that the
Europeans have, especially with the black male,” Jones says.
“Everything is seen in sexual terms if you’re a black male. So I play
on that, very much so.”

So, like the name
“Keziah Jones”, the song “Nigerian Wood” is another loaded joke. But
sometimes people don’t ‘get’ jokes. “My English friends got it, and it
was funny, but in France where they don’t have the same play on words,
they totally missed the joke,” he tells me, laughing.

The overt sexuality
of that track leads me to interrogate him about his ‘shirtlessness’ –
Keziah Jones often performs shirtless, and over the years the Western
media has come to elevate that into a Jonesian motif of sorts. Jones
protests. “You know Europeans man, when you see a black dude with no
shirt it becomes more important than the music. That was not my plan.
When I play… I’m very intense; I get very hot so I take my shirt off.
And I don’t think anything about it… Fela plays with his shirt off, no
one says anything, Femi does that, Seun does that, punk guys do that,
it’s not a big deal.”

Big Bang

Today there is a
recognisable movement of ‘indie music’ talents of Nigerian origin
(Jones describes it as a “big explosion”) – think Siji and Asa and
Wunmi and Nneka. (Jones adds a couple of Diaspora-based names to the
list: US-based Tunde Adebimpe, UK-based Kele Okereke and Dizzee
Rascal).

It would not be an
exaggeration to proclaim Keziah Jones a pioneering force in this
movement. “When I started, in 1992, the only other Nigerian that came
out at that time was Seal, and he did not emphasise the Nigerian aspect
of himself at all,” he says. Before Seal, there had been Sade, also
marketed as a British talent.

“It was sort of a
very unusual thing to be coming out as a person saying I’m Nigerian,
and I’m taking back all the funk and blues and jazz, and I’m going to
say it in every interview [and] talk about Nigeria and Abeokuta and
Fela. There was nobody else around me doing that… so when I saw [others
emerge], 15 years later, I said to myself, yeah man, this is perfect.”

Jones is quick to
acknowledge that a lot has changed in those intervening years. “It’s an
easier struggle for [the new talent]… they can get deals easier, they
don’t have to explain their Nigerianness anymore.”

And the future
excites him. “What the next level would be is actually Nigerian
home-grown music having access to the massive international market, to
be sold on the same level, instead of being only known in Nigeria…
It’ll get to a level when, the next generation after D’Banj, or two
generations later, their music will also be sold all over the world,
and they’ll be known all over the world – [and] not as world music.”

Jones keeps a keen
eye on the Nigerian music industry. “I’ve got lots of nephews and
nieces who are 18, 19, 20, so I hear all the music that’s going on –
9ice, D’banj … even this guy that died, Dagrin, he was doing an early
level of what the future might hold, which is like Yoruba spoken as
poetry, but as hip-hop.” He is impressed by the overall quality of
production, and of music videos, but thinks the industry is still
marked by a penchant for “copying”.

Bending it like Keziah

Jones’ life is
littered with the sacrifices – mostly of relationships – that come with
an unwavering devotion to music. He met Akure Wall, a British-Nigerian
poet, musician, and model one day while playing on the streets of New
York. They got married in 1994. The marriage lasted only two years.
“I’m touring all the time, I was never around, I think she really
wanted a proper married life,” he reminisces. “Music to me is my main
thing, it’s my first thing. And [it’s] what I’ve always done.”

But the two have
remained friends. I ask him if he’ll ever be walking down that aisle
again. “Well, my mum’s on my case,” he laughs. “I imagine maybe one
day, but right now, my music is my main thing, and if it happens it
happens.”

Because he’s been
based abroad all these years, his father – who died in 1996 – never saw
him perform. Even his mother didn’t get firsthand experience of her
son’s music until a few years ago, when he performed at the MUSON
Center in Lagos. Now he has plans to perform in the country more often.
Before now, his albums were not marketed in Nigeria. But in his latest
deal, he’s kept Nigerian and South African rights, which means his
forthcoming album will now also be released in both countries,
“independently from the European thing”.

Apart from the
obvious influences like Fela (posing as a journalist Jones met and
interviewed Fela in Lagos months before Abami Eda passed on) and Jimi
Hendrix, Keziah Jones is a product of an eclectic array of subtler
influences; he lists Langston Hughes, Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka,
Odia Ofeimun, Gil Scott-Heron and Saul Williams as favourite poets /
poet-musicians. He has also been deeply influenced by the cities he’s
lived and loved in: Lagos, New York, London and Paris. And of course,
his hometown, Abeokuta. Our extended riff on the city animates him; his
eyes light up as memories of the ‘rock-city’ invade his consciousness.
“Abeokuta’s a heavy place,” he says.

Language is another
major influence. He is fluent in three: English, French, and his native
Yoruba. But it is clearly the latter that is the biggest influence.
Every now and then during our conversation (from the moment I answer in
the affirmative to his “Se Yoruba ni iwo na”?) he breaks into the
language. It is in Yoruba that he tells me: “I understand Yoruba, it’s
what we speak at home. When I was young you couldn’t but speak Yoruba
in my home.”

Underpinning his
music is a desire to translate a Yoruba sensibility into a modern
idiom. “[Yoruba] really informs my music… I can say things in Yoruba
that I can’t say in English, so I bend English to fit the Yoruba
meaning.”

Then I realise that all his life Keziah Jones has been bending
stuff: bending English into Yoruba, bending Western sounds – and an
English name – into the service of his cherished culture; even
succeeding in bending ‘Norwegian Wood’ till it becomes recognisably
Nigerian. Still very much in the thick of his career, it doesn’t seem
like he’ll be running out of things to bend anytime soon.