It’s only fair that the drummer who invented Afrobeat pays tribute to the drummer who invented hard bop. For the last few years that Tony Allen has been enjoying a second youth in Paris and elsewhere, we have tended to forget that his very particular style, of touching and pounding, comes as much from his African and Nigerian sources as from the rhythmic boppers that were Kenny Clarke, Max Roach and, in particular, Art Blakey. All of them could have countered his statement “I engage in drumming like in an orchestra, I try to make my playing orchestral”. When we know that, in the opposite direction, Art Blakey would have made a mysterious “initiatory” trip to Nigeria, at the end of the 40s, of which testified then several discs of rhythmic proliferation, we can only be curious about these reunions over the chasm of time…