Performance

Afrobeat

0 upcoming performances in New York

Afrobeat here refers to the earlier, band-driven form shaped in Nigeria in the late 1960s, built on long grooves, horn lines, and politically alert songwriting. In New York, it has circulated for decades through club stages and the city’s Afro-diasporic networks, becoming a working vocabulary for jazz musicians as much as a dance-floor language. At Jazz at Lincoln Center, Ulysses Owens Jr. and Michael Olatuja frame it in a big-band setting that also nods to later Afrobeats. The critical point is that the translation tests how a street-rooted form holds up under formal orchestration.