E453 - 2026.04.27 Melvin Gibbs on Fela Kuti - 1 of 3

Fela Kuti has been the subject of at least half a dozen documentaries, a Broadway play, a shelf of books, and at least one richly lauded podcast series.  It's hard to imagine a time when Fela would have been considered an obscure musician from a largely unknown continent.  But that was very much the case in the seventies when bassist Melvin Gibbs heard his music blasting out of a record store on Nostrand Avenue in his native Brooklyn.  The number of  Americans who had even heard of Fela, already a superstar in his homeland, Nigeria, was vanishingly small.   But a penny dro...