Babatunde Olatunji

Early ambassador for African music

Babatunde Olatunji, percussionist, singer and bandleader: born Ajido, Nigeria 1927; married Amy Bush (two sons, two daughters); died Salinas, California 6 April 2003.

The master Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji played a key role in the international popularisation of African music. His 1959 album Drums of Passion, with its muscular percussion and emotionally charged call-and-response chants, struck an immediate, if unexpected, chord with the record-buying public in America and eventually sold over five million copies.

In the decades that followed, his music evolved to incorporate other sound worlds whilst continuing to draw upon the Yoruban traditions of his homeland. He worked alongside musical giants such as John Coltrane, Carlos Santana, Stevie Wonder and the Grateful Dead's Mickey Hart, and became one of Africa's foremost cultural ambassadors.

"When the world hears the beat of my drum," he once said,

the spirit of the gods will descend. You can feel it in your soul, you can feel it in your heart, you can see it in your eyes, you can feel it in your feet – when you dance to the beat of my drum.

"Baba" Olatunji was born, he believed, in 1927, in the Nigerian fishing village of Ajido. He later recalled:

Every day you wake up and you may be celebrating the birth of a child, the coming of age of a young man or woman, someone taking a giant step in life (getting married) or someone passing into the spirit world. All of this is celebrated with music and chants and dance.

In 1950 he gained a scholarship to Morehouse College, Atlanta, in the United States, where he studied political science with the intention of becoming a diplomat. At a time of increased political awareness, he began to perform for his fellow students as a means of drawing their attention to their African heritage. By the time he headed to New York, in 1954, he was juggling postgraduate studies in international relations with music.

In 1957 he was given the opportunity to perform alongside an orchestra at Radio City Music Hall in New York. He and his ensemble played a 12-minute piece entitled "African Drum Fantasy" four times daily and drew rave reviews, an engagement that led directly to the album Drums of Passion, produced by John Hammond.

Although this was not the first time that African music had been immortalised on disc, it did mark the first time that it had been recorded in a modern studio, and it became something of a phenomenon. Ten years after the album's release, a long-time fan, Carlos Santana, took a cover of the title track, "Jin Go Lo Ba" into the US pop charts.

Olatunji and his group, renamed the Drums of Passion, spent the Sixties performing in schools, colleges and, increasingly, in jazz clubs where their sound proved a potent influence upon talents like John Coltrane, Yusef Lateef and Randy Weston. They also appeared at civil-rights rallies alongside Olatunji's fellow Morehouse alumnus, Martin Luther King Jnr, and Bob Dylan acknowledged Olatunji's political work in the song "I Shall Be Free" (1963). In 1967 Olatunji and Coltrane co-founded the Olatunji Center for African Culture in Harlem, New York.

Whilst performing at a school on Long Island in the early Sixties, Olatunji impressed a young student named Mickey Hart who subsequently acknowledged the older man's influence upon both his own work with the Grateful Dead and his later explorations of world music. In the 1980s Hart produced a pair of acclaimed albums for his mentor: Drums of Passion: the beat (1986), on which Olatunji was joined by Santana; and Drums of Passion: the invocation (1988). Hart also invited Olatunji to appear on the Grammy-winning project Planet Drum (1996).

A 1997 album, Love Drum Talk, earned him a further Grammy nomination and an autobiography, The Beat of My Drum, was published last year.

Paul Wadey