By Onome Amawhe

There is a temptation, when writing about Miles Davis, to keep him inside the familiar geography of jazz: East St. Louis, New York, Paris; Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Gil Evans; Kind of Blue, Bitches Brew, electric instruments and the endless argument over whether what he was doing still qualified as jazz.

But there is another way to hear Miles Davis. Listen closely enough to the music he was making by the late 1960s and early 1970s and another geography begins to emerge. The music becomes less concerned with chord changes and more obsessed with rhythm. Repetition becomes important. Percussion multiplies. Individual solos begin to surrender some of their authority to collective groove. The music becomes circular, physical and hypnotic.
And somewhere in that transformation, Africa enters the room.

Not as decoration. Not as an exotic reference pasted onto American jazz. Africa appears as part of the deeper rhythmic and cultural conversation in which Davis increasingly located Black music.
That connection becomes particularly fascinating when Nigeria enters the story.
Because among the African musicians Miles Davis eventually identified as pointing towards the future was Fela Anikulapo-Kuti.

And Fela, intriguingly, had once been listening to Miles.
The relationship was therefore not simply influence travelling from America to Africa. It became something much more interesting: a musical circle in which African-American jazz travelled across the Atlantic, entered African popular music, was transformed there, and eventually travelled back.

The man who refused to remain Miles Davis
Miles Davis’s importance lies partly in his refusal to repeat himself.
The young trumpeter who played with Charlie Parker in the 1940s was not the same musician who helped define cool jazz in the 1950s. The architect of Kind of Blue in 1959 would eventually abandon much of the acoustic language that made the record famous.
By the end of the 1960s, Davis was listening elsewhere.
Rock. Funk. James Brown. Jimi Hendrix. Sly Stone. Electronic music.
And increasingly, rhythm.
The change can already be heard on In a Silent Way in 1969, but with Bitches Brew the following year Davis appeared to blow a hole through the architecture of conventional jazz.
Electric keyboards crowded the studio. Bass figures repeated relentlessly. Percussion became almost orchestral. Improvisation remained crucial, but the centre of gravity had shifted.
The music no longer simply progressed. It circulated.
That distinction matters enormously when considering Africa.
Much Western harmonic tradition depends heavily on progression — chord moving to chord, tension moving towards resolution. Many African musical traditions place far greater structural emphasis on rhythm, repetition, interlocking patterns, polyrhythm and gradual development within cyclical forms.
Davis was hardly attempting to reproduce any specific African tradition. His music was far too hybrid for that.
But his growing fascination with rhythm rather than conventional harmonic movement brought him increasingly close to musical principles that had long been central to African music.
By 1972, on On the Corner, rhythm had effectively become the organising principle of the music. Davis’s official site describes an album constructed around repetition, shifting grooves, percussion and trance-like rhythmic layers; Davis himself characterised what the musicians were doing as a deep African and African-American groove. Miles Davis Official Site
The trumpet was no longer necessarily king.
The groove was.

Then there was Fela
This is where the Nigerian connection becomes irresistible.
Fela Kuti’s musical development had itself passed through jazz.
While studying and performing abroad, Fela absorbed American jazz alongside highlife, soul and funk before gradually creating the synthesis that became Afrobeat. Accounts of Fela’s musical development repeatedly identify Miles Davis among the jazz figures whose work interested and influenced him.
But Fela did something that changes the significance of that influence.
He took those materials home.
Back in Nigeria, jazz stopped being merely something imported from America. Fela placed it beside Yoruba rhythmic structures, West African highlife, funk, call-and-response singing, horns, political rhetoric and the extraordinary rhythmic architecture created with drummer Tony Allen.
What emerged was not African jazz.
It was Afrobeat.
And in Afrobeat, the relationship between rhythm and time became radically different from the compact structure of most Western popular music.
A Fela composition might spend ten, fifteen or twenty minutes developing one central groove.
The bass did not merely accompany the song.
The guitar did not merely decorate it.
The percussion did not merely keep time.
Every instrument became part of an interlocking rhythmic machine.
The music accumulated rather than hurried.
Which is why listening alternately to Fela’s 1970s recordings and Miles Davis’s electric-period work can occasionally produce a strange sensation.
They are not making the same music.
But they are asking remarkably similar questions.
How long can a groove remain alive?
How much can happen without changing the harmonic foundation?
What happens when rhythm becomes the composition rather than merely supporting it?
Where does individual improvisation end and collective motion begin?

Miles hears Africa answering back
Then comes perhaps the most beautiful reversal in the story.
Miles Davis eventually began listening to Fela.
In his 1989 autobiography, Davis wrote about where he believed contemporary music was heading. Among the musicians he singled out were Prince, the Caribbean group Kassav’ — and Fela from Nigeria.
Davis wrote that the future could be heard in music emerging from Africa and the Caribbean, explicitly naming Fela as part of that movement.
Consider what that means.
One of the musicians who helped revolutionise modern jazz — and whose innovations had travelled around the world — was now looking toward Lagos for evidence of where music might go next.
The direction of cultural authority had reversed.
Africa was no longer simply receiving modern music from America.
America’s greatest modernists were listening back.
Femi Kuti has recalled how striking this was precisely because Miles Davis had been such an important influence on his father. Reading Davis praise Fela therefore completed an extraordinary circle of influence.
Miles influenced Fela.
Fela developed Afrobeat.
Miles listened to Fela.
And Miles declared that something happening in African music pointed towards the future.
That exchange is far more interesting than the simplistic story in which jazz leaves Africa through slavery, develops in America and then eventually “returns home.”
Music rarely travels in straight lines.
It circulates.

On the Corner and the African principle
If Kind of Blue is the Miles Davis album most people recognise, On the Corner may be the record that makes the African connection easiest to hear.
Released in 1972, it bewildered much of the jazz establishment.
There are tablas, handclaps, electric bass, keyboards, guitars, percussion, studio manipulation and fragments of trumpet. Instead of conventional jazz solos unfolding politely over chord sequences, instruments emerge from a dense rhythmic environment and disappear again.
Everything revolves around pulse.
The album’s official history describes rhythm as essentially its central message.
It is music built around repetition without monotony.
And that distinction is fundamental to much African musical thinking.
In European classical tradition, repetition can sometimes suggest stasis.
In African rhythmic traditions, repetition often creates possibility.
A repeating figure establishes the ground against which tiny variations become enormous. A percussionist shifts an accent. A guitar enters differently. A horn phrase appears. A voice answers another voice.
The structure does not need to move forward because movement is occurring inside the cycle.
Fela understood that instinctively.
Tony Allen understood it perhaps better than almost any drummer of his generation.
Miles Davis increasingly understood it too.

Africa was also political
There is another connection.
For Miles Davis, Black identity became increasingly explicit as the 1960s progressed.
The civil-rights struggle, Black Power, African independence and a wider Black internationalist consciousness were transforming the political vocabulary of African Americans.
Africa no longer existed merely as ancestry.
It increasingly represented sovereignty.
Across the Atlantic, countries including Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Kenya and others were negotiating the possibilities and disappointments of postcolonial independence.
In America, Black intellectuals and artists were asking related questions about cultural independence.
Who defined Black beauty?
Who controlled Black art?
Why should European standards determine musical legitimacy?
These questions ran through jazz.
They also ran through Fela’s career.
Fela eventually carried the argument much further than Miles politically, turning Afrobeat into an explicit weapon against military dictatorship, corruption, colonial mentality and elite power. His music became inseparable from Pan-African political consciousness.
Miles was not Fela.
He did not build a Kalakuta Republic.
He did not turn concerts into extended political lectures.
But both men understood something fundamental about cultural independence.
A Black artist did not need permission to define modernity.

The trumpet and the Shrine
There is something tantalising about imagining Miles Davis inside Fela’s Shrine in Lagos during the 1970s.
The meeting belongs more comfortably to imagination than documented history.
But musically, they had already met.
Listen to the long electric excursions of Miles Davis from roughly 1970 to 1975 and then listen to Fela’s great 1970s recordings.
The superficial differences remain enormous.
Miles’s music can be dark, abstract, fragmented and almost psychedelic.
Fela’s tends to be warmer, more explicitly dance-oriented, architecturally disciplined and lyrically confrontational.
Yet beneath both is the belief that rhythm can carry enormous intellectual weight.
Neither musician treats the groove as something intellectually inferior to harmony.
That may be one of their most important shared ideas.
Western criticism once tended to divide music into false hierarchies: cerebral versus physical, serious versus danceable, sophisticated versus rhythmic.
Africa had always exposed the poverty of that distinction.
A rhythm could be intellectually intricate and physically irresistible simultaneously.
Fela proved it.
Miles increasingly built music around it.

The Atlantic was never one-way
Perhaps that is ultimately the African story of Miles Davis.
It is not that Miles suddenly discovered Africa.
The connection is deeper.
Jazz itself emerged from the cultural memory of Africans in the Americas — from rhythms, vocal traditions, improvisational practices and musical sensibilities transformed through slavery, Christianity, marching-band music, blues and the violently creative history of Black America.
Miles Davis inherited that history.
Then he spent his life refusing to allow the inheritance to become a museum.
By the 1970s, as he pushed jazz toward funk, electricity, repetition and collective rhythm, Africa became increasingly audible within the broader Black musical conversation.
Meanwhile, musicians in Lagos, Accra, Dakar and elsewhere were listening to Black America and transforming what they heard.
Fela heard Miles.
Miles heard Fela.
Neither remained unchanged.
That is the real story.
Not Africa influencing America.
Not America influencing Africa.
But an Atlantic conversation that had been underway for centuries.
And Miles Davis, perhaps more clearly than many musicians of his generation, eventually understood where that conversation was heading.
Near the end of his life, when asked to imagine music’s future, he did not look only toward New York, Los Angeles or London.
He looked toward Africa.
And among the people he found there was a Nigerian named Fela Anikulapo-Kuti.
The pupil had become an innovator.
The innovator had become an influence.
And the circle was complete.