He said it loud, and they're proud

Africa gave James Brown his beat, and now its musicians are celebrating his legacy

James Brown (left), seen performing on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in 1966. Vieux Farka Toure (left) and other musicians are touring the world to pay tribute to the Godfather of Soul. (CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images (left); Richard Temine for the New York Times)

Hard to believe, but it's coming up on two years since the death of James Brown. The undisputed master of funk passed away Christmas Day 2006. And since then, there has been surprisingly little in the way of big-ticket musical tributes to the man, as if his influence and legacy were too monumental to be tackled in any one concert.

Now a major tribute tour is on the move, one that sheds intriguing and valuable light on an aspect of his legacy that Americans don't always fully grasp: its global reach.

Titled "Still Black, Still Proud," the tour presents the musical and cultural chemistry between Brown's American hard funk and multiple strands of African pop music. It gathers two key Brown sidemen, saxophonist Pee Wee Ellis and trombonist Fred Wesley, with a shifting cast of major African artists - some of the older generation who knew Brown in person, others younger but no less marked by his influence.

After several months of European touring, the group arrives stateside this week in a formation that features Cheikh Lo, the mystically inclined Senegalese singer, and the charismatic young Malian guitarist Vieux Farka Touré, son of the late Ali Farka Touré and an emerging star in his own right. They play two shows at the Museum of Fine Arts' Calderwood Courtyard on Wednesday.

The tour is the brainchild of Ellis, who reached out to former colleague Wesley and to some of the African musicians he's come to know on the European scene - from Afrobeat pioneer and Fela Kuti collaborator Tony Allen, to Manu Dibango, Angélique Kidjo, Lo and Touré. Ellis himself is based in Britain these days.

"It's very simple," he says on the phone from his home there. "I've worked with a few African artists and had reasonable success. And since the beat came from Africa, we wanted to bring it back by way of combining funk with some African rhythms."

The concert program is a mix of Brown classics and new music written for this occasion, Ellis says. There's no recording of the ensemble as yet, but he says they are likely to release a live CD documenting the current tour.

But of course there's more going on here than your regular summer reunion tour or supergroup. By its title alone, "Still Black, Still Proud" not only honors James Brown, but references a specific aspect and time period in his multifaceted body of work. It recalls the political, even revolutionary Brown, whose music was a virtual soundtrack to the breakthrough of black consciousness in American culture.

Recorded in the volatile year 1968, the song "Say It Loud: I'm Black and I'm Proud" not only reflected the burgeoning awareness, but also did much to advance it, informing both black and white ears that the old term "Negro" was obsolete and its accompanying baggage of deference and humiliation cast aside.

Ellis, who played in Brown's band from 1965 to 1969, co-wrote that fundamental song. And the album of the same title marked Wesley's induction into the group; he would stay with Brown through the mid-'70s.

But attuned as they were to the politics of race and empowerment in the United States, both men admit that at the time, Africa was a hazy concept, often invoked but not fully understood. Ellis had taken his first trip to the continent with the band in 1966, for a concert in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. "I'm afraid I was guilty of being just above the Tarzan level of understanding," he says.

"Consciousness of Africa came later," says Wesley. On later African jaunts, including the memorable trip to Zaire for the 1974 Ali-Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle," he saw how great an impact their music was having. "Africans loved James Brown," he says. "And whenever we played in Africa, people wanted us to play all night."

Vieux Farka Touré confims, based on his childhood growing up in Mali, that Brown registered on the continent far beyond the specifics of his music or indeed its availability on cassettes.

"Even in the deep bush, the villages, people knew about James Brown," Touré says, adding that there were always characters around whose hero-worship was so deep that everyone would simply call them "James Brown" instead of their real names.

Like many Africans when faced with the complexities of America's racial history, Touré demurs at the black-consciousness side of the Brown legacy in favor of its more universal impact. "I'm not really all that much into black, white, brown," he says. "I judge each person individually. And James Brown was an immense personality."

It's ultimately that force of personality that "Still Black, Still Proud" celebrates, with a cast and concept of the caliber to do the late master proud. The legacy of James Brown will be mined for decades to come, but as Pee Wee Ellis puts it: "I think this particular homage has a deeper meaning than most."