Fela & the Buddha’s Chauffeur - Why I Play What I Play
Oakland, 1990
I first came across Fela’s music in March 1990, at a flea market in Oakland, California.
I was walking around, looking at this and that, when I heard this funky African music, the likes of which I had never heard before. I went to investigate. A man was selling pirated cassettes. On his stereo, loud enough to attract people just like me, played music from another world. How shall I describe it?
The first thing I heard was saxophone. Not the smooth sax of Grover Washington Jr., not the virtuosic sax of Coltrane or Sonny Rollins. Dirty, in the best possible sense. Under it, a strange mix of Afro-Latin grooves and James Brown funk, West African percussion, a chorus of women’s voices echoing political statements — and it never ended. The groove went on and on.
I was in love at first listen.
Thirty-six years later, I still remember what was playing on that stereo: “Sorrow, Tears and Blood.” Of course I bought the tape, and that began my adventure with Fela.
Fela — Sax Player, Singer, Band Leader, Political Rebel
Even today, all these years later, if you go to Nigeria, Fela is still a legend. His music moved millions; his message woke up a mass of people hypnotized by colonial brainwashing.
Here are a few details I find important. Fela led a band of more than thirty musicians — a special kind of orchestra. He played sax and organ, sang, and led the group, all while chain smoking. And when I say “chain smoking,” I mean he never stopped! When a cigarette was almost finished, he raised two fingers, and someone ran on stage and placed a lit new one between those fingers.
So what do I have in common with Fela?
What does he have to do with why I play the gong music I play?
Fast Forward to 2026
I’m in bed and on my back, in a sound meditation of sorts. The sound: an audiobook, Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, by Jad Abumrad.
The book is full of surprises. For example, it is hard to imagine that this prophet of the streets of Lagos was once a musician without a vision — that it took an African American woman named Sandra Smith, a Black Panther activist, to open his eyes to the power of his music, and its need for a serious message.
There was a single moment that woke him up to his power, and the responsibility that came with that power.
He was at Sandra’s house. He played her a newly recorded song with the words in the language of Yoruba. She asked him to translate, and was shocked to find that the vocals on top of his powerful music were nothing more than the ingredients of his favorite soup.
She said: if you are going to play music that is so powerful, why not add a message that matters to you and your people? It woke him up in a moment. He knew all too well the struggles going on in his homeland and indeed in all of Africa. Overnight, he changed the name of his band and began writing a new kind of music. Music that would rock the world, but not for entertainment purposes.
What Fela Played For
In many interviews Fela names the purpose of his music: to open people to his message — to teach people brainwashed by centuries of colonialism. To wake them up to their real power, and to see their situation with new eyes.
Music, Fela said, was a weapon against the oppressors who wanted to keep the people down so that a few could profit at everyone else’s expense. He wanted to break the cycle. That was his purpose. His purpose shaped the music itself.
Listen to the repetition: he would often play the same sequence for twenty or thirty minutes before he began to sing. He figured out that repetition could entrance and un-trance people at the same time.
It worked. His music was changing minds. Stories from those who went to his concerts at a famous place called the Shrine sound like transformational psychedelic experiences. Outside the venue was a repressive dictatorship; inside was total freedom and a deep journey into joy and self-empowerment.
How effective was he? We can measure it by the government’s pushback. Fela wrote a song called “Zombie,” in which he portrays soldiers as zombies who don’t do anything or think anything unless they are told to think it or do it.
The government forbade the playing of the song, but people all over Nigeria played it anyway. Then things got violent. The army busted into his home, beat him almost to death, raped the women in the compound, and threw his mother out of an upper-story window. She died of her injuries. That was the government’s reaction to “Zombie.”
Fela has been dead for twenty-nine years. Yet when there are protests in Nigeria and across Africa, “Zombie” is a favorite of the protestors. His music is still an invisible presence, waiting for the courageous. A soundtrack for the stand-takers.
All this got me questioning: why do I do what I do with the gongs? What is the purpose of my music, if there is one? It turns out I have an answer.
What I Play For
What is it I do with gong music? It is not political commentary. I don’t try to stir rebellion. I don’t even play emotions. At least not intentionally.
It’s more basic: the point of my gong music is to change how people pay attention.
Our attention sits at the epicenter of our lives; every single moment! The quality of this life is determined by the quality of our awareness. Change the awareness, change the life.
The greatest psychedelic experience that exists in all of life is not some substance. It doesn’t come from a plant in South America or a lab in Switzerland. The most powerful agent of magic is to be aware. Being aware is an acid trip without the acid. It is the Ayahuasca ceremony without the ceremony. Nothing is more amazing and miraculous and beautiful than you being here right now.
So that begs the question: if awareness is so powerful, why are our lives so unmagical? Why do we need special experiences to feel alive?
It is because we also are living under a dictatorship. The dictatorship of the mind — and it tells us where and how to use our attention every moment of the day and night. It dismisses what is not useful to its survival and obsesses about comfort, safety, and stories of past miseries and future anxieties. This dictator holds our attention in a thrall of silliness. Our own private dictatorship.
The Private Dictatorship of the Mind
So that begs another question. How can we overthrow the dictator of the mind so we can enjoy the outrageous power of our focus? How can we reclaim what is ours?
This dictator is not a person. No guns, no violence you can point to. It hides in the how-do-you-dos and the good manners. The mind has a way of dismissing the moment, and nobody — nobody — will say you’re wrong for letting this moment be a non-entity.
It’s accepted without question that this is just how it is. Well, let me channel my inner Fela and say: WAKE UP!
Ask yourself: When you walk outside, do you see magic everywhere? Are you in bliss just by breathing? Do you fall in love with the people who cross your path? Can you perceive the exquisite beauty of a crack in the sidewalk? Is your everyday life an ecstasy, or is it a problem to solve? Are you surviving until you die, or are you living even the small moments?
The dictatorship of the mind turns magic into mud, gold into shit. Life is magic everywhere. Everyone should be getting high just walking down the street — it’s all a miracle. So the real question: why doesn’t that happen?
It is all about how we focus and what we see.
He Changes Minds. I Change Attention.
Fela changes minds; I change the quality of people’s attention. Both are needed. He needed people to wake up from decades of brainwashing and act against physical oppression.
I live in a place where oppression lies on distant shores, where survival is relatively easy. Walk around Zürich and there’s a fountain of fresh water at every corner. In Nigeria, you might walk five miles for a bucket of drinking water for your family.
I truly wish the people of Fela’s Shrine could have had what I offer — and yet I know it’s a different context entirely. Fela says it himself in “Original Sufferhead” (my favorite Fela song): they come from London and New York and Rome and Chicago — that is to say, they don’t come from Nigeria. If they came from Nigeria, they would know plenty about food, light, water, and housing. There is no way a person in my world can begin to understand what it was like to live in that world.
And yet, on a certain level, I do understand. I’m willing to build the bridge between the world of Fela and the world I inhabit: Nigeria, police and army brutality, and the magic of the Shrine on one side, and a person’s mental habits and their awareness on the other.
To me it’s a clean bridge. The connection is a change in consciousness.
This was implicitly understood by those who went to Fela’s concerts at the Shrine. Everybody there smoked marijuana. Why? Because they knew that the way they perceived their lives outside the Shrine — the dictatorship world — would not give them the openness needed to absorb the music and the message.
The basic understanding of both Fela’s audience and my audience: the state must change before anything can land. They worked with the tool they had. They used weed, and I use pausing in the action and reaction over a span of time, so that people can slow down and start to be aware of their awareness. Moment to moment.
How My Music Works
My music seduces the mind just enough that it relaxes its stranglehold on attention. It does this by being beautiful but also long. Longer than people’s normal span of attention.
The music is not recognizable — something they can’t categorize, can’t control.
It is fresh and alive and beautiful. The audience wants to stay with it. The moment they let their attention go beyond their span of attention, they go beyond the dictator of the mind.
Then they encounter a new mind. A mind in the service of awareness. They start to see visions, have moments of clarity. Beautiful reflections. Archetypal allusions from deep within themselves. Their minds begin to flow and even become spacious.
They lose their sense of time, as they experience the timeless present. This is a critical experience. It is their true home. When the dictator of the mind releases the tyranny of the inner clock, everything returns to its true nature. Its true beauty.
When my “show” is over, I always see the change in the faces of the people reemerging. They are not quite the same as when they arrived. There is a sort of bewilderment as the mind begins to take control again. But the eyes. The eyes are so clear and with such a light.
The Highest Selfishness I Know
You could say this quality of attention beyond the reaches of the controlling mind is the change I’d like to see in the world. But that’s not really why I do what I do. I am also a subject of a dictatorial regime. My mind is also a tyrant, and I want liberation!
I want to see magic everywhere. I want to realize my true nature. I don’t want to be a Zombie, following my resentful, fearful little mind. And I want the pleasure of holy company.
It happens that when I play the gongs as I do, it attracts people who teach me, by their very presence, everything I’ve described here. What may seem selfless and altruistic is really the highest form of selfishness I know. It just happens that what I am doing when I make my gong music is also what the world of humans needs. It is a lucky synergy!
The people who come to my events and sessions, they are the masters. They would never say so themselves, and probably they don’t see themselves that way. Maybe the context of the gong bath allows me to see the mastery within each participant. I see it in them, and I have from the very beginning.
They transmit the wisdom of awakening to me, and I provide them with a soundtrack that takes them beyond the dictator of the mind.
I’m the chauffeur, driving Buddha around.
