Photo Credit: Andy Sternber
By Dulani Wallace
I once met Jeremy Sole a few months after I moved to Los Angeles in an old converted theater turned community center. It was 2004 and I was staking out a little neighborhood called Leimert Park—an Emerald City of sorts plotted along Crenshaw Boulevard. Sole, who was emceeing a show inside turned the old playhouse into a percussive, ass-shaking revue that was an outright nod to the Nigerian legend Fela Anikulapo Kuti.
Sole is a white guy from Chicago who has prodigious knowledge of black music. I know this because his musical vocabulary is robust with beats derived from the likes of Cymande, Bill Withers and Marvin Gaye, to name a few. He’s a resident DJ at Zanzibar in Santa Monica where he heats up the floor Thursday nights with funk influences from around the world.
Afrofunké, Sole’s Thursday show, is an incantation of Third world rhythms. Fela, one of DJ’s influences, didn’t just make music for self-satisfaction, royalties or other reasons musicians make music. His music asserted an inherent problem that plagued his people and his nation—the lack of democracy. Fela’s long gone but Sole is ushering the beats continuously on the dance floor and on the airwaves.
Los Angeles is a lucky town to have Afrobeat—the formal name of Fela’s music—as a subculture. Afrobeat transcends any specific race or creed. And DJ Jeremy Sole Thursdays night shows have sealed rifts between black, white, yellow and brown. Imagine a time in the not-too-distant future where “black music” artists will be categorized with Def Leppard and Of Montreal. It’s not far-fetched. Jeremy gets it.
