Jad Abumrad

And as a listener, it can be quite monotonous.

But then there's this moment where you stop wanting it to change and you just give in and suddenly you fall out of time.

And you could be listening for four minutes or four hours.

You don't know.

So there's an element of trance to his work.

Then what will happen typically is.

As at some point when you are deep in the trance, he will break the trance and start singing.

And that can happen 15 minutes into a song.

Suddenly his voice drops on you like the voice of God.

And he's talking about politics.

He's singing about all the injustices of post-colonial Africa.

He's calling out dictators by name.

He's giving sort of broad history lessons in pidgin English.

And that created – so many people I talked to in reporting this series talked about hearing that – his voice and it just woke them up, almost like woke them out of a slumber.

And if you imagine that happening a million times, it created a youth movement.

that was very, very dangerous to the government.

And as you say in your intro, he was beaten repeatedly, his house was burned down, his mother was thrown out of a window, because he was able to use music, just music, to fight back.

So yeah, and it's groovy, it's funky, it's blending in jazz influences.

He's got the sort of James Brown, chicken scratch guitar influence.

It's all of these things fused together in what he would ultimately call African classical music, but which started out as being named Afrobeat.