In 1958, right around the time Fela Kuti turned 20, he took a fateful trip to London. Accounts differ as to whether he’d ostensibly traveled there to study law or medicine, but in either case he diverted himself towards Trinity College of Music and his first bandleader gigs instead. Fela returned to Nigeria a few years later, bearing a hybrid of jazz, highlife, and Latin music he’d soon refine further into his own Afrobeat sound, and by the time EMI gave him an excuse to head back to the UK in 1971 he had just crossed the precipice of reshaping African music (and the world’s music) forever. While Fela’s London Scene isn’t a definitive snapshot of everything he’d worked towards in the first couple years of the decade — throw in the other three albums he released that year and you’ve got a clearer view — it does reveal the emergence of an artist and a band that would thrive on Africa’s musical terms whether they were in Lagos or Abbey Road Studios. Considering the (surprisingly unobtrusive) cameo from recently Afrobeat-enthused, future frequent collaborator Ginger Baker behind the kit on “Egbe Mi O,” there is no sign of crossover compromise on London Scene. Everything that made Africa 70 so distinct — the slowly heightening call-and-response structures, Tony Allen’s fluidly momentous drumming, a horn section that expands the global language of the J.B.’s, Kuti’s electric piano dancing around the pocket — is there in a nascent form. It’s a little closer to straightforward jazz-funk than they’d get later in the decade, only one song breaches the ten-minute mark that later works happily exceeded, and Fela hadn’t yet fully committed to singing more frequently in a diaspora-uniting common-language English. But his message is already loud and clear, whether the words are explicitly anti-colonialist (“Buy Africa”), or it’s left to the music itself to express his defiant power (“Fight to Finish”; “Who’re You”).