Fu Chronicles

It can be tricky invoking martial arts in your concept record: the best-case scenario is usually treading ground that Wu-Tang broke and maybe following in two or three of the thousand footsteps they laid down, and the worst-case scenario is a novelty-entrenched act of dopey cultural caricature. But since the Fela-disciple Antibalas were already aware of how to respectfully navigate the legacies of international icons and too reverent of that legacy to jeopardize it with kitsch, their Afrobeat/kung fu crossover Fu Chronicles makes for a powerful (and hopefully temporary) finale for a band that founder/frontman Duke Amayo disbanded during the pandemic. Before joining Antibalas, Amayo had actually founded a martial arts dojo, and would also form a musical side project under the same idea as the one that guides this album; the self-released debut by Amayo’s Fu-Arkist-Ra group predated these sessions by nearly two full decades. But it flourishes in its final form here, updating some of this older material (“MTTT, Pt. 1 & 2”; “Fist of Flowers”) with the confidence of a long-gestating closure. As much as the classic Afrobeat call-and-response cadences and disciplined-yet-fluid rhythms can feel as much like a focus-building kata as they can a more dancefloor-rooted workout, the feeling persists that this album finds the freedom of the body inseparable from the knowledge of the mind and the empathy of the soul. And even though there are a few stray nods to 42nd Street kung-fu soundtracks here and there — which, it should be noted, can mean funky library music, motorik krautrock, or Lalo Schifrin as much as it means invocations of ancient Han dynasty twelve-tone scales — there’s a nuanced but eclectic expansion of their sound, especially in the blues feints of slow-boil “Fight Am Finish” and the way “Koto” subtly integrates light-footed flute and violin into the usually heavyweight brass. It’s invigorating whether you’re throwing hands with a sparring partner or just raising them to the sky.