It was historic: for the first time on Wednesday evening, a musician from the African continent sold out the largest indoor venue in Montreal, the Bell Center. Adding Thursday evening’s concert, the Nigerian Burna Boy will have sung in front of at least 25,000 spectators, thus confirming his own success as well as that of his colleagues in the afrobeat scene, now a global phenomenon in the same way as Taylor Swift’s pop, the R&B of Beyoncé and the reggaeton of Bad Bunny. And, as a bonus, what a performance he gave, Burna Boy!
Enough to forgive him for the half hour it took him before going on stage. Two years after stealing the show from Future, headliner of the inaugural day of this edition of Osheaga, Burna Boy once again put the crowd in his pocket by donning, with the patter that we now know him, a thirty songs for just under two hours.
The audience seemed to know them all, word for word, by heart. It’s one of the things that the artist likes on stage: with a gesture of the hand, commanding his orchestra to lower the tone, or even to stop the song abruptly, to launch a cappella, with the confidence that the fans will accompany him. The pop song at its simplest, a good chorus that Burna Boy brings with his soft and amber voice, contained, barely scratchy, equipped with a delicate vibrato.
A detail, certainly, but one that says a lot about the type of performance we were treated to on Wednesday evening. In a world dominated by rap and pop artists accompanying themselves with pre-recorded tapes – a criticism that some have also leveled at Madonna’s performance at the same Bell Center last month – there was something something refreshing to see a singer perform without these technological crutches, and with an orchestra that is impeccable in its execution.
An orchestra ? A brass band, we could say: there were at least 13 on stage, including a brass section of four musicians, three backing singers, a drummer and a percussionist. During a ballad at the heart of the evening, a string quartet took the stage; five percussionists later joined Burna Boy for an “acoustic” moment during which African pop shined thanks to the sound of the drums and the voices of the Boy and his backing vocalists.
He thus bridged the gap between the rich rhythmic tradition of his part of the country and the modern pop that inspires it – firstly Jamaican dancehall, then funk (a major influence on the original afrobeat of the legendary Femi Kuti), R&B and, on his most recent album, I Told Them…, released last summer, of hip-hop and American funk. The theme of the album inspired the scenography: apart from the pyrotechnic effects, the performance avoided technological flashiness, but the decor was imposing by reproducing a street corner in Queens or Brooklyn, with her bodega and its old telephone booth on the garden side and its barbershop courtyard side — a functional salon, with its hairdresser and a client, sitting there most of the evening!
Burna Boy, who has seven albums in a decade-long career, had plenty of good material to keep the crowd dancing all night long. He opened the concert with the title song from his latest album, followed by Gbonataken from his classic African Giant (2019), the record that revealed him outside the African continent and its diaspora, and which earned him a nomination for a Grammy award – a distinction that he won instead in 2021 for the album Twice as Tall.
While the original Nigerian Afrobeat of the 1960s and 1970s emphasized the dynamic between brass and percussion, with songs often stretching beyond 10 or 15 minutes, modern Afrobeat is more concise, revolving around pop choruses with, in the case of Burna Boy, verses “rapped” in the style of deejays Jamaicans.
The musician attacks his performance with magnetic calm, moving in harmony with his six dancers, alternating between grooves dancehall-pop and romantic songs like a crooner new genre — during the first quarter of the evening, it moves from a slightly rapped rhythm (Rentalcollaboration with Dave) to an aerial ballad (Pull up), and will alternate on these two tables until the last portion of the concert, just as danceable, but more rhythmic and energetic, a sequence initiated with the almost house bomb On Formtaken from his most recent album.
Before him, Bob Marley (not of African origin, except spiritually) had sold out the Montreal Forum in November 1979. The South African Johnny Clegg and his Savuka orchestra had also already performed at the Olympic Stadium in 1988, but in the first part of George Michael. The talented Burna Boy wrote a page of history this week, and will follow in his wake other talents from Africa – the Nigerian colleague Davido will be at Place Bell on April 19, the young South African singer Tyla (first winner of the Grammy for best African music performance) will be to be discovered during the next edition of Osheaga.