Talking With Ghosts

Tony Allen was the last musician to arrive at Midilive Studios, in the Parisian suburb of Villetaneuse, early on the evening of Nov. 13, 2019. He strolled past his playing partners for the night, Joan Wasser and Dave Okumu, and headed directly for a drum kit already set up to his specs by the engineers; the man Brian Eno once called "the world's greatest drummer" was not a stranger to the space. Allen put on headphones and immediately played one of his signature drum fills, the kind that effortlessly evokes both an accidental stumble and a brilliant equation. Then he stopped. "Where's the click?" he asked.

Wasser, who had organized the session, answered: "We're not using a click." Her hope, she explained, was to create a less regimented, more imaginative and free-flowing recording atmosphere, without any unneeded technological stress, even if it meant forgoing the metronome track musicians use in the studio to stay in time. "Is that OK with you?" Allen assented, and the three gathered in a close circle to play — Okumu on bass to Allen's right, separated by a small partition to minimize bleed, and Wasser on keys facing Okumu. When the drummer restarted, the other two wandered into his watery rhythm, and fit right in. "All of a sudden, we were floating," Wasser would later tell me on a sun-splashed October afternoon in the backyard of a Brooklyn restaurant, a smile dawning on her face. "It was