Fronting an eight-piece, multi racial band, Keita played an African take on jazz-rock fusion.
The strategy of encouraging black and white bands to jam together paved the way for the ska revival, 2-Tone and multi-racial bands such as the Beat (who, according to Red Saunders, first met in Victoria Park) and the Specials.
Their apology states: "As a multi-racial band our foundation is built upon both diversity and consideration for other cultures".
Here was a multi-racial band releasing a record on the eve of Obama's election victory with lyrics critical of the Bush regime yet full of hope for the future.
"As a multi-racial band our foundation is built upon both diversity and consideration for other cultures," No Doubt said in a statement on their website.
According to The Christian Science Monitor, the alleged shooter has been identified as Wade Michael Page, a 40 year old Army veteran who the Southern Poverty Law Center claims was a one time leader of a racial supremacist band.
This is the man credited not just with forming the first multi-racial rock band, but with pioneering the outrageous "ghetto dandy" look that Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone would later make their own.
For many the soundtrack to the unemployment-creating, manufacturing-destroying, riot-catalysing early years of Thatcher's rule consisted of multi-racial ska revivalist bands from the inner cities of the Midlands.
The band's racial politics are not simple or simply confrontational.
When you look at the cross racial history of string-band music, which then turned into so many genres ― the heart of the blues and "hillbilly music," which turns turns into country music and jazz ― all that stuff doesn't happen without the fiddle and the banjo.
Somehow our conversation turned to CBGBs or Laibach or something and thus I learned that the Rykies were a multi-racial mock Nazi band who'd been banned from CBGBs back in 1998.
