As anybody who has been to one will testify, tribute concerts can be a mixed bag. On June 27, for example, Simple Minds, Queen and Annie Lennox will be playing in Hyde Park to celebrate the 90th birthday of Nelson Mandela. As one of South Africa's most acclaimed young musicians, the jazz singer Simphiwe Dana might have expected to be there too. But not only was she not invited, she had not even heard of it prior to our interview.

“I guess the organisers just want to go with what they know works,” she says diplomatically, before turning the questions round to another London concert in which she will be taking a starring role. Billed as an African Tribute to James Brown, the Barbican's Still Black, Still Proud concert on June 14 is guaranteed free of Simple Minds.

“James Brown made a real connection with the townships,” Dana says. “He stood for freedom, and he had a real impact in my country because he had a voice and he used it to speak for the oppressed. Our own music would be banned under apartheid, but music from outside was available - well, maybe not Say it Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud).”

“James influenced many African musicians and they influenced a lot of things happening in music, so it has come full circle,” says Pee Wee Ellis, the Godfather of Soul's former musical director, who conceived the show and invited Tony Allen and Wunmi, from Nigeria, Cheikh Lô from Senegal, and Mali's Vieux Farka Touré to reproduce the excitement of a James Brown revue.

Ellis and his fellow musical director Fred Wesley were there when Brown first touched down in Africa, in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, in 1968. “We were mobbed at the airport,” Wesley says. “We'd see women doing our dances, you could tell how much they were influenced by America. James loved the drive of African music. They had the same beat and chords, but they had a hard drive.”

That Ivory Coast concert was also crucial to the development of West African music. Early converts such as Moussa Doumbia and Geraldo Pino turned to funk, blowing away old-fashioned entertainers such as the young Fela Kuti. A year later, Kuti was in America, learning all about Brown, soul and black power. Two films capture the excitement of black America colliding with the motherland. The 1971 documentary Soul to Soul followed Ike and Tina Turner and Wilson Pickett to Ghana. They were greeted like heroes at the airport, visited villages, hung out with kings and were terrified of the animals. Ike Turner refused to eat anything except cornflakes the whole time he was there.

Even better, When We Were Kings, the Oscar-winning film about the 1974 Muhammad Ali-George Foreman fight in Zaire, features Brown, the Pointer Sisters and Celia Cruz and the best musicians in Kinshasa. Wesley recalls a DC-8 struggling to take off from New York's JFK airport. “We had a lot of equipment, but the real problem was the Pointer Sisters' wardrobe,” he says.

The week of concerts they put on remains a career highlight for Wesley. “It was the moment the music all came together for the first time, we saw the two cultures merge into one.”

It was also the start of the long, slow decline of Brown. Wesley left his employment when Brown asked him to start copying the indigenous music they had heard in Kinshasa. “James wasn't sure he had enough music left inside him,” he says, sadly. “He thought he was running out.” He was.

By then, Ellis had long gone, but not because of musical differences. “It was my golf clubs,” he says. “He wouldn't let us take our clubs on the tour bus. He'd say: ‘Golf is for white folk and rich people, and you ain't neither.'”

Still Black, Still Proud, Barbican, London EC2 (020 7638 8891), June 14

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