Acclaimed musician, poet, director and actor Saul Williams tours his new album Leap Life, his first solo full-length in seven years. Named after his leap-year birthday, Leap Life is an expansive, genre-defying work shaped by voice, rhythm and intuition. Moving between spoken word, jazz, hip-hop, ambient composition and ceremonial sound, the album finds Williams continuing his decades-long practice of using art as a transformative force. With ‘Leap Life,’ Williams expands the definition of what music itself can be.

For nearly three decades, Williams has occupied a singular place in Black culture, resisting the confines of genre across music, literature and film to use art as a transformative device. He starred in Sinners which earned a record-breaking 16 Academy Award nominations; co-wrote and starred in the Sundance and Cannes award-winning SLAM, directed Neptune Frost, and has released numerous albums, books and multidisciplinary works.

Leap Life includes contributions from Carlos Niño, Robert Del Naja (Massive Attack), Moor Mother, Kamasi Washington, Georgia Anne Muldrow and Surya Botofasina.

Name: Osekre and The Lucky Bastards
 
Where They’re From: Brooklyn, New York (by way of Accra, Ghana)
 
When They Started: 2010
 
For Fans of: K’naan, Keziah Jones, Jupiter & Okwess International, Throes + The Shine
 
Genre: Afropop meets ska/punk
 
Sounds Like: Making something out of nothing and getting hyped off of life
 
The origin story for Osekre and The Lucky Bastards begins in the 1980s. Somewhere in that decade Osekre (full name: Ishamel Osekre) was born in Accra, Ghana to a loving mother and a father who had no interest in fatherhood. Osekre is candid about flipping the script about that fact from something painful into something celebratory about the fortuitous experience of simply being born. He’s proud to be a “lucky bastard.”
 
The music of Osekre and The Lucky Bastards is alive with treasuring every moment. They play a hybrid of Afropop and ska, punk, and reggae that is equally indebted to Osekre’s Ghanaian heritage and the Brooklyn DIY/garage/indie scene that thrived in the late 2000s. At that time, Osekre was studying at Columbia University. He was writing and performing poetry and found the music scene to be the perfect outlet to have his work reach more people. His backing band, The Lucky Bastards, has been a rotating collection of performers that currently includes a drummer, guitarist, bassist, saxophonist, and trombonist.
 
There’s an urban grittiness to the music that is less tropical than traditional Jamaican ska and instead is more connected to the riotous British quality of the second wave ska scene. Meanwhile, Osekre’s gruff delivery is pure Afropunk. The band has an improvisational, jammy quality that Osekre relates to Ghanaian jama music, which comes from the Ga people. Traditionally, a jama is when a circle of people create polyrhythms using drums, gongs, clapping and singing as a form of cheerleading.
– MTV IGGY
 
Osekre’s upbeat and ambient blend of afropunk serves as a culmination of influences that he picked up through absorbing the soundtracks of his two homes, Ghana and New York. Everything from K’naan to the Strokes, Fela Kuti to the Ramones, even Bob Marley to the Stones can be heard in Osekre’s sound. With the mentality of a Caribbean beach party and the intensity of a Bushwick loft party, Osekre And The Lucky Bastards are always sure to be an interesting time. They come to the stage with a style of world music thoroughly updated and curated for New York City in 2014, and despite how strange it might sound, it really succeeds in its goals. The quintet’s mission is clear form the first note of the set—these boys want every single member of their crowd up and dancing the night away, and they will stop at nothing to make that happen.
 
Rise and Dance are made to get you to, well, rise and dance. Sweet Mother and Mother Told Me are joyous odes to the singer/songwriter’s mother, who raised him in Ghana before he came to New York in the mid-2000s to attend Columbia University. He’s quickly become a staple of Brooklyn’s DIY scene in a career that has already lead the Lucky Bastards to multiple appearances at CMJ Music Marathon, Northside Festival, NPR’s Greene Space.
– CMJ
 
Osekre and The Lucky Bastards official site
Osekre and The Lucky Bastards on Facebook
Osekre and The Lucky Bastards on Twitter
Osekre and The Lucky Bastards on Bandcamp
Osekre and The Lucky Bastards on Soundcloud
 
Photo credit: Julia Pearl Robbins

Somewhere in the sky, between Europe and Africa, a German fashion designer crossed paths with a Sierra Leonean writer. Love creates. What emerged was a living metaphor of this encounter. A life riddled with juxtapositions of humanity, and the love and spiritual presences that bind us.
 
Born in Germany, his name is Patrice Babatunde Bart-Williams.
Patrice. An ode to the slain Congolese leader. Babatunde. A Yoruba name calling on the father’s return and a signification of our ancestor’s immortality. Patrice took his first breath on the same day that his African grandfather took his last.
 
Bart-Williams. A moniker exposing his family’s roots, creoles returning to an Africa, Sierra Leone, different from that which they were snatched from.
 
And then, Patrice turned 11.
 
“My quest for purpose and identity became a matter of survival. I was growing up in an environment where there was no one like me and where people acted surprised when they heard me speaking my mother tongue.”
 
His life had just been torn asunder. Gaston Bart-Williams, Patrice’s father, a writer and Sierra Leone’s first filmmaker, the man who’d prodded him to deliver beers to Germany stranded Blues great, Champion Jack Dupree, had died in a boating accident off the coast of Sierra Leone.
 
Surrogate father’s quickly consumed the world of the young one. Bob Marley pushed Patrice’s philosophies of love and righteousness while Bob Dylan gently encouraged his awareness of freedom’s responsibilities. 2 Live Crew rode with him on his skateboard, competing for space with Fela Kuti’s shrine and the Fugees ballads. A year later, Patrice allowed his first song, “You Always You,” to escape his mind. Two years after this, an entire album fled.
 
“I always believed that my days were numbered, so I was in a big rush to get things done. My early encounter with death triggered something. An appreciation for life, the subject that became the main theme of my early work, up until now.”
 
Skipping from the school bench to the world stage, Patrice released his first EP and before graduation, walked across the stage to open for Lauryn Hill’s Miseducation Tour. He brought soul on tours with the original Black Eyed Peas, and once his album dropped, his career soared. His portfolio of music weaves aching blues, stirring soul, rebel punk and righteous reggae, leaving no room for labels.
 
Known more for his live shows, people hyped Patrice by word of mouth alone. His live shows sold out without album releases. In the most unexpected places like Portugal or Romania 5000 people turning up and singing his songs word for word, as “Lions”, “Everyday Good” and later “Soulstorm” leaked across fan’s consciousness. That’s been the story of the growth of his music.
 
It’s a bootleg success and one that has leapt into Patrice’s producing work with acclaimed artists Cee-Lo, Selah Sue, and of course, soul lover’s favorite 2012 album, Cody ChesnuTT’s, “Landing on a Hundred.”
 
Patrice’s latest venture into his life’s work, the album “The Rising of the Son,” acts as a personification of where he began at age 11. Journeys throughout the African Diaspora brought sounds from Jamaica, Cologne, Germany, France and the UK into a powerful medley of note symbols. Acclaimed Kingston based producer, Don Corleone, pushes “Rising” into a new era of reggae creations, and surrogate father, Bob Marley, steams through the rhythms captured in his Tuff Gong studios.
 
To accompany, “Rising,” Patrice produced and directed a short film that takes the audience full circle to his, and all of our beginnings, in Africa, and to his resurrection as the son of a director.
 
Patrice official site
Patrice on Facebook
Patrice on Twitter
Patrice on YouTube
Patrice on Instagram

Koku Gonza, the daughter of a native Tanzanian folk singer, has shared the stage with soulful heavy weight artists. Artist ranging from the living Jazz-Funk Fusion legend Roy Ayers, the Millennium Bluesman Anthony David the elegant Soulful-Siren Yahzarah, Songstress Maimouna Youssef and soul savvy songwriter Eric Roberson. Her mother from South Carolina, is also a musician. Her parents noticed her talents at an early age and immersed her in piano, vocal and dance activities.
 
As an Indie artist, Koku Gonza composed arranged and performed all vocals, as well as played the guitar on all of her albums. The song, L.O.V.E. serves as the lead single from her debut studio album Radiozophrenic released in 2011 through Mixer Pot. The song caught the attention of various media outlets. Her L.O.V.E. music video video debuted on BET International, Channel O, and other media outlets that feature breakout artists. In July 2012, Koku Gonza completed her first live tour in France. She performed in 11 cities in Southern France, and received rave reviews from various media outlets like Soul Bag Magazine. In November 2012, The talk show +D’Afrique featured Koku Gonza’s Radiozophrenic. Koku Gonza’s sound and delivery has been compared to the late legend Bob Marley, Mama Africa Miriam Makeba, Sade as well as contemporary artists like India Arie and Corrine Rae Bailey. Koku Gonza’s music is parallel to the translation of her Kihaya name, which means lovely. She applies love, soul and passion into the ingredients of her genre-defiant style of music. For the past two years Koku Gonza has worked on her latest project Love Culture! Listen to it here.
 
Koku Gonza official site
Koku Gonza on Facebook
Koku Gonza on Twitter
Koku Gonza on Bandcamp