Founders Brewing Company is pleased to present
Afro Zuma (Afro Rock and World Music from Grand Rapids)
Afro Zuma is a Grand Rapids, MI based 14-piece collaboration of jazz, rock, and funk artists working together to pay homage to the West African musical style of Afrobeat. Drawing inspiration from their diverse backgrounds, Afro Zuma incorporates traditional rhythms from Brazil, Cuba, Guinea and Nigeria into deep groove heavy melodies, high energy original drum arrangements and socio-political lyrical content, which give way to epic James Brown-inspired unison horn arrangements. Nigeria is the home of Afrobeat music and of its father – Fela Kuti. From its birth in the late 1960s, Afrobeat music has been a melting pot in which traditional Yoruba music, jazz, rock, and funk are fused together in an ever-evolving complex musical organism that has traveled to every part of the globe, evolving and absorbing culture as it goes.
Zuma Rock adorns the cursed gateway into Nigeria’s capital city and symbolizes a right of passage into one of Africa’s most impoverished yet culturally affluent countries. Like the rock to which Afro Zuma pays homage, Afro Zuma symbolizes one musical community’s passage into a new musical genre. The evolution of world beat music in West Michigan is alive and well.
May 28th 2016
9:30 pm
$5
21+ only
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