biography

Sankofa Sounds is: 

... a multi-generational and multi-national (US-American, Nigerian, Israeli, and German) collaborative of multi-instrumentalists, who want to share the musics of the African continent and its diasporas with our audiences and communities. Our work includes a focus on educational opportunities for our communities, high school and college campuses through “informances” that go beyond just performing the music, as we seek to share the sounds, cultural contexts, and history of these diverse musics.

Sankofa Sounds is an Afro funk fusion band that performs musics from Africa and the global Black diasporas. We invite audiences to deepen their listening practices around African musical traditions. Our repertoire includes genres such as Afrobeat, Soul, Funk, Highlife, Ethio-Jazz, Cape Jazz, and Congolese Rumba, idioms that reflect global sonic exchanges born of rootedness and innovation. Sankofa is a symbol from the Akan people of West Africa (today's Ghana and Ivory Coast) that means “go back and get it,” a metaphor for the importance of innovation grounded in culture. 

Sankofa Sounds honors African and diasporic music through creative performance, with a particular focus on repertoire that illuminates histories of movement and cross-cultural influence. We do so because we want to promote the fascinating exchanges that have shaped global Black music. Our focus on such cross-cultural fluidity views musicians, their lives, their expressive artistry, and their legacies, not as isolated cultural phenomena, but as intercultural conversations and dialogue. 

History: 
Headed into our third performance season, Sankofa Sounds started as the much-requested public performance version of an ensemble that formed and is still performing at BGSU's Moore College of Musical Arts: Students can elect to participate in the one credit hour per semester Afro-Caribbean Ensemble at BGSU. As such, the ensemble, co-directed by Sankofa guitarist Nick Kiekenapp and his wife, Sidra Lawrence, performs at BGSU, but does not exist, for example, in the summer term. So when the co-directors received requests to perform for concert series and festivals in the summer outside of university settings, Sankofa Sounds was born. The ensemble features all BGSU alumns, faculty, and staff. All but one of its current members are also alums or students of the Afro-Caribbean ensemble. It includes music teachers and instructors, and four doctors. Often visiting alums of the Afro-Caribbean Ensemble, as well as musical friends and relatives, sit in on performances. And so this is just the first chapter of the Sankofa Sounds story. As a lauded mainstream songbird once sang: "The rest is still unwritten."