biography

Sankofa Sounds is a multi-generational and multi-national (US-American, Nigerian, Israeli, and German) collaborative of multi-instrumentalists, who want to share these musics of the African continent and its diasporas with our audiences and communities. Our work includes a focus on educational opportunities that we bring to community settings, as well as 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 is a Ghanaian symbol that means “go back and get it,” a metaphor for the importance of innovation grounded in culture. Sankofa Sounds is an Afro-fusion band that performs musics from Africa and the global Black diasporas. Our repertoire includes such genres as, Afrobeat, soul, funk, highlife, Ethio-jazz, Cape jazz, and Congolese rumba, idioms that reflect global sonic exchanges born of rootedness and innovation. 

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 wish to promote the dynamic and complex multi-linear exchanges that have shaped global Black music. Such exchanges find meaning through repertoire that points to histories of circulation: of both sounds and ideas. A focus on such cross-cultural fluidity views musicians, their lives, their expressive artistry, and their legacies, not as isolated cultural phenomena, but rather as intercultural conversations, exchanges, and dialogue. Sankofa Sounds wishes to invite audiences to deepen their listening practices around African musical traditions.

Sankofa Sounds is:
Nick Kiekenapp - guitar, m.d.
Tiyinoluwa Omotosho - keys & vocals
Clayton Rosati - drums & percussion
Ariel Kasler - keys, guitar
Daniel Piccolo - drums & percussion
JP Stebal - drums & percussion
Dan Konold - drums & percussion
Garrett Tanner - saxophones
AJ Shank - saxophones
Vince Krolak - trumpet/flügelhorn
Theo Forde-Stiegler - bass
Dr. Sidra Lawrence - musicology