Thursday, audiences in Eden Park will dance to jazz while learning about Nigerian history when local musician Yemi Oyediran debuts “Kiriji Asoro Fabunmi: The Legend of Fabunmi,” a story of the Kiriji War.
The headlining performance of the park’s “It’s Commonly Jazz” program, which begins at 6 p.m. in the park’s Seasongood Pavilion, “Kiriji Asoro Fabunmi: The Legend of Fabunmi” features original music about the longest civil war of the pre-colonial Yoruba empire. Through jazz, Nigerian musical traditions, modern beats and meditation, Oyediran hopes to deliver a message of ancestry, connection and community.
For Oyediran, the story is deeply personal, as the Kiriji War began in his ancestral hometown. Fabunmi of Okemesi, a Yoruban warlord who Oyediran described as the leader of a revolt against a “draconian” and “heavy-handed” government, helped launch the conflict. Oyediran’s great-grandfather served as Fabunmi’s mentor, helped finance the war and rallied their town and parts of the region to support his effort.
“Ultimately, the telling of the events of the war are from him … I’ve been fortunate enough to have members of my family keep the story, write the story down,” he said. “That’s why I say that ancestry is so important. That’s how we really know ourselves, and that’s how we know each other.”
Each Christmas, his ancestors would gather all the family members and “endlessly” tell them stories about the war, their town and other parts of their family history. Although he admitted he found the stories boring when he was younger, he later “went back and started to dig through this stuff,” discovering details he had forgotten and lessons that had been passed down through his family. Now, he wants to bring a version of that feeling to Cincinnati.
“I wanted to give people the experience of what being part of a very large, very extended family feels like,” Oyediran said. “It’s kind of just an experience to dance, to honor our ancestors, to look inward to yourself and take some time to pause, think about where your place is in this world, and how you want to interact,” he said.
The performance will include six jazz pieces accompanied by meditations and six moments of dance and celebration blended into the storytelling, to ensure the audience is not focused only on the musicians.
Helping guide the audience through that experience will be Dr. Joshua Kerobo, the performance’s central storyteller. Kerobo will take on a role similar to that of a “griot” — the West African word for a historian and storyteller — by narrating the events of the Kiriji War vocally and musically, while guiding the audience into moments of reflection. Rather than presenting the history as something distant, he wants listeners to consider how the themes of the past can apply to their own lives. The goal is to make the evening feel less like a traditional concert and more like a shared experience between storyteller, musicians and audience.
Kerobo will also play the Yoruba traditional instrument “ilu gangan” — an hourglass-shaped instrument known as the “talking drum.” Because Yoruba is a tonal language, the drum can play sounds that are similar to the tones of the language, giving it its name. As the music plays, Kerobo will continue supporting the musicians on the talking drum by emphasizing certain words, communicating with the ensemble and reinforcing important moments in the story for the audience.
For “Kiriji Asoro Fabunmi: The Legend of Fabunmi,” jazz arranger Brandon Scott Coleman transformed six traditional Nigerian songs into modern jazz works. One, “I Remember My Darling,” was originally written by I.K. Dairo, while the other five are songs by Nigerian musician Ebenezer Obey that honor regions of the country represented in the performance.
This version of “Egba” draws from the sound of Herbie Hancock in the 1970s, while “I Remember My Darling” is transformed into a freer arrangement inspired by Ornette Coleman. “Ibadan” carries influences of John Coltrane and contemporary jazz, and “Lagos State” pays tribute to Wayne Shorter’s approach to composition. “Ijesha” becomes what Coleman describes as a calypso played by Thelonious Monk, and “Ekiti” pairs a bebop-style melody with shifts between swing and Afro-Caribbean music reminiscent of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.
This is Coleman’s first time arranging Nigerian music, a process that required him to listen closely to original recordings. Relatively few written resources are available on Nigerian music, so he had to determine how the songs’ structures could fit into a jazz setting. Rather than controlling every note, he left it to the musicians to improvise and bring their own voices to the arrangements.
“I’m not expecting them to play exactly as I wrote it rather than interpret it through their own voices, and really make it shine and be special,” Coleman said. “Music has that ability to kind of reach into the gaps that words kind of can’t get into,” Coleman said.
While Coleman brings older songs into new jazz settings, saxophonist, music director and composer Ziaire Trinidad Sherman is helping create the modern sound underneath the story.
Sherman composed the performance’s musical works that will flow beneath Kerobo’s narration and shift with the energy of the story. The sound combines electronics and live band, creating an underlying sound to match the words being spoken.
To create them, Sherman studied how Nigerian music changed across generations. The performance moves between electronically produced modern Afrobeats and the older acoustic tradition associated with the creator of Afrobeat, Fela Aníkúlápó Kútì. For one Afrobeat-inspired composition, Sherman overdubbed himself playing different saxophones to create the powerful sound of the original recordings despite having only two horns playing live onstage. He also drew inspiration from other Black American music; one section pulls specifically from major names in the 1990s New York hip-hop scene, like Nas, Jay-Z, DJ Premier and RZA, to communicate themes of power and overcoming struggle.
Members of the band span across different generations, which Sherman sees as another layer of the project since each musician brings different ways of performing to the table.
“It’s not me just trying to get across my ideas,” Sherman said. “It’s about how we can all come together and create this soundscape that can uplift the story … without the story, there would be no sound.”
And for Oyediran, the message of the performance ultimately reaches beyond the Kiriji War itself. The story becomes a starting point for asking audiences to consider who came before them, what they have inherited and what they will carry forward.
Rather than wanting people to simply applaud and leave when the final song ends, Oyediran imagines them staying behind, talking to one another about their families — maybe about a relative who shaped their life or a more personal story about a great-grandmother’s journey to freedom that still lives on. The musicians may be on stage, but Oyediran wants the audience to leave thinking about their own stories.
“The takeaway is you … and the community that you come from, and the people that you come from,” Oyediran said. “The takeaway is a deeper connection with self and community, through music.”
