Musician
‘Kafari’ (he/him) is the alias of Cincinnati, OH born, Portland, ME based pianist and rhythm bones-wielding beatmaker Ahmad Muhammad. Kafari’s music synthesizes his love of ambient piano music, instrumental hip-hop and acoustic percussion, and takes inspiration from pioneering jazz harpist Dorothy Ashby, beatmaking legend J Dilla, and the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who in a 2014 performance sparked Kafari’s interest in traditional music and the Irish rhythm bones – a percussion instrument popularized in America in the 1800s through Blackface Minstrelsy. Kafari often distributes and teaches bones to his listeners at his performances, sharing pieces of their complex and fraught history and workshopping basic rhythmic techniques with his audiences over his original beats.
