04/11/2022
Kassa Overall, a Grammy-nominated musician, emcee, singer, producer and drummer, will be returning to Oberlin, his alma mater, on Tuesday April 12 — his first performance at Oberlin since 2019.
Kassa has been called “one of modern jazz music’s most audacious futurists” by Pitchfork. In the past three years, Overall has released four critically acclaimed projects: I THINK I’M GOOD (on Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood Recordings Imprint), GO GET ICE CREAM AND LISTEN TO JAZZ, and the mixtapes SHADES OF FLU and SHADES OF FLU 2, tilting the nexus of jazz and rap in unmapped, kaleidoscopic directions and gathering support from artistic visionaries including Virgil Abloh and Thom Yorke. Whatever the experiment, Overall remains faithful to the pocket of jazz drums in the tradition of his mentors, Elvin Jones, Billy Higgins, and Billy Hart, the latter of whom he studied at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.
Filling out Kassa’s all-star band is the Detroit-based keys player Ian Fink, who plays with Shigeto, Karriem Riggins, and Common; Haitian-American percussionist Bendji Allonce, son of Kompa legend Herman Nau who has worked with Miley Cyrus, Ms. Lauryn Hill, and Roberta Flack; and Tomoki Sanders (they/them), a multi-instrumentalist from Japan and New York who plays a saxophone given to them by their father, the great Pharoah Sanders.
Presented by Oberlin Jazz Society
