Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah [formerly Christian Scott] is a sonic architect, trumpeter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer, designer of innovative technologies and musical instruments. He is a two-time Edison Award-winning, six-time Grammy Award-nominated, Doris Duke Award in the Arts awardee, who has released thirteen critically acclaimed studio recordings, four live albums, and one greatest hits collection. He is widely recognized as the progenitor of the “Stretch Music,” style, a 21st-century approach that asserts genre blindness and an ethnomusicological approach to limitless fusion that heralded NPR to hail him as “Ushering in a new era of Jazz” and JazzTimes Magazine to mark him as “Jazz’s young style God.” and “the architect of a commercially viable fusion”. He has collaborated with a number of notable artists, including Prince, Thom Yorke, McCoy Tyner, Marcus Miller, Flea, Eddie Palmieri, Robert Glasper, rappers Mos Def (Yasin Bey) to name a few.
Adjuah is Chieftain and Oba of the Xodokan Nation, as well as the current Grand Griot of New Orleans. He is the grandson of Louisiana luminary and legend, the late Big Chief Donald Harrison Sr., Guardians Institute founder and Grand Griot, Herreast Harrison. And is the nephew of Jazz innovator and NEA Jazz Master saxophonist-composer, Big Chief Donald Harrison Jr. Adjuah (and his twin brother Kiel) joined his grandfather’s Guardians of the Flame banner in 1989 at the age 5.