Chief Adjuah (formerly Christian Scott)

Chief Adjuah is a two-time Edison Award winning and Grammy Award nominated trumpeter, composer and producer. He is the nephew of jazz innovator and legendary sax man, Donald Harrison, Jr. His musical tutelage began under the direction of his uncle at the age of thirteen. Since 2002, Chief Adjuah has released eleven critically acclaimed studio recordings, two live albums and one greatest hits collection. Chief Adjuah is known for developing the harmonic convention known as the “forecasting cell” and for his use of an un-voiced tone in his playing, emphasizing breath over vibration at the mouthpiece. The technique is known as his “whisper technique.” Chief Adjuah is the progenitor of “Stretch Music,” a jazz rooted, genre blind musical form that attempts to “stretch” jazz’s rhythmic, melodic and harmonic conventions to encompass as many other musical forms, languages and cultures as possible. Jazz is a progressive musical movement and Chief Adjuah is at the forefront of its continued viability as an art form. Chief Adjuah is a scion of New Orleans’ first family of art and culture, the Harrisons, and the grandson of legendary Big Chief, Donald Harrison Sr., who lead four nations in the City’s masking tradition. The HBO series, Treme, borrowed the name “Guardians of the Flame” from African-American cultural group Scott began “masking” as a member of with his grandfather in 1989. Chief Adjuah recently became the Chief of The Brave, in February 2017, one his grandfather’s early banners. In 2018, Tulane University’s acclaimed Amistad Research Center announced its archive of the Donald Harrison, Sr. legacy papers to highlight the Harrison/Scott/Nelson family’s contributions to the arts, activism, and African diaspora cultural expressions. The Harrison family’s story has been documented by Oscar winning director, the late Jonathan Demme, in his post-Hurricane Katrina works. Chief Adjuah  currently sits on the Boards of Guardians Institute and The NOCCA Institute. Since Chief Adjuah’s emergence on the jazz music scene, he has been a passionate and vocal proponent of human rights and an unflinching critic of injustices throughout the world.

Poetry has allowed Amyra to summon her own reality time and time again as she faced the intricate violence of being raised in New York City’s Foster Care System. Her work, often autobiographical, tends to generational trauma, Black liberation and communal healing. In honoring the wonder and terror of her own history, she invites us to reckon with our own.

Freedom, We Sing, Flying Eye 2020,  León’s debut picture book, is endorsed by Amnesty International and was shortlisted for the Waterstones Book Prize, UKLA Book Awards, North Somerset Teachers Book Awards and nominated for the Kate Greenaway Medal. Illustrated by the wonder that is Molly Mendoza.  Concrete Kids, Penguin Teen 2020, León’s debut YA poetry collection was shortlisted for the Goddard CBC Social Justice Prize and named a YALSA Amazing Audiobook for Young Adults and received starred reviews from Kirkus Review, Booklist and School Library Journal. Both publications are currently being taught in schools throughout the United States and United Kingdom. León’s second picture book, Darling, will be published via Candlewick in 2023, illustrated by Cathy Ann Johnson. 

Celebrated in the NAACP Image Award nominated series PBS: American Masters In the Making, Strange Grace: The Life and Art of Amyra León is an intimate look into the intersections of Amyra’s multidisciplinary practice and her remarkable journey of becoming.

WITNESS , Amyra’s debut album, is an experimental soul record that serves as a hymn and a battlecry, an ode to the Harlem that raised her. 

She has performed everywhere from the back corners of bars in New York and London to being on the frontlines of marches against injustice. She has toured throughout the United States and Europe countless times and has performed at Lincoln Center, BAM, Brooklyn Public Library, The Apollo Cafe, TEDx and more. She has shared stages with Common, Nikki Giovanni, Carrie Mae Weems, Brian Jackson, Hellogoodbye, and more. 

Amyra composed Una Mujer Derramada in collaboration with Sivan Eldar commissioned by and performed with Lisbon's Gulbenkian Orchestra, the Montpellier National Opera, and the Paris Chamber Orchestra. Amyra was honored to perform the composition as the sole vocalist with all three orchestras. 

She is the inaugural recipient of the Battersea Arts Centre Phoenix Award which led to the 2019 London premiere of her debut play VASELINE, co-commissioned by Arts Council England. VASELINE will return to the stage in 2023.