Akua Naru via Matrix

Akua Naru

Connections Out

Network Node

Name: Akua Naru
City/Place: Cologne
Country: Germany
Hometown: New Haven, Connecticut

Connections Out

from this node by: Matrix

Life & Work

Bio: Akua Olatunji, better known as Akua Naru, is an American rapper from New Haven, Connecticut. Blurring the lines between hip-hop, soul, and jazz, her music often tackles issues of race and gender inequality through a powerful poetic voice and skillful storytelling.

Raised in a religious household, Olatunji began writing rhymes from early childhood. After completing her studies at Rutgers University, she relocated first to China and then to Cologne, Germany, where she made her debut back in 2011 with the EP Poetry: How Does It Feel?. That same year, she also released her first studio album, The Journey Aflame, which was met with overwhelmingly positive reviews throughout the world, becoming a college radio hit in the US and receiving heavy airplay in countries like Germany and France.

A North American 22-date tour ensued and so did a live album under the name The Live & Aflame Sessions in 2012. In the following years, Olatunji returned with the critically-acclaimed The Miner’s Canary (2015) and dropped the self-produced The Blackest Joy in 2018, an album heavily informed by African music and inspired by Black women’s empowerment.

Media | Markets

▶ Instagram: akuanaru
▶ YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/@AkuaNaruOfficial
▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCkSc0OQ904rf-ahVyNquuTw
▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/artist/2xxyuUOZJxayJDF6SxLG2K
▶ Apple Music: http://music.apple.com/br/artist/akua-naru/410473445
▶ Deezer: http://www.deezer.com/br/artist/1436098

Clips (more may be added)

4:46
Akua Naru - Toni Morrison (Live Session)
By Akua Naru

8 views

Next

Connections In ViaConnect to Akua Naru to appear here:

What's Been Happening?

A video was posted re Akua Naru:

Akua Naru - Toni Morrison (Live Session)
EXECUTIVE PRODUCED, THE URBAN ERA AUDIO RECORDED & MIXED, MATTHIAS GAMM AUDIO MASTERED, RONNY SCHLÖSSER VIDEO PRODUCED, LENARTS PRODUCTIONS VISUAL GRAPHICS & POSTPRODUCTION, FELIPE BARROS DIRECTED AND EDITED, LENARD GUTFLEISCH CAMERA, LE...
- Mon at 8:14 AM
A category was added to Akua Naru:

Germany
- Mon at 8:09 AM
A category was added to Akua Naru:

Cologne
- Mon at 8:08 AM
A category was added to Akua Naru:

Public Speaker
- Mon at 8:07 AM
A category was added to Akua Naru:

Educator
- Mon at 8:06 AM
A category was added to Akua Naru:

Poet
- Mon at 8:04 AM
A category was added to Akua Naru:

Hip-Hop
- Mon at 8:04 AM
A category was added to Akua Naru:

Rap
- Mon at 8:03 AM
Akua Naru is matrixed!
- Mon at 7:49 AM

Akua Naru

Connections Out

Human creativity is everywhere. From Brazil it's all being connected in a manner allowing one to move from any creator to any other creator in just a few steps. Artificial Intelligence & algorithms not necessary. Real intelligence, yes.

Raymundo Sodré Global

A Massa (do povo carente) / The Masses (of people in need)

A Massa (do povo carente) / The Masses (of people in need)

Add to my Playlist

A Massa - Raymundo Sodré (7,025 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Sina de Cantador - Raymundo So... (6,881 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Magnetismo - Raymundo Sodré ... (6,342 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Sacando a Cana - Raymundo Sodr... (5,950 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Mêrêrê - Raymundo Sodré (5,459 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Jardim do Amor - Raymundo Sodr... (4,673 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Debaixo do Céu - Raymundo Sodr... (4,149 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Desejo de Amar - Raymundo Sodr... (3,859 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Oração pra Yá Oxum - Raymundo ... (3,739 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Yá África - Raymundo Sodré (3,508 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Meu Rio, Cadê o Papel - Raymun... (3,177 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Casa de Trois - Raymundo Sodré... (2,896 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Mulher é Laço que Prende o Coração do Vaqueiro - R... (2,556 plays)

Share | Report | 60,213 plays | 11,778 views

THE MATRIX IS THE MOTHER SHIP (it carries people to culture; per above, it carries culture too)

THE MATRIX IS CULTURAL DIFFUSION ON A PLANETARY SCALE (Bahia is Ground Zero)

THE MATRIX IS THE INTEGRATED GLOBAL CREATIVE ECONOMY (matrixed economist, Dr. Darius Mans, presents the Africare Award to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — Brazil's current president — in 2012)

SPARROW/PARDAL ROBERTS

Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix. — Susan Rogers (personal recording engineer for Prince; recorded "Purple Rain", "Around the World in a Day", "Parade", and "Sign o' the Times"; now director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory)

SUSAN ROGERS

Dear Sparrow, Many thanks for this – I am touched! — Julian Lloyd Webber (most highly renowned cellist in the United Kingdom; brother of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber (Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats...)

JULIAN LLOYD WEBBER

This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :))) — Clarice Assad (pianist, composer with works performed by Yo Yo Ma and orchestras around the world)

CLARICE ASSAD

Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!! — Alicia Svigals (world's premier klezmer violinist; founding member of The Klezmatics)

ALICIA SVIGALS

Thank you for your note below and we appreciate you including Kamasi in the matrix, Sparrow. — Banch Abegaze (manager, Kamasi Washington)

KAMASI WASHINGTON

This Matrix was built by an ex-royalty "rescuer" (Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Mongo Santamaria, Jim Hall, Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley and many others) so that deep Brazilian culture, much of it otherwise impossible to find if one is not right there where it is made, might also (via an alternative to major media) be discoverable from all around the world. To do this it integrates this immensity into a system whereby ALL CULTURE EVERYWHERE — from small villages in Africa to Grammy-winning artists in Los Angeles — writers, filmmakers, painters... — can be found from anywhere on the planet.

(Clip by Jorge Pacoa)

Andrew Dickson Art Critic

The Matrix uncoils from the Recôncavo of Bahia, Brazil, final port-of-call for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history and from where some of the most physically and spiritually uplifting music ever made (samba and its precursor chula, per the Saturno Brothers above) evolved...

Bob Mintzer Big Band Leader

WHAT IS THE RECÔNCAVO? The peninsula upon which Salvador is situated is like the thumb of an open and grasping hand, what is normally thought of as the Recôncavo then being defined by the curved index finger. This way of definition developed when agricultural products were brought to Salvador by boat, sometimes making their way first down the Paraguaçu river after having been carried overland from the sertão (backlands) to Cachoeira, the river debouching into the Bay of Saints at Maragogipe. The city of Bahia (as it was usually called then) was crouched on the bay, comprised of a commercial district much smaller in area than today (landfill has increased it greatly), the area around the upper section of the elevator, and what is now called Pelourinho.

Robertinho Silva Rio de Janeiro

Much of the remainder of the peninsula was given to sugarcane plantations, and dotted within the Atlantic rainforest were countless quilombos (Afro-Brazilian villages founded during the age of slavery); both are attested to today in commonly used city names. The neighborhood of Garcia was once Fazenda Garcia (fazenda being a farm or plantation), and this denomination is still used today to distinguish one end of Garcia (fim-de-linha) from the other (the Campo Grande end). Neighborhoods Engenho Velho de Federação and Engenho Velho de Brotas are so called for the old mills (engenhos velhos) which pressed the caldo (juice, so to speak) from the cane so laboriously hacked out of the fields. The neighborhood of Cabula is named for an nkisi (deity) of candomblé angola (the first candomblé -- a West African religious belief system -- to arrive in Bahia)...whose rhythms comprise the basis for samba, meaning that the rhythms to which so many in the world inexpertly swayed as Stan Getz's saxophone soared and João and Astrud Gilberto sensuously intoned -- this paragon of suave Brazilian sophistication -- was born in the rough senzalas (slavequarters) of Bahia. Ironically enough, the barefoot senzala version was/is far more sophisticated than the sophisticated version.

Stephen Kurczy Journalist

But times have changed, and Cabula is now a crowded, non-descript middle-to-working class Salvador city neighborhood (plenty of candomblé around though), and Engenhos Velhos de Federação and Brotas are swarming working class neighborhoods (ditto the candomblé); the senzala samba, the samba chula and samba-de-roda have disappeared. A simplified version -- Bahian pagode -- is heard everywhere in Salvador, but the real-deal stuff has died out here in the big city. It remains, however, a potent force on the remainder of its native ground, the Recôncavo proper, where it is danced to upon pounded earth, under moonlight broken by banana, palm and mango leaves, lifting the souls of its participants almost like something religious, which it was, and gods aside, is.

Niwel Tsumbu Guitar

Connect to anybody in here. You appear on their page. Anybody in here connects to you, they appear on your page...

Ivan Bastos Bahia

...plugged into a superpower: the small world phenomenon.

Jon Otis Drums

By the same mathematics positioning some 8 billion human beings within some 6 or so steps of each other, people in the Matrix tend to within close, accessible steps of everybody else inside the Matrix.

Kiko Souza Ska

And by extension, to within discoverable reach of everybody everywhere on the planet.

David Castillo New Orleans

A little bit about how the math works:

EM PORTUGUÊS / IN ENGLISH

BUT WHY BRAZIL???

Asa Branca Federal University of Bahia Faculty

"The time has come for these bronzed people to show their worth..."

(Music by Assis Valente. Clip by Betão Aguiar. The Matrix was built in Salvador's Centro Histórico above, incorporating these marvelous people.)

Romero Lubambo MPB

Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles — jungle and desert and dense urban centers — both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn.

Varijashree Venugopal Composer

Brazil absorbed over ten times the number of enslaved Africans taken to the United States of America, and is a repository of African deities (and their music) now largely forgotten in their lands of origin.

Wayne Escoffery Saxophone

Brazil was a refuge (of sorts) for Sephardim fleeing an Inquisition which followed them across the Atlantic (that unofficial symbol of Brazil's national music — the pandeiro — the hand drum in the opening scene above — was almost certainly brought to Brazil by these people).

Chubby Carrier Accordion

Across the parched savannas of the interior of Brazil's culturally fecund nordeste/northeast, where wizard Hermeto Pascoal was born in Lagoa da Canoa (Lagoon of the Canoe) and raised in Olho d'Águia (Eye of the Eagle), much of Brazil's aboriginal population was absorbed into a caboclo/quilombola culture punctuated by the Star of David.

Michael Cleveland Bluegrass

Three cultures — from three continents — running for their lives, their confluence forming an unprecedented fourth. Pandeirista on the roof.

Nublu New York City

Nowhere else but here. Brazil itself is a matrix.

'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother"
A real mother for ya!

Copyright ©2023 - Privacy - Terms of Service - Contact -

Open to members of the worldwide creative economy.

Name

Email Address

You'll use your email address to log in.

Password

Passwords must be at least 6 characters in length.

Password Again

Enter your password again for confirmation.

Profile Address

This will be the end of your profile link, for example:
http://www.matrixonline.net/profile/yourname

Timezone

Language

Human Verification

Please type the characters you see in the image. May take several tries. Sorry!!!