This paper examines the confluence of African and African diasporic artistic practices in the work of Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, a contemporary New Orleans jazz musician with a rich heritage that ‘stretches’ across the Black Atlantic. It argues that his oeuvre creates a distinctive sonic space wherein he cultivates diasporic solidarity, spiritual healing, and utopia-making through a Pan-African cultural lens. Drawing on musical analysis, artist life-history, and diasporic theories, this study situates Adjuah’s practice within a continuum of African-derived aesthetic sensibilities, including what I call: “radical Sankofa-ism” – a process of recovering cultural memory and resisting the social order to manifest revolutionary Afrofuturistic ontologies. Thus, his self-articulated concept of “stretch music” is not merely analyzed as genre expansion, but as a decolonial methodology and healing technology that defy rigid taxonomies inherited from Eurocentric worldviews. Adjuah’s integration of African diasporic memory, ancestral invocation, and futurist gestures prepares an Afro-centric socio-sonic gumbo in which past, present, and future nourish new understandings of self and society. This process is analyzed as part of Adjuah’s utopia-making: not as escapist fantasy, but as a grounded expression of liberation. Through layered musical textures, instrument innovations, communal performance practices, and socio-political commentary, I show how his music enacts forms of cultural solidarity and spiritual healing that resonate across temporal and geographic boundaries. Ultimately, I contend that Adjuah’s music offers a model for how contemporary Black artists mobilize African diasporic culture to embody and produce iterations of jazz rooted in healing, heritage, and interconnection oriented toward collective freedom.

How does òrìṣà-centered sound generate authority, continuity, and transcendence in diaspora? This paper examines how sacred force travels through music within African Cuban Santería (La Regla de Ocha) and transnational jazz performance contexts. Focusing on òrìṣà song, bàtá drumming, and ceremonial aesthetics, I argue that ritual knowledge extends beyond liturgical space animating intercultural collaboration, pedagogy, and global jazz stages. Through the musical philosophies and practices of artists including Román Díaz, Lázaro Galarraga, and Melvis Santa, I explore how practitioners complicate sacred-secular distinctions while sustaining what I call “creative paradox”: the productive tension between preservation and innovation that enables continuity through disciplined transformation. For some, spiritual force depends on linguistic precision and guarded ritual boundaries. For others, the vitality of the òrìṣà emerges through movement across genres, instrumentation, and publics, including woman-led ensembles and diasporic jazz festivals. In these contexts, ceremonial concepts such as invitation, lineage, and aše inform improvisation and collaborative practice, rendering sound socially operative, relational, and efficacious. Sacred sound thus operates as a technology of presence, generating forms of transcendence that are neither abstract nor metaphorical; they are experienced as the arrival of divine force in and through performance. Situating African Cuban musicianship within broader conversations about migration, Black transnational solidarity, and global jazz, I frame spiritual sound as dynamic worldmaking in diaspora, where sacred authority endures precisely because it adapts. By foregrounding cosmology as structuring ontology, the paper challenges secular-modern assumptions that continue to delimit jazz studies.

This paper explores African diasporic formation through the lens of an ethnography of an African musician who chose to leave a developing career in Ghana in favor of teaching and establishing a band in the United States. Paa Kow was deeply influenced in his homeland by traditional Ghanaian music as well as the Western popular music, most notably jazz, that caught his attention from an early age. This twenty-first century diasporic formation is notable for the agency that was afforded to this musician through his decision to emigrate to the United States. He embarked on this move with the intention of disseminating his understanding of African musical influence across diasporas as well as establishing his own performance career in America. The new African diaspora evidenced in this case study is highlighted by the personal and cultural identity constructs that such an emigration allows and ultimately led to an entire ontological system that informed Paa Kow’s professional musical activities both in the United States and in his Ghanaian homeland. Considered a child prodigy in both traditional Ghanaian drumming and West African highlife, this musician found New World agency in the cultivation of original music in a genre known as Afro-Fusion that is quantifiably one of the predominant products of the transatlantic cultural feedback loop. The sudden passing of Paa Kow in late 2025 has given this research and analysis an added dimension of memorializing an incredible musician and proponent of cultural exchange with American jazz and other African-informed styles.