Bodac Cultural Group & Obeyjah at Ashkenaz

Ashkenaz Presents

Bodac Cultural Group
African Drumming & Dance (Ghana)
and
Obeyjah
Reggae music

Sunday, May 24th at 9:00
at Ashkenaz
Berkeley’s Home for World Music & Dance
1317 San Pablo Ave. @ Gilman

www.ashkenaz.com

Bodac Cultural Group was launched in Ghana by Master-drummer Benjamin Ofori, the Bodac Cultural Group is a Bay Area-based ensemble that not only performs traditional African dance and drumming, but teaches it as well. As the group explains, “Our mission is to share to various communities our knowledge, gifts, talents and joy of West African (Ghana) art and culture through our vibrant performances and education.” They also lead a community drum circle every Sunday at 4 pm in Concord’s Todos Santos Plaza.
bodaccultural.org

Obeyjah sings conscious reggae built on a life of music from deep roots and an energized dance style he calls Mississippi Delta reggae. Born into a sharecropper’s family in Mississippi, Ras Otis “Obeyjah” White discovered reggae in the ’70s through “A Jamaican brother named Rashon,” Obeyjah recalls. “Reggae won me over when he told me its guiding message, ‘People must be free and chant down the walls of Babylon.’ This music vibrated with my work life, with my coming out of the slavery of the South. When I listened to Peter Tosh, Bob Marley and Bunny Wailer singing songs like ‘Africa Must Be Free’ delivering the message that Black African people must wake up and take charge of their destinies, I realized that these songs were opening up doors that would never again close.”

Over the next two decades Obeyjah melded reggae with the blues and soul of his youth and, after moving to the Bay Area in 1995, started his own band, writing songs inspired by Rastafarian teachings and the Bible. He recorded his first CD, “Let Jah Rise,” in 1997 in the Marley family’s Tuff Gong Studio in Jamaica’s Trench Town.

http://www.obeyjah.com