Elder’s role reflects a cross-disciplinary approach that combines product development with editorial leadership and community building. By uniting those areas, he will help ensure that NAME BRAND RECORDS’ digital presence is not only functional, but alive with context, identity, and participation.

An Evolution in Sound, Community, and Consciousness There are moments in the continuum of Black music when a band is not just a band it is a vessel. A laboratory. A mirror. And sometimes, a teacher This is one of those moments. San Francisco: Conception of a Sound (1971) The group Juju was born in San Francisco in 1971 - not out of industry ambition, but out of necessity. The necessity to create a sound that reflected a deeper cultural and spiritual alignment. This was not simply jazz. This...

My journey into African music did not begin in a classroom. It did not begin with ethnomusicology, anthropology, or a university lecture hall filled with neatly outlined histories and assigned listening lists. It began on the bandstand, in 1970. That’s where I met Ndikho Xaba - a Zulu man from South Africa, living in exile, carrying his country in his spirit and his struggle in his sound. I joined his band, Ndikho and the Natives, and stepped into an education that no institution could have...