Nkeiru Okoye was born in New York City in 1972 to a Nigerian father and an African-American mother. She graduated from Oberlin in 1993, which is the same year I graduated Wartburg College. Okoye is almost entirely contemporary with me. I am less than a year older than she is. According to the bio on her website, Okoye has had an already-amazing career as a composer…and I only heard a piece of hers for the first time yesterday.
Sigh. There is so much wonderful music out there to hear! Would that I could do just that, and nothing else. Well, writing too. And photography. And….
I found this piece almost entirely accidentally on YouTube, and I listened to it over my lunch break yesterday. It’s one of the most refreshing things I’ve ever heard, containing a mixture of styles and genres and techniques that blend together into something wonderfully old and new. Looking up Okoye’s work and trying to learn what her compositional style is, I found this profile which includes this:
With an output containing a plethora of orchestral, band, choral, and chamber works as well as operas composed over a career spanning nearly 30 years, Dr. Okoye has written across nearly every musical medium. Her genre-bending compositions draw from Classical, Gospel, Folk, Jazz, R&B, and African diasporic music, and are often infused with African American improvisatory techniques.
I don’t know how much of this piece is improvisatory, but you can certainly hear all of those influences in this piece’s pages. I thought this was wonderful, and I hope you will, too.
Here is Black Bottom by Nkieru Okoye.
