Two-time Edison Award-winning and Grammy-nominated Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah—trumpeter, composer, producer, and designer of innovative instruments and interactive media—released in 2017 three albums to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the very first jazz recordings. Collectively titled The Centennial Trilogy, the series is at its core a sobering re-evaluation of the social and political realities of the world through sound. It speaks to a litany of issues that continue to plague our collective experiences: slavery in America via the prison–industrial complex, food insecurity, xenophobia, immigration, climate change, sexual orientation, gender equality, fascism, and the return of the demagogue.

The first release in the trilogy, Ruler Rebel, vividly depicts Adjuah’s new vision and sound, revealing him to the listener in a way never heard before by way of a completely new production methodology that stretches trap music with West African and New Orleanian Afro-Native American styles.

Ruler Rebel was released in March 2017 after the first annual Stretch Music Festival at Harlem Stage. Created by Adjuah, the Stretch Music Festival explores the boundaries of stretch, jazz, trap, and alternative rock with some of music’s most poised and fiery rising stars.

Diaspora stretches everything from the rhythms of the New Orleans and the Caribbean to the soundscapes and textures of Nordic Pop, Alt Rock, Japanese Traditional Music, Afro beat and beyond.

Heralded by JazzTimes magazine as “jazz’s young style God” and “the architect of a new commercially viable fusion,” Adjuah is the progenitor of Stretch Music, a genre-blind musical form that stretches the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic conventions of jazz to encompass many musical forms, languages, thought processes, and cultures. In 2016, he won JazzFM’s Innovation of the Year honor along with the DownBeat Critics Poll Rising Star Composer to go along with his many wins for Rising Star Trumpet.