Onyx Ashanti – Memphis Flyer

For years, Ibuka, Mississippi-native Onyx Ashanti was just another street busker playing pop standards for tourists for a little spare change. But something just wasn’t right.

“The sound of the sax is beautiful, but it didn’t say everything I needed to say. I wanted to be able to speak in beats and keyboards and synthesizers and these other sounds that the saxophone couldn’t make,” Ashanti said.

Onyx Ashanti

So Ashanti invented a new instrument, what he calls the “beatjazz system.” It’s a sort of digital saxophone with mini-keyboards that fit over Ashanti’s hands and a futuristic headset that he straps around his face. The sound is a sort of a hybrid electronic sax with hints of early ’90s rave music.

Parts for his beatjazz system were printed on a 3D printer. And because beatjazz is constantly evolving, Ashanti carries a mobile 3D printer with him on his travels. He can design and print new pieces on the go.

Ashanti will be performing beatjazz and speaking at Forge on Broad on Friday, September 19th, at 7 p.m. Attendees with a USB or wifi-enabled device will be able to download a free recording of the performance.

After Ashanti developed beatjazz, he ditched the pop standards in favor of original electronic music.

“I thought I was going to go crazy if I had to play another Earth, Wind, and Fire song,” said Ashanti, who, in 2011, gave a TED Talk about his beatjazz system.

He began busking with beatjazz in Oakland and later in Berlin, where he only accepted tips in the form of Bitcoin. After he returned to the U.S., he went back to accepting traditional tips when he found that most Americans didn’t even know what Bitcoin was.

“Here, it’s put in the vein of a PayPal, rather than the truly revolutionary thing that it is. I still give people the option to tip me in Bitcoin when I busk,” Ashanti said. “But 99 percent of the people I’ve encountered since I’ve been here only vaguely know what it is. It worked much better in Berlin.”

Onyx Ashanti

When you see him perform today, it’s hard to believe that Tupelo, Mississippi native Onyx Ashanti started out as a saxophone player. But after mastering conventional jazz saxophone and making his living as a busker in Atlanta and California, in the 1990s he became fascinated by electronic music.

“I liked that it was such a varied and open new world,” Ashanti says. “I saw synergies in music that could be applied to society. Here is this music that can be so many things at the same time. It can be cheap and cheesy, or it can be really emotional and powerful in ways that we are just starting to grasp.”

Soon, Ashanti had become a laptop noodler, playing synthesized sounds with an saxophone-style breath controller over pre-programmed beats and loops he had created.

“I didn’t have to get a bass player. I could be the bass player. I could play all of the instruments. But back then, I didn’t play all the instruments at once like I do now,” he says. Eventually, he found himself drawn to Berlin, Germany, where he now resides.

“I absolutely love it,” he says of his adopted homeland. “It is a very dynamic place. I knew they were very sophisticated about their electronic music scene, so before I left, I spent about a year developing this new strain of beatjazz.”

His forays into electronica had freed him from a traditional band environment, but the experiments in Berlin led him into an entirely new direction. The music that Ashanti will bring to Memphis this week bears some resemblance to both “conventional” electronic music and the kind of mutated jazz that Miles Davis explored in the late ’60s. But to get a sense of what Ashanti is trying to do, imagine if Miles Davis had not only been an innovative trumpet player and bandleader, but had also designed and built all of his own instruments. Ashanti creates his beatjazz by using custom controllers he designed and built using a 3D printer that allow his hands, body movement, and breath to signal and manipulate a bank of computers and synthesizers in a way that was simply not possible even a few years ago.