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One Man, One Mission
Ask Raashan Ahmad, “What do you do?” Then take a seat.
It isn’t a brief story. Ask him why he does so many different things and he shows that each of his efforts is a strategy to capture his life mission, change through artistic expression, engaging with and promoting diverse art forms and artists, embracing the gifts of others to foster a collaborative creative community. To rally support for creatives – mostly those without resources and unknown in the majority community – Raashan draws the attention of diverse global audiences as a musician, a community organizer, a DJ, a nonprofit executive and a dad. When his audiences focus on him, he smiles and says, “But have you seen him? Have you heard her? Can you come with me into their world?”
Born in Trenton, New Jersey, Raashan grew up shuttling between his family there and Los Angeles, where his parents moved after his birth. His father was a DJ and Raashan, who loved dance, dreamed of joining the ballet – not that he ever took a class; it was decades before he saw Alvin Ailey’s dance company and discovered how a body like his could be trained. But in the meantime, hip hop happened and as a teen in the 90s, he and his friends danced. Flaring and uprocking in abstract styles.
global musician
Raashan looked inward. He had a son to raise and it wasn’t cool to be a broke rapper. He didn’t want to be that guy. The next day he got online looking for jobs. As he searched, he received an email. It was from a producer named DJ Moar, one of the international musicians he’d collaborated with. “Hey, want to come for a tour in France?” A couple months later Raashan “pulled up to a packed venue in Paris” and asked, “So, who else is performing?” DJ Moar looked at him and said, “It’s just you.” It turned out that jazz rap and Raashan’s international features had caught on. “We did a tour of maybe 14 dates and they all sold out.”
For the next ten years, the tours and albums kept coming— For What You’ve Lost in 2010, Ceremony in 2013, Above the Clouds in 2016, The Sun in 2019. Eventually he’d make 10 solo and collaborative albums that speak to everything from personal heartbreak to poverty, fatherhood, climate change and life as a Black man in America, while leaving the listener with an earworm of gratitude and hope. As Raashan traveled the globe, he was singled out by top music critics like BBC’s Gilles Peterson who chose For What You’ve Lost’s “Pain on Black” as one of his top songs in 2010 and invited Raashan to perform at his World Wide Awards 2011 in London, and Mark Thompson, who interviewed him on France24 in 2016 for an audience of 20 million.
“Raashan’s gift of verse works the friction of a bard’s heart, his concern always the message and never unnecessary flights of fancy rhyme,” wrote a critic in PopMatters of his Afrobeat-infused 2019 album, The Sun. The review went on to describe the album’s “subtropic” energy, “deliciously chunky groove [in] ... two heart-pounding numbers of djembe-drum cool,” and, in other tracks, a “a lusher marque of his soul-searching funk.”
Raashan’s music pushed boundaries in the interplay with other cultures. He’d land in a country, enter a world he’d never visited and make music with whoever was there—jazz, swing, classical, funk, soul, genre-agnostic. He was in Sarajevo performing for the troops after the U.S. bombings, had a show at the Blue Note in Tokyo in when the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami devastated the country; he performed with the national orchestra in Bogota, Colombia and the Philharmonic in Szczecin, Poland, DJ’d at the first Afropunk festival in Dakar Senegal, got thrown in jail in Australia for not having the right entertainment visa. Along the way he collaborated with industry giants like Gift of Gab of Blackalicious, soul singer Aloe Blacc, Chali 2na from Jurassic 5, and Greg Errico of Sly and the Family Stone. He also teamed up with French folk/rocker singer Keren Ann, Nigerian musician Keziah Jones, Noelle Scaggs of Fitz and the Tantrums, Stro Elliot (The Roots), Fred Wesley (The J.B’s), and electronic dance music artist The Polish Ambassador.
Stage-hopping all over the map, his life mission began to take shape.
HIP HOP ROOTS
One day the four of them went for an audition, but the casting folks said they were looking for rappers not dancers “and my friends and I are like, oh, we're rappers because we used all our gas money to get here,” Raashan says. “My older brother rapped, so I was like, I'll just steal his rhymes and rap over this breakdancing tape we brought.” They didn’t get the gig but Raashan's career in music had been launched.
By the early 2000s he was living in Oakland and had helped form The Crown City Rockers, a live hip hop band with members who came from diverse backgrounds (both musically and culturally). They put out a couple of albums and crisscrossed the country in their van, doing underground, jazzy, conscious rap in the vibe of the aughts, performing in clubs, colleges, festivals, on radio shows and everywhere in between.
It was a good life until some tragedy struck. His mom got sick and a friend was murdered by her husband. He tried to write his way out of his pain.
One of his poems turned into “Cancer”, a song about losing his mother. “I never really wrote like that before,” he says. Others followed— including one about welcoming his first son into the world—and with them, he released his first solo album in 2008, The Push. “It became like my best friend.”
He toured the U.S. for the first time as a solo artist and during that time would occasionally collaborate with groups who would e-mail him to record verses for their projects like the Jazz Liberators in France, DJ Mitsu the Beats in Japan, or Ta-ku in Australia offering a few hundred dollars for a verse. He would write and send back the songs, forget about it, and keep hitting the stage. “But then on my last tour I went home to Oakland and nobody came,” he says. “Literally nobody. I was like, okay this is a wrap.”
Arts Community Builder
The more Raashan traveled, the more he found home. “Wherever I go, I ask, ‘Who’s here? Where are the hip hop heads at – they’ve got to be here because at the foundation of Hip Hop IS community. Giving back, teaching, dancing, lifting each other up and being part of Hip Hop is being part of a global community so when I would land for a show I’d find my family. And they’d be like, Oh, can you meet with our class? Can you do a thing in a refugee camp? Can you do a writing workshop? Maybe come to a detention center or hang out with kids and do a master class on learning English through hip hop?”
Raashan quietly remembers playing in Sarajevo amid the bombed-out buildings. “I’m in the street with all these young kids. We don’t speak the same language but there we are in the rubble just freestyling together and hugging, you know? And I’m realizing that the reason I love hip hop so much is because it's accessible for folks that might have nothing else except their words and a beat, pure expression and a canvas to tell your story. So wherever I’d land in the world, like we say, ‘Game recognize game.’ We see each other and we’re connected because hip hop is universal.”
That love of bringing people together turned into a passion for promoting all kinds of diverse art forms and undiscovered talent, embracing the gifts of others to foster a collaborative creative community.
And then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Raashan’s home base had become Santa Fe, New Mexico. Grounded with the rest of the world, his travels stopped, and he set about funneling his global experience into building community in his own town. The only way he could afford a place to create new music and work out his community efforts was through a Vital Spaces program that offered studio space for only $100 rent a month. Soon after he started getting involved in the nonprofit’s other programs, hosting events. And a year later, in 2021, he was asked to step in as its executive director.
Today, he leads Vital Spaces, running the organization and creating affordable spaces for artists who need them, while constantly knitting collaborations into community. He DJs, throws dance parties, poetry readings, concerts and educational happenings with kids, elders and all in between while collaborating on a number of initiatives to bring access and resources to those that have been historically left out. He’s currently working with a team of others who are passionate about Santa Fe’s next wave of talent to build out a new community performance space, encouraging creators of all ages and tapping hidden talent. With his music appearing on TV shows like Blackish and Breaking Bad, commercials and video games, Raashan is working on his next album and trying every day, “to keep walking in joy” and being in service and right relationship with his community because you know, “that's Hip Hop.”