This documentary is a virtual storytelling experience that features stories, music, dance, and poetry in a Black historical grounding

What if jazz was never just American? What if embedded in its rhythms, its improvisations, its defiance and play, was a figure far older — a West African trickster who survived the Middle Passage and found a new voice on the other side of the Atlantic?

Jazz as African Trickster: A Black Atlantic Essay Film is a virtual storytelling experience that traces the living thread between Yoruba culture and the music the world calls jazz. Through stories, live music, dance, and poetry — grounded in Black history and African cosmology — this essay film follows the Trickster: a shape-shifting, boundary-crossing figure from West African tradition whose spirit, carried across the ocean in the bodies of enslaved Africans, never disappeared. It transformed.

This is not a lecture. It is an experience — a Black Atlantic journey that asks you to listen differently, to hear jazz not only as an American art form, but as an African cultural memory in motion.

Date: Sunday, August 3, 2026
Time - 8:00 PM EST / 3:00 PM WAT
Location: Zoom

What to Expect

• Original storytelling weaving Yoruba oral tradition with jazz history
• Live music, dance, and spoken word poetry
• A scholarly yet deeply human exploration of African diaspora identity and cultural continuity
• An intimate virtual gathering connecting audiences across Africa, the Caribbean, and the America.

Who This Is For

Lovers of jazz and African music. Students and scholars of the African diaspora. Anyone who has ever felt that Black culture carries something ancient — and wants to understand what that means.