Kimati Dinizulu - Life and Career

Life and Career

Nana Kimati Dinizulu has been playing drums and percussion instruments since his early childhood. For many generations, the Dinizulu clan has been active in music and performance. Nana Dinizulu’s father, the late Nana Opare Dinizulu was a world-respected African drummer. His mother, Alice Dinizulu, was a key dancer for Asadata Dafora’s Dance Company which was the first dance company to put African dance and music on Broadway in the United States from the 1930s to the 1950s.

To gain a deeper knowledge of African traditions, as a young man, Dinizulu, traveled to Ghana where he lived and learned for two years and then he moved back to the United States. Since then, he has made over 30 trips to Africa, where he now resides part of the year. While in Ghana, he studied with expert drummers, Kofi Nabenadi, C. K. Ganyo, and Sully Emmorro. He also learned from elders of the Fanti people, master drummers whose tutelage proved invaluable in his development as a leading practitioner of African drumming. A major influence on his musical growth and creative energies was his involvement with the Fanti’s Asafo (warrior) music, a tradition dating back many centuries.

Apart from this, Mr. Dinizulu studied extensively with Haitian master drummers, Louis Celestine, Frisner Augustin, and Alphonse Cimber. He also studied various forms of traditional music from Brazil with the late Loramil Machado. Additionally, Mr. Dinizulu has studied African and African-American hand drumming with his father, Baba Chief Bey (James Hawthorne Bey), Baba Kwame Ishangi, and many others. In addition, e has conducted extensive research with the Maroons of Jamaica, the Ewe of Togo, the Orisha worshippers of Trinidad and Tobago, Rada ritual musicians in Haiti and the Ring Shouters of the Georgia Sea Islands.

Mr. Dinizulu has worked with several domestic and international cultural organizations, including UNESCO. UNESCO declared 2004 to be the International Year to Commemorate the Struggle against Slavery and its Abolition by the United Nations General Assembly. Mr. Dinizulu performed and lectured on endangered African-American instruments as a part of a UNESCO conference of scholars from around the world gathered at Tulane University.

Furthermore, Mr. Kimati Dinizulu has worked with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, an organization for documenting, preserving, interpreting, and celebrating the culture and history of black people worldwide. He has performed music and conducted traditional African rituals for the Schomburg Center. He performed at the 75th anniversary celebrations of the Schomburg Center which included pouring libation for the grand opening of the “Lest We Forget: The Triumph over Slavery Exhibit”.

Kimati Dinizulu has also performed libation and drumming at “A Harlem Tribute to the Freedom Schooner Amistad”. He performed the drum rituals to help bring the Amistad into port in Harlem, New York.

Besides this, Mr. Dinizulu was a participant in the African-American delegation at the First Annual Emancipation Day Celebration in Ghana, Africa in 1998 which was sponsored by the government of Ghana. The African-American delegation was responsible for the re-interment of one escaped slave, Samuel Carson with a full state funeral. Emancipation Day is a remembrance of the abolition of Chattel Slavery.

The learning of drumming and African culture is a lifetime process for Mr. Dinizulu. His encyclopedic knowledge of drums, percussion, and the art of drumming comes from his worldwide travels and studies of the music of other cultures as well as his heartfelt love for music and learning. He has assembled a group of musicians from around the world, called the Kotoko Society with whom he composes and performs regularly.