Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah

A family apprenticeship, then a horn rebuilt to order

Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah was born Christian Andre Scott in New Orleans on 31 March 1983, one of identical twins; his brother Kiel Adrian Scott went into film as a writer-director. The training was a domestic arrangement. His grandfather was Big Chief Donald Harrison Sr of the Mardi Gras Indian tradition, and his uncle, the saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr, started teaching him jazz when he was twelve. He went through the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, leaving in 2001, then took a scholarship to Berklee, finishing a professional music degree with a film-scoring concentration in 2004.

The instruments did not stay standard for long. Working with the Dutch makers Adams, he had brass built to his own drawings: a trumpet with the bell tilted 22 degrees, a reverse flugelhorn, and later two horns he calls the Siren and the Sirenette. He names his techniques as deliberately as his hardware — the 'forecasting cell', arrived at around 2009, which sounds a harmonic resolution before the music gets there, and a 'whisper technique' that puts breath ahead of vibration.

Stretch Music, and the records that argued for it

The umbrella term for the whole project is Stretch Music, and he defines it against the word jazz rather than inside it: a genre-blind method that pulls New Orleans rhythm, hip-hop and trap production, post-bop harmony and West African percussion into a single frame. His own bio page states the position without hedging — that jazz as a definition separates and excludes, and that freedom is what actually defines it.

The album Stretch Music came out in 2015, packaged with an interactive player app built for practice and study. Three records followed in 2017 as The Centennial Trilogy: Ruler Rebel, Diaspora and Emancipation Procrastination. Ancestral Recall, made with the poet Saul Williams, landed in 2019, and Axiom, recorded live at the Blue Note in New York, in 2020. His own count is twelve studio albums, three live recordings and a greatest-hits set since 2002; the 2026 presenter listings put the total higher. The shelf behind it holds two Edison Awards, six Grammy nominations by the figure used in his current billing, including in Best Contemporary Instrumental Album and Best Improvised Jazz Solo, JazzFM's Innovator of the Year in 2016 and the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in 2020.

The work outside his own name tells a similar story about where he sits. He played with Atoms for Peace in 2010, co-founded R+R=NOW with Robert Glasper in 2017, recorded with Prince, and turned up on screen in Bill & Ted Face the Music and The Photograph.

The name, the chieftainship and the bow

He began billing himself Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah in 2012, taking the names of two ancient cities in what is now Ghana, and made the change legal in 2023 as Xian aTunde Adjuah. The same year brought the titles that now appear in his programme notes: Chieftain of the Xodokan Nation of Maroons, and Grand Griot of New Orleans. A Doris Duke Artist Award, worth $550,000, arrived in 2023 as well.

The instrument that changed the shape of his concerts was first shown in public in 2022. The Adjuah Bow is a double-sided electric harp that takes the kamele n'goni, the donso n'goni and the kora and crosses them with an electric guitar. Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning, released on Ropeadope in 2023, was the first record made with it and the first under the reclaimed name. On that album, and in performance since, he sings and plays the harp for long stretches while the trumpet waits in its stand.

Where the catalogue stands

The most recent release is the Stretch Music 10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition, out on Ropeadope on 19 September 2025. It runs to fourteen tracks — the 2015 album plus new material — with sessions logged in Boston in January 2015, New Orleans in December 2024 and Los Angeles in April 2025. The new lead track is 'Back 2 Back'. Elena Pinderhughes, Robert Glasper, Matthew Stevens, Braxton Cook and Logan Richardson appear across the record. The coloured double vinyl was cut in a run of 650 copies and began shipping on 15 February 2026.

2026: Miles at a hundred, then a festival at home

Much of this year's visible work has been built around other people's anniversaries and other people's orchestras. On 11 August 2026 he played the Main Hall of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam with the Jazz Orchestra of the Concertgebouw under Vellu Halkosalmi — an amplified programme from 8pm to 9.30pm with no interval, marking the centenary of Miles Davis's birth. The same material went outdoors at the Openluchttheater in Valkenburg on 14 August. Before that he had played the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal at the Théâtre Jean-Duceppe on 1 July, with club runs at the Blue Note in Los Angeles on 7 and 8 March and the Blue Note in New York from 4 to 7 June.

The autumn is denser and closer to home. He is at the New Orleans Jazz Market from 29 October as part of Donald Harrison's Quantum Leap Music Festival: a Miles and Coltrane tribute alongside his uncle on the 29th, Hornucopia II on the 30th, and a further date on 1 November. Five nights at the Blue Note in New York follow from 25 to 29 November, two sets each evening at 8pm and 10.30pm. On 4 December he makes his Houston debut at the Cullen Theater in the Wortham Theater Center, presented by DACAMERA inside a seven-concert season, and plays Stable Hall in San Antonio the night after.

What the show actually does

MetalJazz's account of the Blue Note Los Angeles date on 8 March 2026 describes a concert in two clearly separated halves. The first is built on the self-designed harp, tuned to African scales, with his own singing over it; the reviewer heard a groove-trance feel closer to 1970s soul and R&B than to a jazz set. The second half is trumpet-led stretch music, loose structures owing something to Ornette Coleman's harmolodics, and on the horn the same reviewer had him ripping through bop lines with precision. The band that night was Kris Funn on bass, John Davis on drums, Andrew Renfroe on guitar and Elena Pinderhughes on flute, with a tenor saxophonist. The closer was 'West of the West', which he framed as being about the racism he met after moving to Los Angeles.

Setlist.fm's tally of his most-played pieces matches that shape: 'West of the West' leads, followed by 'The Last Chieftain', 'Diaspora', 'The Eye of the Hurricane' and 'I Own the Night'. The club dates carry no support act — the two-sets-a-night format does the work instead — while the theatre and orchestra bookings are single programmes under his own name.