Kota the Friend

A trumpet in Clinton Hill

Avery Marcel Joshua Jones was born on 16 October 1992 and raised in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, in a Jehovah's Witness household. The trumpet came first, picked up at eight, with keyboard, guitar and bass added later — a detail that mattered little to listeners for most of his career and matters enormously to the show he is playing in 2026. He went through Brooklyn High School of the Arts, played trumpet in middle school in Clinton Hill and high school in Prospect Heights, then on to Five Towns College, where he formed the rap trio Nappy Hair and released two mixtapes, Autumn and Nappy Hair. The stage name was lifted from the Disney film Brother Bear.

Family ties run across the borough — Brownsville and East New York as well as Clinton Hill — and the geography has stayed in the work rather than being left behind by it.

A catalogue built without a label

The solo run began with Anything. in 2018. FOTO followed in 2019 and was placed 17th among the year's hip-hop albums by Rolling Stone. EVERYTHING arrived in 2020 and reached number 162 on the Billboard 200. Then came To Kill a Sunrise with Statik Selektah in 2021, MEMO in 2022, Protea in 2023 and NO RAP ON SUNDAY in March 2025, which carried a Big Sean feature on "Michigan". Along the way he has worked with Saba, Joey Bada$$ and Bas, and used spoken interludes from Lupita Nyong'o and Lakeith Stanfield — an unusual flex for a rapper with no major label behind him.

There is no label behind him by choice. He has turned down three major deals and runs his own imprint and clothing line, FLTBYS, which has operated a shop in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania since 2020. Speaking to Rooster at its ArtFest on 12 August 2026, he put the reasoning flatly: "record deals were so bad, and I just didn't want to be messed around with." In a Recording Academy interview he framed success as compounding rather than spiking, measuring it against monthly listener growth from one million to 2.8 million, and was explicit about the point he was making by doing it himself: "Yeah, I'm Black, and I'm independent, and you can do it too."

The output rate backs the self-sufficiency up. In 2023 alone he released three albums and twelve singles, and closed the 20-city Flowers For My Friends tour on 25 November that year at Irving Plaza in Manhattan.

Just Happy To Be Here!

The current record landed on 30 July 2026 — ten tracks, 33 minutes, released through FLTBYS. Loony and Lisa Chiodo guest; production comes from Eeryskies, Powers Pleasant, ORIGAMI, Aja Grant, MAX HE, Bobby Wooten and Pat Finnerty. The framing is gratitude rather than ascent: the album sits with where he already is instead of reaching for the next rung, which is a harder subject to make interesting than ambition and the reason the record leans more on texture than on punchlines.

He described it to Rooster in August 2026 as music that "captures the version of me that accepts all the versions of me", and said of his method: "The music creates the story for me." The same conversation produced the detail that explains the 2026 live show — he had recently come back to playing guitar, as a creative outlet and as something that settles his anxiety, and had started building instrumental versions of songs he had already released.

Where things stand, autumn 2026

The Just Happy To Be Here tour has been running since the middle of August and has stayed deliberately small: Sun Rose in West Hollywood on 16 August, Mercury Lounge in New York on 25 August, Republic NOLA on 17 September, Fine Line in Minneapolis on 24 September, Garcia's in Chicago on 28 September. Not every date survived — the 11 September show at City Winery Atlanta, an $36 ticket with 6.30pm doors, was cancelled outright with no reason published.

Eight dates remain on sale. The Pacific Northwest run takes in WOW Hall in Eugene on 20 October, Nectar Lounge in Seattle on 21 October, the Airport Tavern in Tacoma on 22 October, The Pearl in Vancouver on 24 October and the Hawthorne Theatre in Portland on 26 October, with Landon Wordswell opening in Portland. After that come two nights at Blue Note Hawaii in Honolulu on 17 and 18 November, and FIVE in Jacksonville on 4 December.

Between the Hawaii stand and Jacksonville sits the first Japanese booking of his career: the Osaka festival TASOGARE IN THE PARK on 23 November, then a headline show at Daikanyama UNIT in Tokyo on 24 November, doors at 18.30 and stage at 19.30, tickets ¥7,000 plus a ¥600 drink charge, with official advance sales opening on 3 October. For an artist who has built everything in-house, a first overseas headline date at 34 is a slower arc than a signed act would have taken — and a wholly owned one.

What the show is now

The format changed this year. For the first time he is performing on acoustic guitar with a full group of musicians behind him, and he has folded in poems he writes and reads aloud. His own description, given in August 2026, is "a poetry slam mixed with an unplugged session and rap show" — three things that do not obviously belong in the same room, held together by the fact that he can actually play.

Length and shape are consistent with what has been logged this year. The Garden Amphitheatre show in Garden Grove on 17 July 2026 ran from 8.55pm to 10pm — just over an hour — across thirteen songs: "Summerhouse", "'96 Bulls", "Birdie", "Alkaline", "Strangers", "Anyway", "For Colored Boys", "NO RAP ON SUNDAY", "Pomegranate", "Sedona", "PNW" and "Hollywood" among them. The Music Hall of Williamsburg show in Brooklyn on 2 March 2026 ran twelve, opening on "NO RAP ON SUNDAY" and closing with "She" into "SHE Pt. 2". Across his logged shows the recurring anchors are "Long Beach", "'96 Bulls", "Chicago Diner", "Church" and "Colorado".

Support is assembled locally rather than carried: Juice Lord, Jandeltha Rae and JuneThaKid opened the Minneapolis date, Landon Wordswell and Chef the Chef the Bridgeport show on 10 October. Rooms are in the few-hundred-capacity bracket — Nectar Lounge, the Airport Tavern, WOW Hall — with the Blue Note Honolulu nights closer to supper-club than gig. Doors are typically an hour before stage time and dates are frequently 18-plus. The Tokyo show is billed solo, with no support listed.