Onyx Ashanti

Growing up playing jazz saxophone in rural Mississippi, he was drawn into rave culture in the 1990s and began performing with wind controllers, collaborating with Marshall Jefferson and Soul II Soul. He subsequently developed the beatjazz system—a wearable set of handheld controllers, a mouthpiece, and a mobile processing unit that translates gesture and breath into live electronic sound. He has continued refining the system over more than a decade, framing it through Afrofuturist theory and the patternist philosophy drawn from Octavia Butler's science fiction. He has presented the beatjazz project at TED and performed extensively across Europe, the United States, and beyond.