BU Arts Initiative Brings Award-Winning Musician Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah for Artist Residency
Chief Adjuah blends Afro-Indigenous traditions with contemporary music that redefines musical expression through the lens of decolonization and cultural heritage.

BU Arts Initiative Brings Two-Time Edison Award-Winning Musician Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah for Three-Day Artist Residency and Performance
Chief Adjuah, a pioneering artist, blends Afro-Indigenous traditions with contemporary music that redefines musical expression through the lens of decolonization and cultural heritage.
Boston University Arts Initiative will bring Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah [formerly Christian Scott] to Boston University for an interdisciplinary artist residency that will culminate in a thrilling performance at WBUR CitySpace from February 27 to March 1, 2025, on the Charles River campus of Boston University.
Chief Adjuah, a pioneering artist, blends Afro-Indigenous traditions with contemporary music that redefines musical expression through the lens of decolonization and cultural heritage. Known for his groundbreaking approach to instrument design and sonic exploration, Adjuah will perform a dynamic set that expands beyond the existing rhythms of jazz music. The concert is free and open to the public beginning at 6pm and ending at 8pm at WBUR CitySpace on Saturday, March 1.
“Bringing Chief Adjuah to campus is an exciting opportunity that will engage BU students, staff, and faculty along with community members of the Boston area,” says Elana Harris, Managing Director of BU Arts Initiative. “We’re excited to champion interdisciplinary arts programming to bring together the brightest minds and create new ways of accessing the arts at Boston University.”
Bringing Chief Adjuah to campus is an exciting opportunity that will engage BU students, staff, and faculty along with community members of the Boston area. We’re excited to champion interdisciplinary arts programming to bring together the brightest minds and create new ways of accessing the arts at Boston University.
Additionally, there will be educational programs where BU students and staff can interact directly with Adjuah through an Indigenous identity lunch n’ learn, artist talk, class visit, and presentation on sonic architecture. The full schedule of programs can be found at bu.edu/arts/residencies.
Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah [formerly Christian Scott] is a two-time Edison Award-winning, six-time Grammy Award-nominated, Doris Duke Award in the Arts awardee. He is a sonic architect, trumpeter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer, designer of innovative technologies and musical instruments (including The Stretch Music app, Adjuah Trumpet, Siren, Sirenette, Chief Adjuah’s Bow and Chief Adjuah’s N’Goni). He is also the founder and CEO of the Stretch Music App and Recording Company. Adjuah is Chieftain and Oba of the Xodokan Nation as well as the current Grand Griot of New Orleans. He is the grandson of Louisiana luminary and legend, the late Big Chief Donald Harrison Sr., Guardians Institute founder and Grand Griot, Herreast Harrison. He is the nephew of Jazz innovator and NEA Jazz Master saxophonist-composer, Big Chief Donald Harrison Jr. Adjuah (and his twin brother Kiel) joined his grandfather’s Guardians of the Flame banner in 1989 at the age of 5.
Since 2001, Adjuah has released thirteen critically acclaimed studio recordings, four live albums, and one greatest hits collection. He is widely recognized as the progenitor of the “Stretch Music,” style. A 21st-century approach that asserts genre blindness and an ethnomusicological approach to limitless fusion that heralded NPR to hail him as “Ushering in a new era of Jazz” and JazzTimes Magazine to mark him as “Jazz’s young style God.” and “the architect of a commercially viable fusion”. He has collaborated with a number of notable artists, including Prince, Thom Yorke, McCoy Tyner, Marcus Miller, Flea, Eddie Palmieri, Robert Glasper, rappers Mos Def (Yasin Bey), Talib Kweli, as well as heralded poet and musician Saul Williams. Adjuah scores music for his identical twin brother’s, writer/director and visual artist, Kiel Adrian Scott, filmic works. Scott is a Directors Guild of America Award recipient whose works have been honored with The Peabody Award and an NAACP Image Award.
This program is co-sponsored by BU Diversity and Inclusion, BU Community and Inclusion, BU School of Music, BU Engineering Product Innovation Center (EPIC), and the BU Indigenous Working Group. This residency arrives during the launch of BU President Melissa Gilliam’s initiative “Boston University Arts” which is focused on bringing the arts front and center across the campuses, while also ensuring that BU is a leader in and a destination for the arts.
Founded in 1839, Boston University is an internationally recognized institution of higher education and research. With more than 34,000 students, it is the fourth-largest independent university in the United States. BU consists of 17 schools and colleges, along with a number of multi-disciplinary centers and institutes integral to the University’s research and teaching mission. In 2012, BU joined the Association of American Universities (AAU), a consortium of 62 leading research universities in the United States and Canada. Learn more at bu.edu.
Established in 1954, Boston University College of Fine Arts (CFA) is a community of artist-scholars and scholar-artists who are passionate about the fine and performing arts, committed to diversity and inclusion, and determined to improve the lives of others through art. With programs in Music, Theatre, and Visual Arts, CFA prepares students for a meaningful creative life by developing their intellectual capacity to create art, shift perspective, and think broadly. CFA offers a wide array of undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs, as well as a range of online degrees and certificates. Learn more at bu.edu/cfa.
Founded in 1872, the School of Music combines the intimacy and intensity of traditional conservatory-style training with a broad liberal arts education at the undergraduate level, and elective coursework at the graduate level. The school offers degrees in performance, conducting, composition and theory, musicology, music education, and historical performance, as well as Artist and Performance diplomas and a certificate program in its Opera Institute.
The Boston University Arts Initiative (BUAI), part of Boston University College of Fine Arts, was created in the fall of 2012. BUAI programming reflects the interdisciplinary, global, and urban nature of Boston University. It ensures that the arts are fundamental to the student experience by developing and supporting university-wide programs to advance the role of the arts at BU through building community; supporting interdisciplinary arts teaching, learning, and research; and highlighting diverse artists and modes of artistry.
Boston University Diversity & Inclusion works closely with all of the University’s 17 schools and colleges to help create a positive and welcoming campus climate, and ensure that we are supporting world-class students, staff, and faculty whose experiences and viewpoints embolden the academic endeavor.
BU Community & Inclusion is a network of non-academic units and initiatives across the University whose vision and work directly implement two of the 2030 Strategic Plan initiatives, “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” and “Community, Big yet Small.” Our collective mission is to build community and create spaces that encourage new connections; create a welcoming campus culture for all.
EPIC is a space for all members of the BU community to learn the skills necessary to design and build their own ideas, and gain invaluable hands-on experience in design, prototyping, and small-scale manufacturing. EPIC is an integral part of the engineering educational process. Core freshman through senior classes all uses EPIC to enable students to see how their ideas can become reality.The center is open to all BU students, regardless of major, to receive valuable training on the entire range of relevant skill sets that are vital to product innovation—design, prototyping, material selection, and manufacturing. The students have access to a wide range of industrial tools and equipment and are helped to learn by our staff of manufacturing and design experts.
The Indigenous Studies Working Group (ISWG) at Boston University was founded in Fall 2023 to build community among students, scholars, and members of the BU community interested in the interdisciplinary field of Native American and Indigenous Studies. Our goal is to showcase and discuss scholarship in Indigenous Studies through seminars, events, reading groups, film screenings, informal gatherings over meals, and public lectures and events.