PHEEROAN AKLAFF was born in Detroit, Michigan 1955, and was named Paul, in honor of Paul Robeson. His parents enjoyed dancing to the big bands of Lunceford, Basie, Eckstein, and Ellington. Despite coming from a musical family, his mother, related to the Wings Over Jordan Choir, his father, a Jazz fan and audiophile, and his elder brother, a classical pianist, he favored sports over music until he discovered Alice Coltrane’s music in his late teens. Primarily a self-taught musician, he excelled under the tutelage of Travis Biggs and Sylvia Moy of the Motown hierarchy. Leaving Eastern Michigan University early proved fruitful when moving to New Haven, Connecticut, and commandeering a band named DejaVu with Dwight Andrews. Before heading to New York, akLaff conversed with academic elites that included Toni Nathaniel Harp, Audrey Akua Ficklin Ade, Theotis Holland, and Robert Ferris Thompson, who
facilitated a key mentoring moment in 1975 by introducing him to Rashied Ali. After his tenure with John and Alice Coltrane, the drummer and eventual entrepreneur opened Ali’s Alley, the infamous club he established in Soho after his tenure with John and Alice Coltrane, which effused the gritty bohemia of New York and accommodated the new musical notation systems akLaff was to expand performing with Wadada Leo Smith and Oliver Lake.
Two years later came his first European tour with Oliver Lake, and two years after that, several tours and recordings with James Newton, Anthony Davis, Amina Claudine Myers, Henry Threadgill, and several Northeastern creatives. The following years would introduce decades of artistic immersions in Africa and Asia.
U.S. State Department tours of several African nations and India, thrity years of working in Japan and Korea with the Yosuke Yamashita New York Trio with elder bassist Cecil McBee, working closely with legendary artist Liu Sola in China, and his recent pilgrimage to New Zealand and Australia, has cured an appreciation for the global awareness that akLaff has gained and has oftrn shared with university students worldwide.
Global Performance + Sound Lab 