By Noel Nocciolo What do you get when you take hip-hop and a Ghana-born, Oprah-endorsed Harvard
graduate? You end up with thoughtful, bright hip-hop; certainly not the stuff of
“bitches and hoes.”
Soulfège is lead by Derrick Ashong, a.k.a. DNA, who hosts “The Derrick Ashong Experience”
on Oprah radio, found on Sirius 195/XM 156. His music is wholesome and fun; a breathe of
fresh air in an industry saturated with the quest for the next big thing. This is not poised to
be buzzed about one day and forgotten the next. Soulfège is simply an alternative to the
“all-style-and-no-substance” found in some modern hip-hop. I’d recommend this to those
who enjoy the genre but feel guilt at misogyny.
With hip-hop at the core, the band also takes on the flavors of funk, reggae and a kind of
world beat that you know isn’t being made by a bunch of suburban white kids. It is party
music, but the kind of party music that, when listening to the lyrics in between your party-
time, you start feeling guilty that you aren’t doing more to advance mankind. [Read More]
August 30, 2010 I’m hardly through my first cup of coffee on a sticky morning in late-July when I get a call from
Derrick Ashong, the front man of the burgeoning six-piece band Soulfege and the host of
|Oprah Radio’s The Derrick Ashong Experience. It’s a bleary 7AM in Los Angeles where Derrick
is calling from but he’s already been up for a few hours to get some work done before heading
into the studio to work on Soulfege’s 3rd full length album, the follow up to 2008’s Take Back
the Mic. Clearly, the man has a lot on his plate, yet he’s taken the time out to talk to me, an
amateur journalist still going through undergrad, and so, right away, I can tell there’s something
special about Derrick. There’s something special, too, about his band. With members hailing from Seattle to Ghana
to Portland, Soulfege combines light reggae guitar melodies with driving rock chords and heavy
hip-hop beats, along with more traditional African music. For those who cringe when they hear
about a new “fusion” band, I feel you – but Soulfege, in terms of both sound and message, is
deep into a style that is unique and part of a larger, emerging trend around the world... [read more]
by Craig Lambert In their version of the classic West African song, “Sweet Mother,” the band Soulfège sings in
English, Jamaican patois, and the African languages Ga and Twi in one verse. “There are very
few people around who will understand everything said in that verse,” says Soulfège co-
founder Derrick N. “DNA” Ashong ’97. “But everyone can kind of feel the joy and vibe and
the love in it.” Indeed, last January the band (www.soulfege.com) played in Laramie,
Wyoming—about as far from Ashong’s Ghanaian roots as you can get. Yet “the kids were
bobbing their heads and jumping up and down,” Ashong recalls. “Paintings and clocks were
literally falling off the walls because everyone was jumping up and down so hard that the walls
were shaking.” If this is an era of globalized culture, world music, and the erosion of international barriers, then
Ashong and Soulfège (a play on solfège, the popular method of teaching sight-singing), may
be perfectly in tune with the times... [READ MORE] |
|
Get your copy NOW!!! The latest release from critically-acclaimed Afropolitan Fusion Sensation - Soulfège
"Take Back the Mic" - Available now!Here are some reviews: "Here are musicians, poised with a positive vibe and with lyrics so uplifting that you actually believe, if only for one night, that slowly, out of a species-wide weariness for discord and conflict, a new world mood may emerge from the street and the Net, somehow defying the odds—a spirit of promise and hope and harmony, a spirit that denies dissonance. Soulfege lets us dream such sweet dreams, in vibrant colors." - VanityFair.com “Soulfege make politics sexy. They make you want to be part of something that is positive, sensual and wholesome. Check out their fusion of all the groovy things in life. hese cats have good taste!” - Dave Stewart (Multi-platinum pop legend, co-founder Eurythmics)
“This stuff is "a real upper" it evokes summer days gone by with positive vibes to come! Go spend your money on it! It is worth it!- Score 9.5 out of 10.” - Charles Foskett (Producer, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello)
|
| |  | | Take Back the Mic
Soulfege
| | | | | | | |
| | Take Back the Mic
Soulfege
| |  |
| | Take Back the Mic
Soulfege
| |  |
Album also available on many other online outlets including: Napster, Rhapsody, eMusic, LaLa and more... |
|
 |
|---|
April 29, 2008 
Call them Afropolitan. Call their sound ReggHopFunk Fusion, by way of Ghana and Harvard Yard. Call this team of beaming musicians (with not one, but three soaring vocalists) P-Funk progeny, channeling Manu Dibango and Sly Stone and Rage Against the Machine. Whatever you want to dub them, this weekend’s performance by Soulfege at Manhattan’s Knitting Factory was a rare treat in these way-ironic days: a full-on groove group powering out songs with upbeat melodies to match their message—one of global community and connectedness, conveyed with such energy, assuredness, and good will that they transcended the ironic, transformed the conversation, and transported the listener beyond the otherwise dismal and downbeat world around them. Soulfege (a term for the diatonic “do-re-mi” music scale) is led by Derrick Ashong, a West African-raised, Harvard-educated, L.A.-based singer-songwriter (his moniker: D.N.A.), actor (Steven Spielberg’s Amistad), lecturer, and political activist. (In February, I blogged about his viral YouTube video, on his passion for Barak Obama.) On Saturday, with his fellow choirmates from his college days, Jonathan Gramling and Keely Nicole Johnson, Ashong and company echoed and built on one another’s buoyancy, backed by thick, sick basslines and drum-and-bongo beats. (They just won Billboard’s Best Hip Hop Songwriting contest.) http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2008/04/afropolitan-p-f.html |
|
|
|
Soulfége: Do Harvard and Oprah Know Solid Hip-Hop?
It’s Afropolitan: Derrick Ashong’s Soulfege
