The House is proud to introduce Kafari to Middlebury. “Kafari” (he/him) is the alias of Cincinnati, OH born, Portland, ME based pianist and whythm bones-wielding beatmaker Ahmad Muhammad. Kafari’s music synthesizes hil love of ambient piano music, instrumentally-focused hip-hop and acoustic percussion, taking deep inspiration from pioneering jazz harpist Dorothy Ashby, beatmaking legend J Dilla, and the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who in a 2014 performance sparked Kafari’s interest in traditional music and the Irish rhythm bones=a percussion instrument popularized in America in the 1800s through Blackface Minstrelsy/ Kafari often distributes and teaches bones to his listeners at this performances, sharing pieces of their complex and fraught history and workshopping basic rhythmic techniques with his audiences over his original beats.

From July 2019 to May 2023, Kafari appeared weekly on Monday nights in Portland, Maine at The Jewel Box, where he hosted a residency performance featuring his two-keyboard piano/organ bass renditions of an expansive variety of contemporary and modern songs. Briefly before the conclusion of this longstanding residency, Kafari explained "I hope to facilitate a rejuvenating sonic sanctuary that I and others can momentarily lean on and be recharged by." 

Through numerous cohesive, mood-setting albums and intimate live performances, Kafari explores music-making as a balm for the spirit, taking the listener with him on a journey of spiritual discovery and self-healing. A self-identified "sound healer," Kafari writes in the liner notes to his most recent album Riffs and Lullabies vol. 2 "I think of being a musician as a private public journey. My intention is to care for myself and to cultivate a personal relationship with music that is expressive, healing, and that serves my needs at the time. And perhaps through that act of expression and of making a statement, I can make a connection with you.