Theo Croker
Theo Croker is a storyteller who speaks through his trumpet. This Grammy award-nominated artist, composer, producer, thought leader, and influencer projects his voice through music. After seven years of sojourn in Shanghai, Croker crash-landed with a simmering original sound on the 2014 Dee Dee Bridgewater-assisted album Afro Physicist. Following the success of Escape Velocity in 2016, he ascended to a new stratosphere with Star People Nation in 2019. The record garnered a nomination in the category of Best Contemporary Instrumental Album at the 62nd Grammy awards. It attracted widespread acclaim from the critics, such as Stereogum. Paste and The New York Times who called it “an album that gallivants from swirling, left-field hip-hop beats to propellant swing to entrancing passages of African percussion”.
Along the way, he also lent his sound to platinum-selling albums by everyone from J. Cole to Ari Lennox while touring his band across the globe many times over. In 2020, he hunkered down at his childhood home in the midst of the global pandemic and wrote his sixth full-length album, BLK2LIFE || A FUTURE PAST.
“This record was composed like a film score,” explains Croker regarding the album. “I want the listener to feel like they are in the movie.” Like a contemporary oratory, the 13 themes that make up the album, are inspired by the forgotten hero’s journey towards self-actualization within the universal origins of blackness. It’s a sonic celebration of Afro-origin, and ultimately a reclamation of the culture, for the culture.
“Our hero receives a transmission (sent from his ancestors while in meditation), that sets him on a mission to raise the planet’s vibrations through music that defies the confines of a ‘genre’ and frees the culture from the imminent threat of commercial gentrification” says Theo. “BLK2LIFE || A FUTURE PAST is meant to be a deeply impactful, personal experience for the listener, one that you can also dance to – it is Black music after all.”
Line-Up:
Theo Croker: trumpet, vocals, samples, efex
Mike King: keyboards
Eric Wheeler: bass (acoustc & electric)
Shekwaga Ode: drums (acoustc & electric)
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