Biography
In 1993, decades after his work with Sun Ra and long after he'd carved out a revered solo niche for himself, Kelan Phil Cohran together with the Legacy ensemble: Oscar Brown III, Aquilla Sadalla, Josefe Marie Verna and his son Malik Cohran, set out to put together a kaleidoscopic soundtrack commissioned by Chicago's Adler Planetarium to score a program they called African Skies, inspired by decades of research into devotional music, African history and archeo-astronomy. The result is a harp-led weightless jazz masterpiece and undoubtedly Cohran’s most ethereal suite, lifted to the heavens by his virtuosic performances on harp, trumpet, congas, violin uke, guitar, flute and his "space harp" the frankinphone - an amplified lamellophone that Cohran designed after studying African instruments like the kalimba.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.