Obasi Akoto Steve Kirby: The School of Hard Knocks
Obasi Akoto Steve Kirby is a veteran double bass player, composer and educator, best known for his work with Elvin Jones and Jazz Machine and with piano titan Cyrus Chestnut. Obasi has an extensive performance history which includes performances and/or recordings with some of the greatest jazz artists in the world. Now based in Baltimore, he leads the Bright Moments jazz jam session every Tuesday evening at Keystone Korner.
Pianist Aaron Hall sat down with Akoto to ask about his journey into music. He began by asking “Where are you from?” The answer, it turns out, is complicated.
“I moved to St. Louis when I was two months old,” began Akoto “that’s where I grew up. By age 13 there was trouble at home and trouble at school, so I dropped out. That was a really tough period—I basically couch-cruised until I was old enough to join the army.” The army gave him food and a place to sleep, and structure. However, the army experiences led to other challenges.
“After basic training, I wound up in Ft. Hood, then later, Ft Boening, GA, for jump school. Afterwards, I was shipped to Ft. Bragg NC where I was a motor pool mechanic. I was a big guy, and my Commanding officer pegged me for a boxer. One of my first fights was with Klenk, a Harley-riding White guy who was the division heavyweight champ. As soon as we got in the ring, it was BAM! BAM! BAM!, eight times on my chin. I’m thinking ‘Oh man, I’m about to die!’ In a fog, I just kept swinging, and when I finally came to, I saw Klenk stretched out like a ‘swastika’ on the mat. That’s how I became captain of the team and 82nd HHC division support command heavyweight champ.”
Also while in the army, Akoto briefly became a born-again preacher. He ultimately decided that preaching was not his real calling, but it occurred to him that music was a “ministry.” Returning to St. Louis after leaving the army, he decided, “I’m going to try music.” He knew it would be a rough ride – “but I’m intrepid!” And he did go on that rough ride, despite having had no musical encouragement at home – his father had told him to stay as far away from music as he possibly could—“And when he saw that I wasn’t listening to him, he stopped listening to me.” Still, he recalls being a little boy in a neighbor’s basement, banging away on a dilapidated old piano for hours, not even aware of being in the dark with all the spiderwebs and mice. “I was fascinated with the sound possibilities way back then.”
Back in St. Louis after the army, Akoto began pursuing music by taking a job as a stockboy in a music store and began meeting musicians who had worked for Ike and Tina Turner and Ray Charles, guys who were down on their luck, working factory jobs and hanging out in music stores, trying out instruments, looking to form bands and play in blues clubs. One day, one of the guys took the top strings off a guitar and showed Akoto how to play a bass line—and that started his performance career.
“What that guy really wanted was somebody who wasn’t a drunk and who had a car so he could pick everybody up!” His first gig was Tubby’s Red Room in Alton IL, just outside East St. Louis. It was the kind of bar typical of the neighborhood – dirt floors and a rag for a door. Fights in the parking lot would break through a door behind the bar, roll across the stage and out a door on the other side, all while the band was playing. They played biker clubs where they were literally encaged in chicken wire—the audience would throw bottles that would stick in the chicken wire just inches from their faces!
Akoto learned on the job. Bit by bit, he nailed the basics, but when he got excited and began to rush the tempo, the drummer would reach over and shut off his amp, and he’d have to mime playing the rest of the song while the band laughed at him. “Eventually I got to play through a whole song. And the guys started asking me to play with their other bands.”
Hill observed that these experiences were the kind that give a musician a soulful quality– where you have enough adversity to give you a backbone and not enough to break you.” Akoto replied, “What I’ve been through – most people would be dead. Stuff came at me that was meant to kill.” But he stood up to it, facing every obstacle by telling himself, “You’ll kill you before you kill me.”
He cut his teeth playing blues and R&B, and then studied classical music at Webster University, but it was jazz which called to him. “Jazz is the musical embodiment of the American experiment,” Akoto says. “European song structure and theory mingled with African rhythm language and storytelling to create an exciting new approach to musical language—basically those pioneering musicians refused segregation and proved that they had more in common with one another culturally than with their European and African counterparts. Jazz is musical democracy! It is a practical and profound resistance to tribalism.”
Akoto believes that even as little boy banging away on an old piano in a dark basement, “I realized subliminally what I have come to understand consciously now: music is a language of everything and everyone in the universe. It is math, it is science, it is physical and it is spiritual, it is artful and it is functional. It is a way to connect to the universe without actually being a Yogi.”
Akoto eventually undertook more formal musical education on his way to where he is today. That story will be told in a future issue.
–By Liz Fixsen
Liz Fixsen is a jazz vocalist and pianist and jazz aficionada. She is a member of the board of the Baltimore Jazz Alliance and writes for and edits the newsletter.