AJA & fuZION

AJA is a musician and performance poet. Barbadian-born and New York-based, he fuses the two art forms, blending jazz with various Caribbean rhythms to accompany his poems.

This has created a unique sound and AJA & fuZION (his band) have taken performance poetry to the international World Music and Jazz stages. He has performed at major music festivals in Belgium, Canada, England, Germany, Holland, South Africa and Switzerland. AJA currently performs with a quartet called fuZION – drums, bass, keyboards and back-vocals.
His works have also been internationally published and he has appeared as a soloist at international literary festivals in Canada, Columbia, Cuba, Dominica, Nicaragua, Holland, South Africa and Trinidad & Tobago.
A feature of AJA is his intensity on stage. The music is captivating; the poems are very creative; and the lyrics engaging - his performances have been described as “edutainment”.
From his emergence in the 1990s, AJA has focused on world issues such as war, hunger and the abuse of women and children. In 2003 he decided to do more than just perform his works and transformed his poems from the stage and the page into practical initiatives. As a result, he has organized humanitarian projects in Barbados and other Caribbean territories as well as in Sierra Leone, West Africa.

In light of his work as an artiste and humanitarian, AJA became in 2003 a United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Spokesperson on Peace and Poverty Eradication for Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean. He is also an UNWomen Partner for Peace for the Caribbean.