Celebrating the LIFE of Babatunde Olatunji (1927-2003)

Sunday, April 27th 2003 2pm - 6 pm: Funeral procession in Harlem The procession will begin at 2 pm at Madison and 125th and head west, ending at Unity Funeral Home on 126th and 8th Avenue.

Monday, April 28th 2003 Riverside Church 9 am - Viewing
11 am - Funeral Service
1 pm - 6pm Reception/Celebration at Grant's Tomb
(adjacent to Riverside Church)
Riverside Church is at 490 Riverside Drive (120th St. And Riverside Drive) in Manhattan

For more information:
www.drumsofpassion.org
www.babaolatunji.org

Babatunde Olatunji, who passed away on April 6th. Baba recorded many firsts after leaving Nigeria in 1950 for Morehouse College on a scholarship. He became the first African musician to chart in the US, following the release in 1959 of his Drums of Passion album on Columbia Records. Baba quickly became a fixture in music, cultural and civil rights circles, joining Martin Luther King for his 1963 March on Washington and breaking new creative ground in collaboration with jazz musicians (with John Coltrane's assistance, he would also go on to found a school to teach Harlem's youth African dance and music). Over the decades, Baba continued to wield outsize, if under-recognized, influence on American popular culture -- one of his drum students, Mickey Hart would rise to prominence as part of the Grateful Dead; in the late 1980s, with Bill Lee, bassist and a former Morehouse classmate, he would help with the music for films by Lee's son, a little known but promising filmmaker named Spike. There was perhaps no single more important bridge between the African and African-American communities than Baba. He was a true pioneer.

At 2 pm on Sunday, April 27th, there will be a funeral procession in Harlem for Babatunde Olatunji that will begin at Madison and 125th and proceed west, concluding at Unity Funeral Home on 126th and 8th Avenue.

On Monday, April 28th, at Riverside Church (490 Riverside Drive, Manhattan - near Columbia University), the viewing will start at 9 am and the funeral service will commence at 11 am. At 1pm, a reception celebrating Baba's life through music and dance is planned at Grant's Tomb (roughly adjacent to Riverside Church), involving many, like Max Roach and Bill Lee, from the music community.

I hope that you will personally attend the events to celebrate his life and myriad contributions. Please circulate the details of the events as widely as possible and encourage your friends to attend. It is a supreme irony that Baba's accomplishments were not as well known among his people as they ought to have been; particularly for those of us in the US, who have benefited unwittingly from his pioneering cultural ambassadorship, we must not lose this opportunity to pay our respects.

Details on the celebratory events as well as links to biographical info, including the informative New York Times obituary, can be accessed on www.drumsofpassion.org.

Regards,
Dayo Ogunyemi