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For many who engage in a regular meditation practice, sound baths are a key part of a balanced healing diet. The concept is beautifully simple: A guide plays a series of ringing drones using a variety of instruments (glass bowls, gongs, chimes) while attendees sit or lie back, eyes closed, listening closely and feeling, well, bathed in the sound waves. For some, the feeling is rejuvenative, while others find it helps them sink deeper into a meditative state.
Beyond the sounds from the instruments and some spoken instructions at the start, sessions are primarily experienced in silence. That’s definitely not going to be the case at the Hip-Hop Sound Bath at Portland Insight Meditation Center on Friday.
Although Ofosu Jones-Quartey, the Washington, D.C., teacher and artist who records under the name Born I, will bring along his singing bowls and kick the night off in a more traditional fashion, he will then move on to use the instruments percussively and rap along with them. Eventually, he will slip into performance mode, presenting tracks from his most recent album, Komorebi.
“I designed the record to really fit with this flow,” Jones-Quartey says. “I wanted to make hip-hop that you could play in a meditation hall and it wouldn’t be jarring. You can stay in meditation and listen to these songs.”
The history of hip-hop has long been threaded with elements of spirituality, especially in the works of groups like P.M. Dawn and Brand Nubian and artists like the late rapper Ka. But all of that music is written with head nodding instead of head bowing in mind. Dan Lief, the board chair at PIMC who was responsible for bringing Born I to Portland, acknowledges the potential disconnect, but he insists that meditation “doesn’t need to be a certain way.”
“Anything we’re doing in our life,” Lief says, “whether that’s sitting or standing, or moving or listening to a hip-hop performance, or being artistic ourselves, all of that, at the deepest sense, can be meditation. It’s something to help you be more aware and engaged and really authentic through each step of your life. So it really is kind of genius for Born I to be bringing teachings and practice that is very much off the cushion and involves the emotional shifts and resonance that comes through music.”
Jones-Quartey’s practice of meshing meditation and hip-hop feels entirely natural for an artist who was introduced to Buddhism by his mother and saw how, in his favorite martial arts films and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons, the heroes regularly sought blessings in a temple or engaged in periods of quiet contemplation. As he grew up, Jones-Quartey focused on his dual loves of music and spiritual practice. At first, he was comfortable balancing those two sides of his life, but as the years went on and he started a family, he began to spiral.
“I would have a night at the club and then come home and then have to go teach a meditation class,” Jones-Quartey says, “or I’d go play a big rave because I was doing electronic music and then leave to go straight to teach a retreat and come home and try to be a dad and a husband. I had to reset myself and recalibrate and become kind of like a different person in all these different formats.”
Add to it an undiagnosed mental health condition (OCD) and it’s little wonder that Jones-Quartey hit a wall during the pandemic and reassessed his priorities.
“I decided I was going to start over everything, and go back to what my earliest inclination in music was, which was to make hip-hop that expressed my love of Buddhism and Buddhist thought,” he says. “I wanted to talk about meditation and the idea of compassion and wisdom. These things that were helping me come out of my depression, helping me reconcile with my family, helping me to heal.”
Jones-Quartey is busier than ever these days, bouncing around North America to hold similar hip-hop sound baths, host meditation retreats, and perform live. Oh, and he’s the male voice you hear if you use the Balance app. It’s a lot, but he insists that it all works together.
“The traveling, teaching, performing, and being in community with people, and also the pain of being away from my family, and the appreciation I have for them when I am able to be with them, all of that is informing how I’m showing up,” Jones-Quartey says. “I do foresee a future where I slow down a bit, but not quite yet.”
SEE IT: Hip Hop Sound Bath with Born I at Portland Insight Meditation Center, 6536 SE Duke St., 503-519-9686, portlandinsight.org. 7–9 pm Friday, Aug. 7. $25 suggested donation.
