Navasha Daya and Fanon Hill current new Reggae band, ‘Oneeki Roots’
By Sean YoesSpecial to the AFRO
The music video for the brand new tune by Navasha Daya and her husband, Fanon Hill, “Issues of a Lady’s Coronary heart,” easily transcends the gap between the seashores of Monterey, Calif., and the slender streets close to Hollins Market in South Baltimore.
It’s a well-known endeavor for Daya and Hill, companions in love and music, who’ve traveled world wide to carry out and create numerous genres of music. And their formation of the reggae band “Oneeki Roots” is the newest chapter in that journey.
“We’re each multifaceted musically and so it’s necessary to have totally different avenues to precise these totally different genres. Oneeki Roots actually speaks to our reggae and roots reggae background,” mentioned Daya. “And Fanon is extraordinarily educated about all of the African Diaspora music, and reggae is unquestionably one in every of his fortes.”
The band’s debut single, “Issues of a Lady’s Coronary heart,” is produced, organized and written by Hill, who can be featured on bass and synthesizer. Different members of the band embody: Moziah Saleem on drums and percussion, DeAndre Shaiffer on fender rhodes (piano), Matthew Chase on guitar, and Daya offering vocals.
The story for the video was crafted by Hill and directed by Toroes Thomas, who can be featured in entrance of the digicam along with his pal Blayre Pichon, lovingly strolling the seaside in Monterey, Calif., at sundown. Daya and Hill additionally seem within the video, with Hill taking part in bass on a stage, and Daya taking part in guitar and singing at the back of an Arabbers horse-drawn cart close to historic Hollins Market.
“Oneeki Roots makes use of music to honor the values of safety, sanctuary, love and ancestral reminiscence,” mentioned Hill. “These values are important to precise via music. Reggae has at all times supplied a way of objective via difficult occasions,” he added.
Hill’s lyrics and Daya’s vocals are paying homage to one other period of music—the Nineteen Seventies, maybe, when artists like Chaka Khan, Stevie Marvel, Minnie Ripperton and Marvin Gaye fearlessly explored themes of romance, need and love.
“Love has the ability to resume and reinvent itself each season,” Hill mentioned. “‘Issues of a Lady’s Coronary heart’ pays tribute to the highly effective ways in which love has sustained households and communities.”
The tune particularly speaks to the need of a person not simply offering for a girl financially and bodily, however deliberately tending to a girl’s coronary heart.
“A lady’s coronary heart can transfer the earth, sculpt new nations, and illuminate galaxies close to and much,” Hill mentioned.
“A person who doesn’t deal with a girl’s coronary heart won’t ever be entire; he’ll eternally exist out of steadiness,” he added.
The duo, who’re additionally co-founders of the Cherry Hill Arts and Music Waterfront Competition, in addition to the Youth Resiliency Institute, have at all times been intentional about creating music as a therapeutic talisman for the communities they serve and past.
“Fanon is a really honorable man and is huge on honorable love tales. It’s necessary to place that worth system there,” Daya mentioned. “Our society now could be so ratchet; it’s so not about this divine love. I feel individuals who have been married for many years take severe dedication. And you actually have that in your self to decide to an individual since you deeply love one another…you may get via so much with that.”
“Wholesome relationships create wholesome societies…wholesome households, wholesome households,” she added.
It appears clear that the messages in Daya and Hill’s music manifest of their neighborhood work and their lives; they imagine within the energy of affection between a person and a girl.
“Should you love God and have an ethical compass and a worth system that’s the identical and you’re keen on one another deeply and respect one another and are attracted to one another, you may get via just about something,” Daya mentioned.
“Man is a protector. A person protects us bodily…to ensure we’re protected. However, we additionally want males to guard our hearts.”
