Nas and Damian ‘Junior Gong’ Marley Live Performance on KCRW

About 150 people were in attendance when KCRW DJ Garth Trinidad hosted an intimate performance with hip-hop icon Nas and Grammy award-winning reggae artist Damian ‘Junior Gong’ Marley (Bob’s youngest son) last weekatProducer Bob Clearmountain’s studio. It was a magical night and we’re happy to share it with you as it is now available in the archives! Garth will also be playing excerpts from the performance and a short interview on air tonight at 9pm PST.

Watch/listen to it here: http://tinyurl.com/NasDamianKCRW

Nas and Damian’s new album, “Distant Relatives,” is centered around the theme of Africa. The pair told Garth this “passion project” was based on a mutual admiration of each other’s music and is a nod to their respective musical family trees. They even opened up about their famous fathers.

“As a kid, he’d be traveling from country to country coming back with foreign money, showing me. He came back with money from everywhere and I noticed everybody else had jobs, 9 to 5’s, but he was kind of like his own boss and put together his whole band and he wrote songs with them and, to me, that was like a real life for me – something I could control, I could create,” said Nas about jazz musician Olu Dara. “I could create things and then go out there in front of people and show people what I created and they could relate to it. That give and take, that relationship between the music and the people – I like that. That’s what I was digging.”

Meanwhile, Marley attributes much of his success to a “firm foundation” of family. “I was obviously very young when my father passed from the flesh. So a lot of what I know of him and learned about him is from my older brothers and sisters…And otherwise, knowing what my father stand for outside of just being a musician, you know what I mean, standing up to be a rebel, a revolutionary, at the same time a humanitarian — all of these things has had a great influence on the person I’ve become, let alone, just the musician I’ve become.”

Set List

As We Enter

Count your blessings

Dispair

Promise Land

*Interview*

Made you look

Jamrock

Encore:

Road To Zion

Africa Must Wake Up