There is a bird that looks backward while moving forward.

Its feet point in one direction while its head turns toward what has been left behind. In its beak, it carries something precious, often represented as an egg. This is one of the visual representations of Sankofa, an Akan concept from Ghana commonly understood through a deceptively simple instruction:

Go back and get it. Not go backward. Go back. There is a difference.

Sankofa asks us to consider the possibility that progress doesn't require abandoning everything behind us. Knowledge can be recovered. Traditions can be reconsidered. Work can be resumed. Something an earlier generation learned, built, protected—or left unfinished—may still have value to the generation standing in front of it.

Throughout this story, Adinkra symbols and Ghanaian-inspired colors will appear in the borders and artwork. They aren't here simply to make the page look African. The symbols have meanings. The colors and patterns have histories. They are part of the visual language of the story, because Blueprint Sankofa isn't simply about tracing a family tree.

It's about what people went back for.

A musician survives an accident and returns to the faith of his childhood, but takes his music with him. His son carries that relationship between faith and music into another generation. A young woman spends years balancing motherhood, work and the career she still wants until the opportunity finally comes to pursue it fully. A young rapper gets close enough to the record industry to see inside it, walks away, raises a family, spends decades working regular jobs and eventually returns—not only to his music, but to songs he left unfinished and a business infrastructure he didn't understand the first time around. A little girl starts writing songs before she's old enough to know that generations before her had been doing the same thing.

And now another little girl hears music and moves. To understand how we got there, we have to do exactly what Sankofa asks. We have to go back.

Imagine the year is 1906.

Theodore Roosevelt is president. The Civil War has been over for only forty-one years. There are Americans still alive who remember slavery because they lived it. For Black Americans, emancipation has not produced equality. Jim Crow is tightening its grip across the country, enforced through law in some places and through custom, intimidation and violence in others.

This is the America Samuel M. Utterbach Sr. has to navigate.

He comes out of Virginia and eventually makes his way to Missouri, part of the larger movement of Black Americans searching for opportunities beyond what had been left for them in the South. His story eventually reaches a particular block in Kansas City: 1708 East 18th Street.

Samuel operates a barbershop there. Across the street, at 1709, family history remembers his recreation center. Those addresses matter because this wasn't simply somewhere Sam happened to rent a storefront. The streets surrounding him were becoming part of the Black commercial and cultural machinery of Kansas City. The Black press was nearby. Businesses were opening. Entertainment was growing. Musicians needed places to work, meet, eat, get dressed, get paid and find the next job.

And Sam had a barber chair in the middle of it.

A good barber in those years needed considerably more than the electric clippers we associate with a shop today. Scissors, straight razors, combs, brushes, tonics, shaving preparations and hot towels were part of the trade. The work was intimate. A customer sat down and, for the next little while, wasn't going anywhere.

That makes a barbershop something more than a place to get cleaned up. People talk. Politics gets argued. News gets passed around. Somebody knows who's hiring. Somebody knows who got fired. Somebody has heard which band is coming through town and where they're playing afterward.

Every now and then, a white customer might have come through Sam's door too. Maybe someone recommended him. Maybe his reputation traveled beyond the immediate neighborhood. We don't know enough to manufacture the reason, and there's no need to. The contradiction is interesting enough on its own: outside that door, America was investing enormous energy into deciding where Black people belonged. Inside it, Samuel Utterbach was building something of his own.

Then there was 1709—the recreation center. That part of the story still leaves questions. Was there a pool table? Cards? Food? Music? A place simply to sit and socialize? Those are possibilities, not facts, and family history doesn't become better by turning the unknown parts into fiction.

But the geography remains intriguing. A barbershop on one side. A recreation center on the other. Black businesses and the Black press nearby. Musicians moving through the district while Kansas City was developing a sound that would eventually travel around the world.

I can't give you the guest list for Sam's barber chair. I can't tell you which musicians crossed his doorway. But I know who was growing up around it. His son. And young Sam didn't become a barber. He picked up a trumpet.

Samuel M. Utterbach Jr. was born in 1899. By the time his father's businesses were established on 18th Street, young Sam was growing up inside a Kansas City that was beginning to sound different.

Music moved through theaters, dance halls, clubs and neighborhoods. Musicians came into town looking for work and left carrying somebody else's riff in their heads. Bands competed. Arrangers experimented. Players moved from one orchestra to another. Kansas City wasn't simply listening to jazz. It was helping make it.

Sam became part of it.

He played trumpet. Family history also remembers him playing mellophone. By the late 1920s, his name begins appearing in the surviving record of the Kansas City jazz scene. In 1927, Sam Utterbach is documented on trumpet with George E. Lee's Novelty Singing Orchestra, recording for Kansas City's Meritt label.

“Down Home Syncopated Blues.” “Meritt Stomp.” Put those records on today and something remarkable happens: a man born in 1899 comes back out of the speakers. That's my grandfather.

Around him were musicians whose names became part of Kansas City jazz history—George E. Lee, Thurston “Sox” Maupins, Clarence Taylor, Jesse Stone, Clint Weaver and others moving through an orchestra whose personnel changed as opportunities did. By 1929, Sam was still recording with Lee in an expanded orchestra that included another trumpeter, Harold Knox, and musicians such as Herman Walder and a young Budd Johnson, who would go on to a long career in jazz.

Sam wasn't watching that history happen. He was standing in it.

That's important to say plainly because families have a strange way of shrinking their own history. A photograph becomes Grandpa when he was young. A record becomes that old thing somebody made. A name printed on a session sheet gets put in a box. Enough time passes and somebody finally asks the obvious question:

What was he actually doing? My grandfather was playing trumpet in professional Kansas City orchestras while one of America's great musical languages was being formed around him.

There are still holes. I've spent hours studying photographs of George E. Lee's orchestras. Some come from before Sam's documented tenure; others fall around it. Musicians changed. Captions disappeared. Men who once had names became “unidentified” in archives. Family memory points toward one person, instrumentation sometimes points somewhere else, and the dates complicate both.

Eventually, I realized I was in danger of allowing the missing photograph to become more important than the man. I already have something more valuable than a face to circle. I can hear him. The records survived. So did a story he told me about why his relationship with music eventually changed.

According to the story my grandfather passed down, Sam was involved in a car accident that killed a close friend and fellow musician. Sam survived. He had been raised in a Christian home, and after the accident he went back to God.

That could have been the end of the music story. It wasn't.

Sam didn't decide that the trumpet belonged to the life he was leaving behind. He brought it with him. If music had once belonged to dance halls, recording sessions and the working life of a Kansas City musician, it could now belong to his faith.

He would be a musician for Christ. And somewhere nearby, his son Clinton was watching.

Clinton Utterbach grew into a world where faith and music didn't have to be reconciled. His father had already done the reconciling. Clinton chose gospel, and by 1967 that choice had become large enough to have a name printed on a record: Soul Goes to College.

The name on the recording was the Utterbach Concert Ensemble. It was recorded at Mary Dod Brown Chapel at Lincoln University with an ensemble of more than thirty voices. Among those singers were two young people whose names would eventually become inseparable from my own story: Cynthia Gudger and Joel Utterbach.

My mother and father. Before Mom and Dad. Before me. They're voices together on a record made under the Utterbach name, with Clinton standing at the center of that connection. That's how inheritance actually moves. Rarely in a straight line.

Sam didn't hand Clinton a trumpet and tell him to continue exactly where he stopped. Clinton took the principle and changed the form. The horn became voices. Jazz became gospel. One musician became an ensemble.

Decades later, Soul Goes to College would travel somewhere none of them could have predicted. The recording became part of Baylor University's work preserving Black gospel music. Something members of my family made when they were young survived long enough to become evidence of a larger history.

There's a symmetry in that I can't resist. Soul Goes to College eventually went back to college. Only this time, it was there to be remembered. And one of the young women singing on that record was nowhere near finished with music.

When I think about my mother's career now, I don't start with a stage. I start with the walls.

There were photographs everywhere. Headshots. Actors. Singers. Dancers. Publicists. People whose names and faces belonged to an entertainment world that seemed to be constantly passing through our house even when my mother wasn't standing on a professional stage herself.

Then there was her newsletter. She wrote. She circulated things. She stayed in touch with people and maintained relationships. Looking backward, I realize something I couldn't have understood as a kid: Cynthia never really left the business. Life simply required her to conduct much of it from somewhere else.

She came from a family of singers and was the one who wanted to pursue it professionally. But wanting something and being free to pursue it are not the same thing. There was work. There were children. There were bills and responsibilities that don't become less real because somebody has talent.

So she worked, and she sang.

Sometimes music happened after work. Sometimes it happened around work. She could be the person doing the regular job and still find herself singing in the lounge connected to the office building. The dream didn't disappear. It learned how to survive.

Years passed. My brother grew up and left. I became old enough to take care of myself. The responsibilities that had always answered not yet began loosening their grip.

Then the call came. There was an opportunity overseas. This time Cynthia didn't have to explain why she couldn't go. She could. So she went.

She wasn't a twenty-year-old running toward an untouched dream. She was a grown woman who had already worked, raised children, postponed things, maintained relationships, kept singing and kept enough of that other life alive that when the door finally opened, she still knew how to walk through it.

Sometimes we talk about pursuing a dream as though the only proof of wanting it badly enough is dropping everything else. My mother's story taught me something different. Sometimes you take care of what needs taking care of, refuse to let the other thing die while you're doing it, and when the moment finally arrives, you go.

My Uncle Fred found another route. Even during his military years, music was there; he DJed with reel-to-reel machines. His working life eventually took him into the racing industry, but years later the road curved back toward contemporary jazz and radio. He hosts a radio program in the South today. There is more to Fred's story, and I want to hear that part from Fred before I tell it for him. For now, it's enough to recognize the pattern: sometimes you come back through a different door.

My own route into music started long before The Last Kind, record labels or anything resembling a business plan.

During my time with KDAY Performing Arts, I was in a crew called NUTEE CROO. Back then I was B-Boy C, working alongside LADIE BASS, a beatboxer, singer and rapper. We were young, making things, performing and finding our place inside a Los Angeles culture where hip-hop wasn't something you studied from a distance. You lived in the middle of it.

That also meant navigating everything surrounding the music. Gang politics and neighborhood lines were real, while the conscious side of hip-hop was showing me another possibility for what the culture could say. I gravitated toward records with something on their minds, the kind of music that could hit hard without checking its intelligence at the door.

Then we met Ben Caldwell.

I became involved with his film IFresh. The relationships around it led to production opportunities and even a hair-care product deal involving Donnie's Hair Care Products. One room kept opening into another, and eventually the music attracted major-label attention.

We signed with Capitol Records.

For about a year, it looked as if the route forward might finally be visible. Then it wasn't. Capitol dropped us, and afterward I largely stopped pursuing music as a career.

I didn't stop writing. That's different. I kept writing songs, only most of them went into the closet instead of the marketplace. Then The Last Kind pulled me back out.

They put me on their album, and another project was supposed to follow. Before that could happen, the business shifted again. Stray Records lost its Warner Bros. relationship during a period when independent labels and dot-com-era companies were being cut loose. I was able to help secure the group's release. We walked away with our dignity and our music and eventually established our own label through a relationship with Sony.

There was only one problem. I didn't really know how to run a record label.

That's easy to admit now. It wasn't necessarily easy to understand then. Having access to the machinery isn't the same thing as knowing how to operate it. I could write. I could make records. I understood artists. I'd already seen pieces of production, product deals, major labels and independent labels. None of that automatically taught me publishing, rights administration, metadata, licensing, accounting, distribution strategy or how to build an organization that could survive when somebody else's deal disappeared.

So the label existed, but for years I didn't fully understand what I had.

I had already traveled, performed in different countries and written a lot of songs. One of the first songs I was able to get out featured Bernadette Cooper of Klymaxx. But as the industry changed, the kind of conscious underground hip-hop I was making increasingly moved away from the commercial center. The music didn't disappear, and neither did the people making it. We went underground.

Life kept moving.

I raised children. I spent roughly twenty years in logistics and another decade in customer-service leadership. I kept a home studio and kept writing, but family and work had first claim on my time. Some of those songs have now been sitting with me for fifteen years or more.

Then COVID stopped the normal rhythm of things.

I started podcasting. I started looking seriously at music again. This time I wasn't returning as the same B-Boy C who had walked into KDAY Performing Arts, or even the same Mr. Baaka who had maneuvered through underground hip-hop.

I came back carrying thirty years of other education.

Logistics had taught me systems. Putting something on a truck doesn't mean it reaches the right destination. There is documentation, a chain of custody, handoffs and information that has to travel with the package. Lose the information and eventually something—or somebody—doesn't get what they're supposed to receive.

Music started looking remarkably similar.

A song moves through writers, producers, artists, publishers, labels, distributors, rights organizations and streaming platforms. Metadata travels with it. Credits travel with it. Money is supposed to find its way back through that chain.

Suddenly, twenty years in logistics didn't look like twenty years spent away from music. It looked like training I hadn't realized I was receiving.

The customer-service years mattered too. I knew what it looked like when people stood outside a system trying to get a straight answer about how it worked. Independent artists do that every day. Hip-hop helped build an entire culture around doing things ourselves, but doing it yourself shouldn't mean figuring out everything by yourself.

Sitting there in my own history was something I had never properly used: the continuing Sony-related label infrastructure we had established years earlier. This time, I had an idea for what to do with it.

I didn't want another label whose only purpose was putting out my own records. I wanted to build something useful for underground hip-hop, independent artists and cultural music, particularly music connected to the wider African diaspora.

That part was personal too. I grew up with Beta Israel, Orthodox and Eritrean cultural and religious influences in my life. Africa and the diaspora weren't abstractions I discovered when they became fashionable in music. They were already part of how I understood culture, family and identity.

So the question stopped being, How do I get myself back into the music business? It became: What can I send back through the door?

That question grew into labels, media, radio, artist platforms, DJ access and conversations about the things I wish somebody had explained to me when I first started: ownership, publishing, metadata, distribution, licensing and the business underneath the music.

Eventually, I found myself in a position the young B-Boy C couldn't have imagined. I owned a media company. And somewhere along the way, I realized I had become one of the people standing near a gate. So I decided to hold it open.

Now Sankofa has become unusually literal for me. I'm going through songs I wrote fifteen years ago. Some should stay exactly where they are. Others deserve another chance. I'm rewriting lyrics, reconsidering arrangements, rebuilding production and finishing ideas with fifteen more years of life behind me.

I'm not trying to become B-Boy C again. I'm not trying to recreate the young Mr. Baaka. I'm taking what those guys left me and deciding what the man I am now can do with it.

The rapper comes with me. The producer comes. The traveler, father, logistics worker and customer-service manager come. Mr. Baaka comes. KnowledgeCreative comes. The label owner and media owner come too.

Going back doesn't erase the years between. You get to bring them with you. And maybe that's the clearest expression of Sankofa in my own life. I'm not going back because I want to live in the past. I'm going back because I left some good music there.

I asked my niece Gabby when she started making music. I expected a year, maybe an artist who influenced her or a particular song that made her want to try it herself. Instead, she basically told me there wasn't a beginning she could remember.

“OMG, I started when I was still in elementary school. I was writing songs from as young as I can remember. It was honestly something that was just in my blood. I couldn't NOT be creating music. It just happened.”

After spending all this time tracing musicians through my family, it just happened hits differently.

Gabby didn't know Sam Utterbach standing in Kansas City with a trumpet. She wasn't there when Clinton gathered voices into the Utterbach Concert Ensemble. She didn't watch my mother finally take her music overseas, and she certainly wasn't sitting beside me while I tried to figure out what to do with a record label I didn't know how to run.

None of that had to be explained before she started writing. She was in elementary school. She just wrote.

But inheritance doesn't mean repetition. What Gabby eventually found inside music belongs to her own life. As she got older, songwriting became somewhere she could put things that were harder to carry.

“I think over the years I used it as an escape,” she told me. “I've been through some issues and definitely used the music to express it and get it out of my heart and my head.”

That's where her branch becomes her own. Sam found faith and took his music with him. My mother kept music alive through years when other responsibilities had to come first. I went back and found old songs, old infrastructure and a different purpose for the business surrounding them.

Gabby found a release valve. But she doesn't want the healing to stop with her. She wants the person listening to participate in it. “I also want other people to sing their hearts out to it,” she said. “My music is for healing.” Not streams. Not followers. Not fame. Healing.

Maybe that's the part of inheritance we don't talk about enough. We tend to look for the thing that stayed the same: his grandfather played music, his mother sang, his niece writes songs.

The more interesting story is what changed. Every generation found a different use for the same impulse. And now there's another generation in the room. My granddaughter is only a year old. I'm not going to decide what she's supposed to become because her family has spent more than a century making music. But I watch her.

When music comes on, she moves.

There are jazz instrumentals she responds to immediately—music her mother played while she was carrying her. I can't tell you exactly what a one-year-old remembers from before she was born, and I don't need to turn it into something mystical to appreciate what I'm seeing. These are sounds that surrounded her at the very beginning of her life, and when some of those sounds return, she responds.

For somebody who has spent this much time looking backward, it's impossible not to wonder what I'm watching move forward.

I don't need her to become a singer. I don't need her to become a rapper, producer, DJ or musician. I want to give her access to creativity before anybody gets a chance to convince her that creativity belongs to somebody else.

Put instruments around her. Let her hear jazz, hip-hop, gospel and the sounds of the diaspora. Give her books. Let her draw. Let her make noise. Tell her the stories. Show her where the people before her came from and what they made with what they had.

Then let her decide what any of it means. Sankofa doesn't require her to repeat us.

Samuel Sr. built something on 18th Street. Sam Jr. picked up a trumpet and eventually carried his music back into his faith. Clinton turned that inheritance toward gospel. Cynthia held onto a professional dream long enough to step fully into it. Fred found his way back through radio. I went underground, built another life and eventually returned with enough experience to understand that the infrastructure around artists mattered almost as much to me as making another record. Gabby started writing before she was old enough to call any of that an inheritance.

And right now, the youngest one just dances. That's enough.

My responsibility isn't to tell her which part of the blueprint to follow. It's to make sure she knows there is one—to surround her with enough history, culture, music and possibility that when she discovers whatever is hers, she has the freedom to make something new from everything that came before.

And if life ever makes her put something precious down, I hope she knows she can go back for it.

More Sankofa.