Meet Jafar Graves of Chicago

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jafar Graves.

Hi Jafar , it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
Hypnotic Brass Ensemble began long before we ever thought of ourselves as a professional band. We are brothers from Chicago, sons of the late musician, composer, educator and cultural visionary Kelan Phil Cohran. Music was part of our everyday life growing up. Our father trained us not only to play instruments, but to understand discipline, history, family, culture and the responsibility that comes with being an artist.

We started playing together as young musicians in Chicago, eventually taking our horns into the streets and performing throughout the city. Those experiences became our training ground. We learned how to communicate with people from every walk of life, how to hold an audience without a stage or production, and how to develop a sound that was unmistakably our own.

In 2005, the journey expanded internationally. What started in Chicago eventually carried us around the world. Over the last two decades, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble has performed hundreds of shows across North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, South America and beyond. We’ve played everything from street corners and small clubs to major festivals and some of the world’s most respected venues.

Along the way we’ve had the opportunity to work and perform with artists including Prince, Gorillaz, Damon Albarn, Yasiin Bey, De La Soul, Erykah Badu, Tony Allen and many others. But regardless of who we’ve worked with or how large the stage became, the foundation has remained the same: seven brothers, one family, and a musical language built together over a lifetime.

Today we’re still independent, still touring, still creating and still evolving. We’re preparing our new album, PPL — People: Practicing Powerful Living, while developing new projects in music, film, technology, education and the preservation of our family’s history.

More than twenty years into our international journey, we don’t really look at HBE as simply a band anymore. It’s a family institution, a body of work and a continuation of something that began generations before us in Chicago.

We’re still writing the story.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It definitely has not been a smooth road.

Being an independent group made up of brothers comes with a unique set of challenges. We love each other, but we are seven different men with different personalities, families, responsibilities, ideas and visions. Learning how to remain brothers while also being business partners and creative partners has probably been one of our greatest lessons.

Financially, independence has also been challenging. Touring internationally with a large ensemble is expensive. Flights, hotels, transportation, production, rehearsals, recording, promotion and simply keeping a business operating can consume money very quickly. There have been times when we were playing incredible stages around the world while behind the scenes we were still figuring out how to keep the machine moving.

The music industry itself has changed dramatically during our career. We came from an era of physical records and CDs into downloads, streaming, social media and now direct-to-fan platforms. We’ve had to continuously learn how to protect our music, understand contracts, maintain ownership and find new ways to turn what we’ve built into something sustainable for our families.

We’ve also experienced loss. Our father, Kelan Phil Cohran, transitioned in 2017. He was our teacher, mentor and the foundation of so much of what we became. Continuing without him required us to understand that carrying his legacy didn’t mean standing still—it meant continuing to grow.

We’ve made mistakes. We’ve trusted people we probably shouldn’t have. We’ve learned business lessons the expensive way. We’ve disagreed with each other. We’ve had periods when things moved incredibly fast and periods when we had to rebuild.

But we’re still here.

That’s probably what we’re most proud of. Through everything, the brotherhood and the music survived. Today we’re taking everything we’ve learned and becoming much more intentional about ownership, our catalog, our history, our business and what we leave behind.

The obstacles didn’t stop the story. They taught us how to build the next chapter differently.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
Hypnotic Brass Ensemble is a family band made up of seven brothers from the South Side of Chicago. At the center of what we do is brass music, but we’ve never really accepted a single genre as a definition of our sound.

Our music carries jazz, hip-hop, funk, soul, rock, reggae, Afrobeat and the musical teachings passed down to us by our father, Kelan Phil Cohran. We grew up learning together, rehearsing together and eventually developing our sound together, so the chemistry you hear isn’t something that was assembled in a studio. It comes from a lifetime of being brothers.

One thing we’re known for is making brass instruments function like an entire band. The horns can become the rhythm, bass, harmony, melody and percussion all at once. We can move from something raw and aggressive to something deeply melodic without changing who we are.

That versatility has allowed us to collaborate across very different musical worlds—with artists including Prince, Gorillaz, Damon Albarn, Yasiin Bey, De La Soul, Erykah Badu, Tony Allen and many others—while still sounding unmistakably like Hypnotic Brass Ensemble.

We’re also proud that we’ve built this career independently. We came from playing Chicago streets and subway stations to performing on stages around the world, but we never abandoned the musical foundation we were raised with.

What we’re most proud of, though, is probably the longevity of the brotherhood itself. Seven brothers have continued creating, traveling, arguing, learning, evolving and making music together for decades. That’s not easy.

Right now we’re entering another creative chapter with our forthcoming album PPL — People: Practicing Powerful Living. The project represents where we are today: still rooted in Chicago and our father’s teachings, but continuing to experiment, collaborate and push the HBE sound forward.

What sets us apart isn’t simply that we’re a brass band.

It’s that nobody else can recreate the history between these seven musicians. You can learn the notes, but you can’t reproduce the lifetime behind them.

We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
Risk has been part of Hypnotic Brass Ensemble from the beginning.

One of the biggest risks we ever took was deciding that we were going to build this independently. There was no guarantee that seven brothers from the South Side of Chicago carrying brass instruments around the world were going to turn that into a sustainable career.

We played on the streets. We traveled when we didn’t always know what was waiting for us on the other side. We invested our own money into recordings, tours and ideas. We left situations that may have offered more immediate security when we felt they weren’t right for our family or our future. We’ve turned down opportunities when the ownership, creative control or circumstances didn’t align with what we believed HBE should be.

Sometimes those decisions worked immediately. Sometimes they cost us money. Sometimes we didn’t understand whether we had made the right decision until years later.

But risk taught us something important: there’s a difference between gambling and believing in something you’ve spent your entire life preparing for.

Our father taught us to trust our preparation. When you’ve rehearsed for years, studied your craft, developed your own sound and learned how to survive together, stepping into the unknown doesn’t feel quite as reckless. It becomes part of growth.

We’re still taking risks today. We’re investing in our own infrastructure, releasing music independently, developing our own platforms, preserving our archive, creating new businesses around HBE and finding ways to connect directly with the people who support us.

For us, the biggest risk would probably be becoming comfortable enough to stop evolving.

We’ve never wanted to simply protect what HBE was. We want to keep discovering what HBE can become.

Contact Info:

• Website: Hypnotic brass ensemble.com
• Instagram: @HypnoticBrass
• Facebook: @HypnoticBrass
• Twitter: @HypnoticBrass
• Youtube: @HypnoticBrassEnsemble
• Soundcloud: @HypnoticBrass