The Occidental Brothers’ blend of high-energy soukous, rootsy Ghananian Highlife and African Jazz conjures sounds of the golden age of the African guitar band and has made them favorites of of music critics and devotees of the style, but it’s a sound that has also seduced an audience of listeners as diverse as the members of this multi-racial band. The group is led by guitarist Nathaniel Braddock, an instructor at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music and twice profiled in Guitar Player Magazine. Braddock is joined by jazz phenom Greg Ward (of the Whistler Records band blink.) on alto, Joshua Ramos on bass and Makaya McCraven on drums. After playing the Pitchfork festival in 2008 and GlobalFest in January 2009, the OBDBI experienced a meteoric rise–graduating from Chicago street festivals to the stages of Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Montreal and Vancouver Jazz Festivals in the course of a year.