About
Modern African Griot. Rapper, spoken word artist, cultural programmer, actor and model. Twenty years of building memory into sound, stage, and screen.
Building a living archive, verse by verse.
Ian Jazzi is a rapper, spoken word artist, cultural programmer, actor/model, and modern African griot based in Accra, Ghana. Twenty years across music, theatre, film, advertising, and civic advocacy, with a dual academic background in Economics and Theatre Arts from the University of Ghana, Legon.
The music runs under the framework of "Architecture Rap" — treating every album as a structure built to hold something worth keeping — and has grown into eleven studio albums conceived and eight released. Alongside the catalogue sits a body of stage and screen work, and a run of national advertising campaigns; the full list lives on the Work page.
Ian is the founder of the Griot Architecture Institute (GAI) and the creator of the COS Africa framework, the intellectual spine behind GAI's programmes. He is also the founder and Creative Director of The Unwind Agency, a modeling and advertising agency established in 2008 with campaign work for Ecobank, Tigo, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and Stanbic Bank.
The civic side of the work includes BBG4K (BoredBoardGames4Kids), a youth literacy initiative he founded, and over a decade as a performer and creative facilitator with Alliance Française Accra, including training regional spoken-word champions on behalf of the French Embassy.
"Every record is a structure — something built to hold what deserves to be remembered." Ian Jazzi
Griot Architecture Institute
GAI is the institutional home for the frameworks behind Ian Jazzi's work — encoding, preserving, and transmitting African cultural knowledge through programmes, curriculum, and creative practice.
GAI carries its own identity, separate from the personal artist brand.
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