ALBUM AVAILABLE NOW

1. The Beginning of The End 

2. Spiral

3. Lost

4. In The Wild

5. Transitions

6. Love & War

7. Wonderland

8. Winter Nostalgia 

9. Renegades, Part 1 

10.Renegades, Part 2

Hope Udobi Nwachukwu - Piano/keyboards

Charles Wilson- Drums

Mikel Combs - Bass (Tracks 1, 3, 5, 7, 8)

Mike Saunders- Bass (Tracks 2, 4)

Aaron Hardin - Organ (1,3, 4, 5, 8)

Jonathan Epley - Guitar (3, 7, 9)

Aaron Dugan - Guitar (1, 5, 6, 8, 10)

Mark Sundermeyer - Guitar (6)

Theljon Allen - Trumpet (1, 4, 5)

Elijah Easton - Tenor Sax (1, 5, 6, 8)

Leroy “Boogie” Greer - Percussion (4, 5, 8)

Zack Dawson - Executive Producer

Jimmy “The Senator” Douglass - Mixing (1, 3, 4, 8)

Punching Dolphins- Mastering

Recorded at Beyond Studios (DC/NY)

ABOUT UDOBI

Hope Udobi Nwachukwu—known professionally as UDOBI—is a Washington, D.C.–born pianist, composer, producer, and songwriter whose sound draws from contemporary jazz, classical tradition, soul, hip-hop, and cinematic music. Raised between the United States and Nigeria, he began exploring jazz at nine and developed a distinctive musical voice grounded in improvisation, rhythmic depth, and refined composition.

His performance and collaboration credits include Dave Chappelle, Mary J. Blige, Jeff “Tain” Watts, Bobby Watson, Delfeayo Marsalis, Naturally 7, Angie Stone, Raheem DeVaughn, Common, GoldLink, Yaya Bey, and Isaiah Collier. He has toured across North America, South America, Asia, the Middle East, and Australia, appearing at the Montreal International Jazz Festival, Governor’s Ball, Big Ears Festival, The Kennedy Center, Blue Note Jazz Club, and Jazz at Lincoln Center Doha, where he served as Artist in Residence.

UDOBI’s debut album, In the Wild, premiered with a sold-out performance at New York’s Blue Note Jazz Club. Its ten original compositions—mixed in part by four-time Grammy-winning engineer Jimmy Douglass—capture his cinematic, rhythm-forward approach to modern jazz. He continues to perform, compose, produce, and build collaborations across live, recorded, and interdisciplinary projects.

Thirty-three-year-old D.C. pianist Hope Udobi belongs to a generation of musicians, raised on hip-hop, electronica, and indie rock, that has brought new life to jazz fusion in this decade. Unlike many of his peers in that generation, Udobi buys into the first fusion wave’s vocabulary of long, careening lines and dense textures. On the other hand, he is dead set against the dissipation that ultimately ruined the likes of Return to Forever and Weather Report. In the Wild, Udobi’s debut album, is stacked with satisfying original tunes that stand as bulwarks against such self-indulgence…

Other standout performances included sets from keyboardist Hope Udobi, and D.C-native and New York-based bassist Corcoran Holt. Udobi fronted a superb quartet that highlighted his sleek originals from a forthcoming disc. His originals—“Spiral,” “In The Wild” and “Warrior Children”—burst with hip-hop laden modern jazz rhythms, as he unraveled crisscrossing improvisations across Charles Wilson’s kinetic drumming and Mikel Comb’s undulating basslines. Baltimore-based trumpeter Theljon Allen sometimes upstaged Udobi’s virtuosic passages with his incendiary, Freddie Hubbard-esque solos.