Nahko

Nahko, born Nahkohe Parayno and also performing as Nahko Bear, traces his lineage as a sixth-generation Apache/Mohawk through a Puerto Rican/Indian mother and a Filipino father, though he spent his formative years raised by an adoptive family in an Oregon suburb. Early struggles with personal identity began to ease once music became his anchor. Piano study started at age six, and by his teenage years he was already teaching lessons and staging school musicals in the area. Those skills secured a seasonal production role in Denali, Alaska, where the surrounding wilderness helped him fuse the musical, cultural, and philosophical threads of his emerging artistic outlook.

Viewing music itself as a borderless, cross-generational, and cross-cultural power capable of redemption and healing, he formed Medicine for the People. The ensemble’s core includes horn player Max Ribner, a Berklee School of Music graduate, and percussionist Hope Medford. Their sound, often labeled “thump-hop,” blends heavy percussion, kaleidoscopic stylistic elements, and passages that lean toward spoken word, functioning essentially as a modern-day traveling show for thought and spirit.

Dark as Night, the group’s first album, arrived in 2013 and entered the Billboard Heatseekers Albums chart at number six. The follow-up, On the Verge, appeared in 2014. SideOneDummy then issued the third release, Hoka, in 2016; it climbed to number 72 on the Billboard 200. The following year Nahko issued the more intimate solo project My Name Is Bear, described by him as a “prequel” and consisting largely of material written prior to the band’s formation.