At Afro Fusion UK in London on 29 August 2026, Samuel Adebisi, professionally known as Kornerstone, brought quality to the stage. A UK-based African talking drummer, percussionist and cultural performer, Kornerstone’s performance demonstrated that the talking drum is not an artefact of a distant cultural past. In the hands of a confident contemporary performer, it remains a living, breathing language.
Performing alongside musicians including Temi Commic, Dayo Sax and Hurlarstrings, Kornerstone occupied a distinctive space within the ensemble. Where the keyboard provided harmonic colour, the saxophone supplied melodic expression and the guitar strengthened the musical texture, Kornerstone’s percussion gave the performance its heartbeat.
The talking drum is one of African music’s most evocative instruments because it carries the suggestion of speech. Its changing pitch and rhythmic vocabulary can create the impression of conversation, announcement and response.
Kornerstone understands this expressive dimension. He listened to the ensemble and allowed the drum to respond. This made his performance feel less like percussion accompanying music and more like another musician entering the conversation.
“The talking drum is a voice for me,” Kornerstone reflected after the performance.
“When I play, I am not just thinking about rhythm. I am thinking about what the drum is saying and how the other musicians will respond.”
There is an intimacy to watching a percussionist perform live. The audience sees the physical relationship between musician and instrument: the movement of the hands, the precision of the strokes, the changes in pressure and the instinctive responses to what is happening around the performer. The drum seemed to become an extension of his body.
“When I am holding the drum, I feel connected to something bigger than myself,” he said. “You feel the rhythm in your body before you even think about it. That is what makes percussion so powerful.”
This is perhaps the most compelling aspect of his practice. He is simultaneously a performer and cultural intermediary. He carries an instrument rooted in African tradition into contemporary British spaces and allows new audiences to encounter it through live performance.
There is also an emotional dimension to Kornerstone’s work. For African audiences living in Britain, traditional percussion can evoke memory in ways that words sometimes cannot. A rhythm can recall ceremonies, family gatherings, childhood experiences or a sense of home. For audiences unfamiliar with the tradition, the same sound can provide an introduction to an aspect of African cultural expression that exists beyond popular representations of Afrobeats.
Kornerstone’s performance therefore occupied two worlds. It looked backwards towards cultural heritage while simultaneously moving forward into contemporary musical expression.
Samuel Adebisi ‘Kornerstone’ delivered a performance at Afro Fusion UK that was as much about cultural communication as musical technique. But beyond the technical accomplishment was something more human: the visible relationship between performer, instrument and audience. Kornerstone played with the understanding that rhythm is not merely something we hear. It is something we recognise.
His performance reminded us that sometimes an instrument does not need words to tell a story. It only needs a voice. And on the evening of 29 August, Kornerstone gave the talking drum one.