Malik & the O.G's

Malik & the O.G's is a spoken-word performance band based in Liverpool. Its founder Malik Al Nasir put the band together in 2006 when he first recorded his poetry to music for his debut album Rhythms of the Diaspora Vol 1 & 2, which was released in on Mentis Records featuring Gil Scott-Heron and The Last Poets′ Jalal Mansur Nuriddin. Malik produced the album in 2006 and Malik & the O.G's produced a video with Emmy Award winning Director Mitchell Stuart for the song from the album Africa, an adaptation of one of the poems of the same name in Malik's book Ordinary Guy.

Malik & the O.G's was born out of the political poetry movement that was rooted in the civil rights era in America. In 1984 Gil Scott-Heron toured the UK and met Malik Al Nasir backstage at a concert.

Scott-Heron then trained Malik Al Nasir over a period spanning more than 20 years as a poet and also in the politics of the civil rights era. Jalal Mansur Nuriddin (of The Last Poets) wrote the foreword to the book Ordinary Guy, which was a tribute to Scott-Heron. In 2006 Malik recorded Rhythms of the Diaspora Vol 1 & 2, his debut album, with Gil and Jalal under his band name Malik & the O.G's. The double album was released in August 2015 on MentiS RecordS

Malik & the O.G's also featured in a documentary,Word up – From Ghetto to Mecca, with political black poets Gil Scott-Heron, Jalal Mansur Nuriddin of The Last Poets and UK Dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah, as well as Rod Youngs (drummer from The Amnesia Express). The film premiered at the Phoenix Cinema in Leicester, UK, in 2011 as part of the "Black History Season" dedicated to the late Gil Scott-Heron. It is shown as part of a double bill with the XL Recordings film 'Who is Gil Scott-Heron?' at FACT Cinema Liverpool 22 August 2015.

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