Fantastic Negrito

Fantastic Negrito plays Lou Lou's Jungle Room at The Lafayette Hotel on Tuesday, October 6, presenting his album Son of a Broken Man. The show starts at 8 PM, and tickets are $36.

Born Xavier Amin Dphrepaulezz, Negrito is an Oakland-bred singer, songwriter, and bandleader with three Grammy Awards for Best Contemporary Blues Album—one each for The Last Days of Oakland, Please Don't Be Dead, and Have You Lost Your Mind Yet?. He grew up in an orthodox Muslim household and signed a $1 million contract with Interscope Records in 1996 under the mononym Xavier. A near-fatal car crash in 1999 left him in a three-week coma and permanently damaged his guitar-playing hand, which forced him to rebuild his playing technique from the ground up.

He launched a redemption arc in 2015 by winning the first-ever NPR Tiny Desk Contest with a performance of "Lost in a Crowd," recorded in a West Oakland freight elevator. Since then, he's shared stages with Sturgill Simpson, Chris Cornell, and Bruce Springsteen, and collaborated in the studio with Sting, E-40, and Tank and The Bangas. Outside the music, he runs Storefront Records, an independent label and community venue in West Oakland, and Revolution Plantation, an urban farm he founded in 2014.

On Tuesday night, he'll be performing Son of a Broken Man at Lou Lou's Jungle Room, located at 2225 El Cajon Blvd in San Diego. The set kicks off at 8 PM, and tickets are $36.