In my early thirties, living in New York, I fell in love with a professional jazz musician named Seth. A year into our relationship, I invited him to travel to Ghana with me to visit my grandmother and three aunties. Seth was excited to meet them, as well as to study the rhythms of the Ashanti tribe to which my father’s family belongs. Those rhythms are among the roots of jazz. We flew in to Accra and took a bus to Kumasi, the colorful capital of the Ashanti region. Despite Kumasi’s busy commercial areas, including one of the biggest open-air markets in West Africa, we could still see fragments of…