Joseph Opare is the songwriter, vocalist and producer behind Joseph And The Kohanim, an international music project bringing together soul, R&B, Afrobeat, highlife, jazz-funk and Latin rhythms. Now based in eastern Greater Accra, Ghana, he creates music shaped by faith, life experience and a love of grooves that make people move.

His musical foundations stretch back to London in the early 1990s. Living in Hackney with his friend David Stewart—the recording artist Subject 13, also known as Mr Lefteye—and David’s Jamaican mother, Joseph began learning studio production using Notator and Cubase on an Atari ST. Together they mainly programmed house music, while Joseph also tried his hand at R&B. Recording vocals onto two-inch tape at IMW in Islington added practical studio experience to those early experiments.

Alongside production, Joseph developed his voice through lessons with an opera singer, further studies in arias and classic songs, and later blues tuition in Hackney. Moving between these different musical worlds helped shape his approach: open to experimentation, but always rooted in melody, feeling and expression.

Music also ran through his years in ministry. From 1990 to 1993, Joseph led praise and worship at Edmonton Temple in London, before taking on the same role at Power Praise and Deliverance Ministries International in Tottenham from 1993 to 1995. His journey continued in New Jersey, where he led worship and sang in the ministry’s choir, and into the Caribbean, where he worked as a roadie and missionary in 1995.

Ordained as a minister in the late 1990s, Joseph continued singing and leading worship while pastoring in St Martin from 2000 to 2004. Back in London, he taught a choir at a Redeemed church in Brixton. He later pastored and led worship at TLC—The Light City—in Luton until 2014, before starting Warrior House Luton in 2015.

These experiences gave Joseph years of working with voices, leading congregations and seeing how music can encourage people through difficult circumstances. His own journey of faith, following a troubled youth, continues to inform songs about resilience, gratitude, hope and finding a new direction. Some of his releases began as melodies and unfinished songs carried with him for decades.

After completing a film degree in 2011, Joseph began developing beats in GarageBand on his MacBook Pro. A friendship with producer Nicky Brown helped turn that renewed interest into a serious return to recording. Nicky’s enthusiasm for Joseph’s music gave him the confidence to move to Logic Pro and develop his ideas further. Working together at The Premises in Hackney, Nicky helped lay down instrumentation for several songs before Joseph continued shaping the recordings himself.

“I Have a Dream,” released in 2020, was followed by the ten-song album In Your Presence in 2023 and the twelve-song I Believe in 2026. Across his catalogue, Joseph brings together singers, rappers and instrumentalists whose different voices give each song its own character. He handles much of the songwriting and production, working with others for mixing and mastering.

For Joseph, Kohanim speaks of priesthood. The name reflects his faith and his personal belief in his Hebrew ancestry, giving the project a meaning that reaches beyond performance. Whether through a soulful ballad, a jazz-funk groove or an energetic African or Latin rhythm, his songs invite listeners to dance, reflect, persevere and draw closer to the Most High.

An author, filmmaker and ordained minister as well as a recording artist, Joseph has appeared on Ghanaian radio and on Revelation TV’s Express Yourself in the UK, where he served as a guest counsellor.

Through Joseph And The Kohanim, he brings those experiences together in music that crosses cultures and generations—music with a message, room for joy and a reason to keep going.