At just 11 years old, child prodigy cellist Malik Kofi is… well, mind-blowing. Most of us might not be able to tell the difference between a good cellist and a great one — honestly, I can’t tell the difference between a good cellist and a shitty violinist — but his adult contemporaries say he’s something special.
“Malik is a musical prodigy,” says Craig Hulgren, a cellist in the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, who has been Kofi’s teacher for the past five years. “He has advanced technological and interpretative abilities as a child. Beyond that he also puts in the hard work to develop those talents.”
His grandmother, Ruby Cox, who raised him since he was an infant, says that he started talking in sentences at 8-months-old, by the age of 2 he was putting puzzles together, and had mastered reading music at 4. She home-schooled Kofi and his two older twin brothers, who are both brilliant and left for college at age 16. Man, I’m sorry if you thought your kids were special before you read that — how wrong were you!?* So sad, too bad.
This talented little dude is now the subject of the upcoming documentary Little Music Manchild: The Malik Kofi Story, and I’ll see you at the theater. Until then, let’s rock out to the sweet cello sounds of one Mr. Kofi in the preview.
*jk, all babies are special snowflakes!
[The Grio]