AURORA, Colo. — Not every day do you come downstairs and discover that your son is a savant.
Jude Nyame Yie Kofie, 11, surprised his father one morning by playing the keyboards as if he had taken lessons for years.
"I was here watching the news when I heard him play something," said Jude's father, Isaiah Kofie, a drummer in his home country of Ghana. "So I grabbed my phone, went down there, and was like, 'Dude, play that again.'"
In about a year, Jude is now the lead keyboardist at their church, a one-person wedding band, and a viral YouTubeand TikTok star.
But Jude's unexpected virtuosity also felt like a blessing because of his health problems early in life.
"He looked tiny with all those machines going off," Isaiah Kofie said.
Jude was born with low oxygen levels and had heart surgery as a baby to repair a hole.
He even needed a feeding tube in his stomach until he was eight.
But Jude is a fighter and has thankfully mostly recovered now. As you can tell, it's kind of hard to break his spirit.
But no matter how many accolades he racks up in his young and sudden career as a maestro, his family can only see this one way.
"Looking at his situation and his diagnosis, how he was born in Virginia now, and how he's played. Yeah, it's just God alone," Isaiah Kofie said.
"It's a miracle," Jude Kofie said.
