Brooklyn artist Avery Jones, also known as Kota the Friend, is a jazz-trained trumpeter who incorporates that sound into his hip-hop music. ∙ Jones started his own record label, FLYBYS, in 2008 while still in high school. ∙ Foto, the third independently released Kota the Friend album, was listed as No. 17 on Rolling Stone’s Best Hip Hop Albums of 2019. ∙ The 2020 release Everything featured Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o and was his first album to enter the Billboard 200.