The Guggenheim Fellowship has afforded me the opportunity to explore the intersections of language and creativity. As one steeped in hip-hop culture, i recognize that we all freestyle off the top every day. We may not rhyme when doing so, but we never rehearse conversations and the intricacies and nuances therein. We respond based on our understanding of the language spoken, our personal experience, and our exposure to the specifics or “rules ” of the chosen language of communication.
These sessions are explorations in communication, specifically between musicians and vocalists of specific traditions and cultures influenced by the diaspora of African music, but musical forms created in the crucible of the United States,; these music forms being jazz and hip hop, at the micro, with an understanding that the macro is rhythmic, syncopated music.
For instrumentalists steeped in jazz tradition improvisation is a key pillar to the lexicon of that specific musical language with the basis of this lexicon being the exposure to pedagogical methods, self vs scholarly instruction, one’s mastery of the instrument, the syntax of how notes can be applied, and the interrelationships between those notes to arrive at scales.
For vocalists, emcees, wordsmiths, etc. this lexicon of language is built on similar aforementioned foundations with the addition of annunciation, pronunciation, number of languages learned, and the ability to compose spontaneously, narratives which are implied in the written compositions and spontaneous compositions or improvisations that happen, utilizing spoken language as the medium through which to compose a sonic narrative.
During the pandemic, I created a series called “Off the Top Tuesdays” which I posted on multiple social media platforms exhibiting this skillset. Though still a key element within modern Jazz music, the art of spontaneous composition or “freestyle” has been segmented into two schools of thought. As stated in the book How to Rap by Paul Edwards, Big Daddy Kane states that a freestyle was a written rhyme that had no singular subject matter and was basically free of style, while a completely improvised rhyme was said to be “off the top”, meaning completely improvised at that moment. For others the idea of freestyle was synonymous with off the top and when one was asked to “freestyle” it was implied or assumed that the rhyme had not been prewritten.
To date, there have only been moments of recorded improvisations that have been released with very few complete bodies of work that are completely comprised of improvised lyrics. Within several of the jazz and avant-garde groups of which I am a member, my contribution on the bandstand is to create spontaneous narratives throughout the performance. The album I’m creating captures these spontaneous lyrics over stylistically different rhythms and once recorded I will transcribe the lyrics, providing a lexicon of the words used within the creation of these moments identifying any redundancies, if any, and unique words used during the recording of the material. The thought is to exhibit these finding sonically and visually noting how environment and rhythm impact spontaneous composition.
