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The Elements of Style
Labtekwon and Other Local Hip-Hop Vets Offer a Way Forward For The Scene–Looking Back

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By Bret McCabe

Baltimore producer/MC Labtekwon is through repeating the past. For years, he has been calling out wack MCs, shoddy local club practices, and incompetent radio programming. But those days are over. A new year and new hope for the future demands a change. And Lab knows he has something much more constructive to offer Baltimore hip-hop: himself and his peers.

“My experience in Baltimore is one that I feel is unique and reflects the vision of change that so many people are invigorated by in 2009,” he says. “In the ’80s, I grew up in Whitelock City in West Baltimore. I was a black kid on a skateboard that liked to rap. I would go to the Harborplace, Club Cignel, and Club Fantasy and meet up with kids from all over Baltimore City and Baltimore County. It was always an adventure.”

Media portraits of the man born Omar Akbar tend to paint him as a guy with something to prove: Here’s an artist with a primarily self-released discography that stretches back over 15 years, recognized around the globe, but barely in his own backyard. What such profiles, including those run in this very paper by this very writer, often fail to mention is how thoughtful and introspective he can be.

“There were yo boys, punk rockers, new wavers, skate punks, preps, and anybody that might be considered a social misfit,” he continues. “We were bound by elements of hip-hop culture like graffiti and rap, house music, counterculture from the punk movement, weed and alcohol, and a desire to be young and free. I was exposed to the true diversity of people and culture in Baltimore, and it shaped me to think outside the box of my block in West Baltimore. But I never forgot who I was. I was a part of a youth movement that valued creativity and a healthy sense of local competition in the arts, yet we still partied together and had a good time, before the money was the only reason to do it.

“As an MC I feel that Baltimore has fallen behind in the art of emceeing and too many ‘rappers’ lack the proper understanding of the art,” he says. “These guys are too consumed with TV and radio, hoping to be ’stars’ instead of masters of the art. This is why Baltimore as a whole has no proper representation of hip-hop culture globally. Many of the folks that are local gatekeepers and celebrities now have benefited from the efforts of people such as myself and the folks I grew up with. Yet there is no rite of passage to insure the next generation of Robin Franks, Jeff Vespas, Jada Pinketts, Nicole Ari Parkers, or Kevin Liles. I feel sorry for the Baltimore youth that no longer have this cultural paradigm to nurture their own vision of art.”

If you follow hip-hop journalism, you’ve heard this story before: There once was this golden age when everybody was into the creative culture of hip-hop, and the 1990s came along and an influx of mainstream pop celebrity, money, and superficiality ruined it. Once there was a grassroots movement that established criteria for what made the art matter and measured its quality. Now it’s just people repeating the same old nonsense about big-screen TVs, money, and bitches.

“When I was younger, I looked to Z3 MC, We Rock Crew, Numarx with Kevin Liles. I looked up to them and I studied what they did and wanted to be better than them,” Lab says. “And I took what they did seriously. They were already doing what I wanted to do, and we don’t have that anymore. We have people trying to hit the lottery, and I’ve been saying this same thing for years.”

Oh yes he has. He said it to then-City Paper Music Editor Lee Gardner in 2000 for a cover story (“On the Down Low,” Feature, July 12, 2000) that examined Baltimore’s perennial hip-hop underground. He said it to this writer in a later profile (“Taking it Back,” No Cover, March 16, 2005) in which Lab called out what he felt was the general decline of Baltimore hip-hop across the board. And he’s done his best to champion Baltimore’s 1980s hip-hop evolution, plugging under-documented groups and artists from back in the days before MySpace pages or mixtape downloads in the pages of The Fader and to former Baltimorean and City Paper contributor Tom Breihan’s Status Ain’t Hood Village Voice blog.

He’s even started taking his thoughts to the airwaves, addressing what he views as hip-hop’s crises in an October 2008 WEAA-FM program called The Audio Infusion, and posted a précis of his argument at an accompanying blog theaudioinfusion.com/laboratory.

This time, though, Lab doesn’t want to retread history–he wants to share it. For the past year, Lab has been pointing his peers toward City Paper’s offices, having them stop in and talk about coming up as part of the first generation to grow up with hip-hop in Baltimore City. Their collected stories–at least what fits into this space (see bonus Q&As with Boodamonk, Alco, and MC Chinchilla)–aren’t intended to present the whole of Baltimore’s hip-hop history. They merely hope to convey a sense of the community of artists that existed in Baltimore at one point in time, and how that creative cauldron helped shaped them into the adults they are today.

Today, they–Lab, MC/spoken-word artist Eric Muhammad, MC Chinchilla, graf artists Adam Stab and Alco, graf/tattoo artist Boodamonk, DJs Scottie B and Booman, hook-master Jimmy Jones–are some of the preeminent local artists in their fields, even if they aren’t always recognized for that fact. Yes, the past six years have witnessed a number of local hip-hop artists trying to get their sound outside of the 410 area code through the usual way–major-label deals. But they haven’t been tested, they haven’t studied their craft, and they haven’t learned from the artists who laid the groundwork for it here. Is it any wonder nothing has come of those contracts?

“The rest of the world recognizes hip-hop now,” Lab says. “And it’s the same thing that happened with jazz, the same thing that happened with rock ‘n’ roll, it’s always this thing in America where things become such pop cultural phenomena that nobody remembers what it was that was so important about the people who started it. And that’s the problem with Baltimore. Everybody else in the world knows what it is that makes an MC dope–except you. You think if you imitate T.I., you’re going to be dope. Nope.”

A perfect example of how an indigenous local sound can make it outside the community that birthed it is something all of these guys grew up with: club music. Over the course of 2004 and 2005, Baltimore’s homegrown dance music emerged as the hottest sound hitting discerning dance floors. It was everywhere. Writers, critics, labels, and producers were cashing in on its explosive popularity, and misinformation was pimped and propagated. Truth or fiction, Baltimore now has a musical face, and its beats and producers travel the world in DJ crates.

“Baltimore club is not my legacy,” Lab says. “That’s only something that I’ve experienced. I don’t claim Baltimore club as my child, I’m an uncle that helped nurture it. Boo, I look at as one of the parents–Scottie [B] is one of the parents.”

Lab teamed up with two of its parents, Booman and Jimmy Jones–two-thirds of the pioneering club production group the Doo Dew Kidz with K.W. Griff–in 2006 to start work on the 410 Pharaohs project, which released the irrepressibly hook-filled treat 410 Funk last September. On that album, Lab does what many rappers have tried to do and failed–rap over club’s maniacal tempo–and does it by suavely floating over the ruckus, opting for flowing smoothly over the hectic beats, rather than trying to keep up with them. It’s an unexpected approach, and it works so disarmingly well with club’s frenetic motion that you can’t imagine why any MC would try to rhyme at its sprinting pace.

“He called me and was, like, ‘Yo, I found a style to make me sound like I’m not really rhyming fast,’” Booman says about Lab getting in touch with him to start up the 410 Pharaohs, a project they had long talked about. “So I was like, ‘Alright, let’s go.’ And I got with Jimmy, ’cause Jimmy’s the master of party hooks. And it just came together after that.”

When talking to Booman–an instantly friendly big guy who never appears to lose his smile–he comes across as too modest to claim to be club’s daddy, but he freely admits he was around in the beginning. And in the beginning, everybody was dancing to a little bit of everything at clubs such as Godfrey’s, Fantasy, Gatsby’s, Oak Tree, and Cignel, but house music was the main pulse.

“It was all house,” Booman says of Fantasy during a January 2008 interview. Born Grant Burley III, Booman is a native Baltimorean, graduating from the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute in the late 1980s and eventually Morgan State University in the 1990s. He knew very early on that he wanted to be a DJ.

“When I first heard about it [Fantasy], they were having DJ auditions,” he says of the club, which closed in 1990. “And I wanted to go and do the audition, but I couldn’t get a ride. And it turned out the audition I wanted to go to, [Unruly Records head] Shawn Caesar actually got the job for the Friday nights. And when I heard about that, I just stared going. And it was crazy. It was cool. DJs wanted to come listen to it, because they were playing stuff that was so progressive and stuff you’ve never heard before.

“That club was incredible, actually,” he continues. “We were all going, and it was the meeting point for so many people. Shawn Caesar, Rod Braxton, Lab, Ultra Naté.”

Jones and Booman go back even further. They started doing neighborhood basement parties and making four-track recordings together as teenagers. “We were so close we called each other cousins,” Jones says during another January 2008 interview. “He used to do parties, and I used to go down there and grab the mic and get the party started, so we started doing clubs. And we made a bond with one another where if one of us makes it, all of us is going to make it. We said that at the age of 13.”

They started hanging out at Morgan State parties–”when we had no business being there,” Burley says–before discovering the clubs and other DJs, such as Caesar and Wayne Davis at Fantasy. “You can feel that beat,” Jones says of house’s thump. “You were basically hypnotized. And then going to the club at the age of 15, just having the opportunity to experience something that you would never ever experience in your life. It made me who I am today, it made me appreciate music, it made me understand the structure of music–understanding the different types of music coming from different types of experiences and countries. You got a chance to hear how they put this beat with that [one], how they use a singer–basically what we do now.”

What they do now, of course, is club. “It was a mix of hip-hop, house, and street music,” Jones says. “A lot of people wanted to call it ‘club crack’ and things like that. To us, it was simply just called club music. And it became real popular in early ‘92. And from ‘92 all the way down to ‘95-’96, then it started to be branching off to something different. The elements of it started to be taken away.”

This observation isn’t the overlooked and bitter hater speaking, simply an observation of an artist who lived through it. Before it took over dance floors everywhere, club was merely another style that DJs learned and mastered. And they learned from the people who were in the clubs doing it.

“Watching,” Scottie B says of how he learned to DJ. “Watching and listening. I always wanted to be the guy who played the records. That’s just what I wanted to do, so when I heard that, I wanted to do that.”

Born Scott Rice, Scottie B grew up in the Park Heights area of Northwest Baltimore and, like almost every person who got into hip-hop in Baltimore during the 1980s, he first heard it listening to radio station WEBB (1360 AM). “With the DJ shit, it was WEBB,” Rice says during a March 2008 interview. “After school they used to have Say It and Play It live, and first, it was Randy Dennis, and then he moved out of town for a while and then it was Chuck Maxx, and they would have mixes–edit mixes, the first time in Baltimore they had that stuff. There was AP Crew and the New Boss. And they had DJ Spen, and Vicious V, who is still around, and Terry T. There was 1400, Mack James.”

Rice isn’t just flexing his memory, he’s paying respect to the artists who taught him how to spin–as respectfully as he acknowledges the artists making club around the world today who have shown love to him.

“People all over are making great club music now,” Rice says. “It’s a fact. Philly and New Jersey are Baltimore 10 years ago. Everywhere you go–every car, every store, every radio commercial–club music. You got guys overseas, they make shit you’d think they were from Baltimore. You got Sinden and Switch, that whole crew–all that is Baltimore house, and they tell you that. And you got, shit, I don’t want to forget anybody. You got [Germany's] Man Recordings, they really a baile funk thing, which is Baltimore-oriented. We been doing stuff for him. A lot of the M.I.A. stuff is Baltimore, because of Diplo. In Sweden, you got a kid over there, you got Sweet Fred, he’s in Malmé, his parties are so fucking off the hook.

“And that shit’s good,” Rice says. “All over the world they’re doing it. And that shit’s good. I get a little ups from everybody when I get there, and that’s all I ever wanted–to be in somebody’s crates. I wanted to be played at the party.”

Yes, now Scottie B–and many of the early Baltimore house and club progenitors, such as Shawn Caesar, the late Miss Tony, Booman, K.W. Griff, the Basement Boys, Ultra Naté–are known to fans worldwide. It took a while to get there, but that’s why Rice takes such sincere pride in witnessing how the sound has spread. “I think I appreciate it more than most people,” Rice says. “A lot of guys, they’re flying overseas and they’re doing it, but it didn’t take them 15 years, it didn’t take them 20 years. And I’m not saying they don’t appreciate it–I know they appreciate it. But they can’t appreciate it as much as I can, because I took the lumps.”

Scottie B and club’s pioneers earned that respect: Nobody got famous with club overnight. They played in the clubs to find out what worked and what didn’t. They listened to each other. And they learned how to work a room as a DJ, distribute product as a label, and work with other artists by watching and learning from the people they admired. With local hip-hop, that isn’t happening anymore.

“With a lot of guys now, there’s no respect for the quality,” Burley says. “There’s no respect for their predecessors. We were always–the guys that came before us, even locally, we could name DJ Spen and the Numarx and the Shawn Caesar crew and vibe like that, guys we look up to. But if you ask somebody now about a Labtekwon, they wouldn’t know. That’s a disconnect.”

That disconnect is a product of both the speed at which the dominant mainstream culture can absorb subcultures and the speed at which information moves now. “I don’t want to be one of those guys saying, ‘gangsta rap ruined hip-hop,’ but you started to see other strains developing when Dr. Dre put out The Chronic,” says Eric Muhammad. Better known in Baltimore’s spoken-word community as E the poet-emcee, Muhammad grew up in West Baltimore, attended Frederick Douglass High School, and first got into hip-hop as an MC in the group Mind’s Eye Tribe. He migrated into spoken word in the mid-’90s, he says, when he realized Baltimore’s so-called rap fans weren’t really interested in what MCs actually said.

“What I see in Baltimore now, everybody wants to be a big star, everybody wants to be a rapper, and a lot of these guys can’t really rap,” he continues. “They have no interest in rapping to people outside of their [own circle]. And one of the politics of Baltimore City is to go with the flow. So when money becomes the dominant thing, that’s when everything gets watered down.”

It’s a trend graf artist Adam Stab is noticing in younger generations, too. “Underground culture is sold, and we, right now, live at a time with the immediacy of technological information exchange that I think that has become an inherent part of the process,” he says. Self-taught and educated, Stab moved to Baltimore in 1983 and got into graffiti writing. And like Rice, Booman, Jones, and Lab, he learned his skill by following the older experts around him.

Now, “you have kids not having to hold onto a thing for quite as long or wield it quite as long such that they realize the power of what they’re wielding,” Stab says. “Because eventually you’re going to gain understanding from all the time that you’ve participated in it and holding it on high and honing your skills. It’s one of these things that becomes meaningful. It becomes the way they communicate their life’s poetry. And a lot of people aren’t getting the time to put into it–they do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, until they’re doing it damn well–so that they come to realizing the innocence and importance of what to hold on about it. Why it’s an everyman art, why it’s a folk art, why it came from there in the first place. You will never be bigger than it, it is bigger than you. And that sort of embrace of the commonality is getting lost from it as it becomes a total commodity.”

That’s the real danger facing Baltimore hip-hop right now. Not that nobody has been able to break big–Comp, Bossman, Young Leek, Los, D.O.G., A-maz-on, and Heavy Gold have all signed major-label deals, though none has yet to release an album on a major–but that all the creative labor that countless men and women have put into creating a Baltimore hip-hop community is being completely overlooked as local hip-hop becomes little more than what’s popular on the radio here and nowhere else. Hip-hop in the 1980s and even the early 1990s was under-documented by the press across the country. If people today want to learn about what Baltimore gave hip-hop then, they’re going to have to deal with the people who were there.

“It’s very much the model of the griot in West Africa,” Labtekwon says. “The history is documented in the hearts and minds of the people who lived through it. If you pay attention to what I do–not just what I say in interviews but listen to what I’m doing in my music–there’s elements that are specific to Baltimore. Elements of my style–speedy delivery, melodic delivery–these were Baltimore things that I learned from listening to Chuck Maxx on 1360 [AM]. So when you hear me, or E the poet-emcee, you literally hear the evolution of the Baltimore MC.”

Booman, Jimmy Jones, Muhammad, Scottie B, Stab, and Lab himself continue to be involved with their aspects of local hip-hop culture, and some have even expanded their reach to include community service and outreach, holding workshops and working with students. The message here is respect the art form enough to respect yourself and where you come from. Repping your ‘hood means much, much more than having your boys think you’re the shit.

And right now is the ideal time to remember that. The music industry’s failing business models have forced artists to take a more holistic approach to their careers, and the return to a grassroots movement is already starting to take seed in Baltimore. Perhaps these stories and these artists are the people aspiring young artists can turn to for inspiration.

“What keeps me going is that I remember when none of this shit existed,” Muhammad says. “I consider myself one of the blessed people because growing up with hip-hop, it kept me out of the box. I kept my youthful spirit and my dreams alive. I’m carrying it with me, and by doing that, it filters down.

“It’s about carrying on the legacy,” he continues. “And me, I don’t care what the young cats are doing right now because they’re doing only what they see because we’re not showing them another thing. And we’re at that age now that we are what we hated from our parents. If we didn’t grow up hearing about the struggles of the ’60s and had to read about Malcolm X from books when our parents were there, we were mad at them for that. Now, we’re the elders of the situations. And whatever the kids don’t know of the culture, that’s on us.”

“That’s where the relevance is–Baltimore is already part of a musical heritage, and a lot of Baltimore artists don’t always connect to their own legacy,” Lab says. “And when people make dysfunctional art, it propagates misconceptions. . . . Hip-hop has nothing to do with your ability to hustle on the streets. Hip-hop is a solution, not a problem.”

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Musician > No Cover

Stranger Than Fiction

How the Art Department became a real band out of imaginary origins

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By Al Shipley

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Article in CityPaper this Wednesday.

Big thanks to Brendan & Adam for not submitting a photo themselves as they were in Miami at press time. Looks like another solid check and more food on the table. Now there’s steak with the beans & rice!

Weekends on MySpace

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Bad Liquor Pond Marries Shoegaze To Propulsive Rock

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By Raymond Cummings

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By John Barry

Pablo Fiasco, keyboardist, DJ, and renter of a sizable chunk of a five-story warehouse a block from the Baltimore Juvenile Justice Center on North Gay Street, directs me into the warehouse’s parking lot. Once through the chain-link fence topped with razor wire, he leads me to the front door and into the dark central mouth of the building. Inside, there’s a dentist’s chair with a drill set. There are band practice spaces. A portrait of Jesus Christ on an upside-down milk crate, surrounded by shotgun shells, and a sign reading thou shalt not steal. Virtual walls constructed out of empty bottles of hard cider. We head up the freight elevator to the third floor. Fiasco (an occasional City Paper contributor) knocks and puts his ear to a fire door. I think I hear snoring. We wait.

On the other side of the door lives H.R., the singer for the Washington, D.C.-born thrash/funk/punk/reggae quartet the Bad Brains. When performing solo, he also leads the Human Rights Band. He was born Paul Hudson 52 years ago, though before long he became known as H.R. In high school, it stood for Huntin’ Rod. Now it stands for Human Rights. He’s also Ras Hailu Gabriel Joseph I. Friends call him H, or Joe.

Six degrees of separation with H.R. will get you a number of big names in the rock pantheon. He has played alongside underground icons such as the Beastie Boys and Minor Threat. Bob Marley’s guitar player, Al Anderson, has played with Human Rights. Legend has it that the Rolling Stones tried to get him to open for them (and then settled for Living Colour). Prince has been sighted in his mosh pits, albeit with security guards. Madonna’s Maverick Records label briefly seduced him. He gets pulled up onstage by jam giant 311. He gets called out in stadiums by Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters. Moby, the Deftones, Ignite, and Jeff Buckley have covered Bad Brains songs, as has, well, Living Colour. The list goes on.

A bare-bones version of his story as frontman for the Bad Brains goes like this: After exploding onto the D.C. music scene in 1979, the band recorded a classic first 45, “Pay to Cum.” In 1982, the Bad Brains came out with their legendary eponymous ROIR cassette-only release, cementing their status as legends of the hardcore underground and, musically, the most dominant band on the scene. In 1983, the Bad Brains released the classic Rock for Light album, followed three years later by the epochal post-hardcore statement I Against I. In the years since–most accurately represented in Dance of Days, a chronicle of D.C. punk rock written by Mark Andersen and Mark Jenkins–the Bad Brains have functioned as a dysfunctional family, fronted by a charismatic, unpredictable singer who has a knack for attracting major labels and, in equal measure, driving them away. The band’s latest effort, 2007’s Build a Nation, was produced by the Beastie Boys’ Adam “MCA” Yauch.

And then there’s the history of H.R. the solo artist, a story that’s full of even more fits and starts than that of the Bad Brains. From 1984 to 1992, H.R. and a wide and varying group of collaborators released a string of albums featuring an eclectic fusion of elements including (but not limited to) roots reggae, jazz, rap, funk, and hard rock. There was a long fallow period during the ’90s and early ’00s when H.R. lived in California, but two years ago, Grant Garretson invited H.R. back to the D.C. area and helped the Human Rights Band get under way again. Hey Wella, the first H.R. record since 1992, is set for release Oct. 21 on the independent DC Hardcore label.

When he’s not on the road, H.R. lives in Baltimore, on the third story of Fiasco’s warehouse, without much in the way of obvious accumulated wealth. The fire door opens, and he emerges with a smile. He’s 52, and his beard is flecked with gray. Under his jacket, it looks like he’s wearing a back brace. That’s because, when he feels like it, he wears a bulletproof vest. “That thing weighs a hundred pounds,” says Garretson, who bought it for the singer two years ago. “It shows you what good shape he’s in.”

Being a punk rock legend is a tough gig. Once you start talking about it, and making money off it, it loses its shine. Iggy Pop has spent about a decade being professionally legendary. Jello Biafra and Henry Rollins have gone on one too many speaking tours. But H.R. is still the real thing. He’s unpredictable and enigmatic, a mixture of Sun Ra and Little Richard. He’s easier to talk about than to talk to. A lot has been said about him. When I explain that I haven’t heard a lot from H.R. himself–especially about the music–he agrees to talk.

I meet him for our first interview outside the Depot on North Charles Street on a Monday night. H.R. is standing quietly outside, smoking a cigarette, wearing a hooded sweatshirt reading positive mental attitude. We head inside to a table. He starts to talk about Capitol Heights, in Prince George’s County, where he grew up. His conversation is quiet and halting. Sometimes, when he pauses, I fill in the blanks.

He says he was born on Feb. 11, 1956, in Liverpool, England, where his dad was stationed in the Air Force. His mother was Jamaican and had met his father in England. His early childhood was spent as an Air Force brat, as the family moved from Georgia–where his brother Earl Hudson was born–to Hawaii to Maryland.

H.R. attended Central High School in Capitol Heights. His family lived on Addison Road. “I was the outrageous one,” he says of his youth. He was a gymnast, a diver, and a daredevil. He was also heavily into LSD and, later, heroin. He describes coming home one afternoon after doing blotter acid to find the sound of his father’s voice echoing in his ears–”It was a mind-bender.” He played guitar and began absorbing the musical vibrations of Washington, circa 1975. Singing? He says he briefly did some singing in a church choir as a child. His brother Earl, meanwhile, began honing his considerable skills as a drummer starting at age 5.

Asked about his early musical influences, he goes all over the map. He mentions Deep Purple, the musical Hair, the Beatles (“`Helter Skelter’ . . . `Day Tripper’”), Black Sabbath, and Parliament-Funkadelic, among others. In 1975, however, when he began playing in high school bands, he was a jazz-fusion fan. “Billy Preston, avant-garde jazz, Chick Corea, Mahavishnu Orchestra,” he rattles off. In 1976, he and a group of likeminded musicians who lived in the neighborhood began to practice together. That would turn into the fusion group Mind Power.

“Gary Miller went to the same school as my brother [Earl],” H.R. says. “They were both two years younger [than me].” Miller, soon to be known as Dr. Know, or just Doc, was already an accomplished bass player in fusion groups and was about to morph into a guitar player. “We shopped around a little,” H.R. says. “We found Darryl [Jenifer], who was younger.” Jenifer, from Oxon Hill, was a guitar player who was morphing into a bass player. Earl Hudson played drums. They began to jam in a friend’s basement.

In a quirk of fate that has become part of the Bad Brains legend, H.R. started thumbing through a copy of Napoleon Hill’s self-help book Think and Grow Rich. “My father gave it to me,” he says. “I was 18. I read it through cover to cover.” It introduced him to Positive Mental Attitude: “It was saying, if you do it in your mind, if you get your mind right, you can do anything. It had this dramatic change in my life. I decided I would use it in my day-to-day living and I would put the lyrics and the message in the songs.” In brief, the book lays out keys to success: “definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it.”

“There was a lot going on in 1977,” H.R. says. “There was a demand for an original, creative, and innovative music, and seeing that there was a gap there, we wanted to fill that gap.” Sid McCray, briefly the singer for the band, got turned on to punk rock after seeing a documentary about the Sex Pistols, and soon he was playing his friends music by Eater, Wire, the Dead Boys, etc. The band pulled its new name, the Bad Brains, from a Ramones song, although H.R. insists that he didn’t know it was a Ramones song. He says he thought “bad” was street slang for “good.”

He speaks of the band’s nascent musical vision as a practical matter. “It was kind of like a transformation,” he says, “taking an idea and certain techniques together and putting them together and creating a visionary style.”

H.R.’s musical career began in earnest as his other career option started to tank. For three years he attended Prince George’s Community College and then University of Maryland as a premed major. Then he decided he didn’t want to be a doctor. I remark that it’s a tough course of study. He laughs, shortly: “Yeah.”

The newly renamed Bad Brains found a house together in Forestville and set up their instruments. “We practiced over and over and over again,” H.R. says, smiling. By that point he had taken over singing duties and stopped playing guitar. After over a year of rehearsal and preparation–integrating the sudden and complex shifts of jazz fusion with the raunchy full-frontal assault of punk–they never looked back.

“That was the summer of ‘79,” he says. “We knew we were good. We played our first show at the Marble Bar in Baltimore.” Asked about the show, he adds, as if he’s still trying to find a positive spin for what was, by many accounts, a disaster, “Well . . . there was a light attendance.” The band’s first big show in D.C., he says, was outdoors near the Lincoln Memorial and was prematurely cut short by police.

They recorded “Pay to Cum” soon after, and it was released on a seven-inch single in 1980. A scorching yet melodic 1:45 punk anthem built around a raging, three-chord riff, a machine-gun drumbeat, and vocals that sound like a cassette tape on fast forward, it would become a defining classic, inimitable, one of those songs no one dares to cover.

“We were listening to the Ramones,” H.R. says, describing the band’s development of “Pay to Cum.” “We just wanted to do it faster We played [the Ramones] at 78 rpm. We decided we’d try to replicate that sound.

“We were shopping around for musical ideas,” he adds. The Ramones were melodic and fast. Black Sabbath, he says, had the “grinding sound” that pops up in the Brains’ early music. Jenifer was moving into metal. Miller was refining his fusion jazz licks at hardcore speed.

In 1979, the newly minted punk rockers went to the Capital Center in Largo to see fusion bassist Stanley Clarke and found themselves mesmerized by Bob Marley and the Wailers, who were also on the bill. If Napoleon Hill gave the Bad Brains their attitude, Marley gave them the spiritual ground for their sound and, once they became Rastafarians, for their lives.

“I was fortunate to have a friend who had a lot of reggae, and I went to his house and listened,” H.R. says. “I introduced the sound to the band, and I asked them if we could orchestrate a couple of songs. And we worked from there.” H.R. says the occasional reggae tune gave him more freedom vocally than the slam-bang hardcore tunes. That would remain the mix for the Bad Brains and his own music from then on: the high-pitched, reedy shriek of punk and the freer incantations of reggae.

H.R. writes most of the lyrics for Bad Brains songs, and I take him through a few. “Big Takeover” (“So understand me when I say/ there’s no hope for this USA/ Your world is doomed with our own integration/ Just another Nazi test”): “Yeah. I was thinking about the divisions and segregations. Staying above it and making beautiful music.” Asked about “Living at the Movies” (“Here’s to the maker/ The film double taker/ The illusion type faker/ The paravision viewer”), he describes the negatives in his songs as “hypotheticals,” stories he tells to help people avoid banging their heads against the wall, metaphorically or spiritually. When explaining “I Against I” (“And I say I don’t like it/ And I know I don’t want it/ I against I against I against I”), he says, “I think you have people who want you to fight yourself. You have to stay above it.”

There aren’t any visible chinks in the Positive Mental Attitude. When asked about Babylon, he muses, “I love the United States.” So is he a patriot? “Yes,” he says, “very much a patriot.” What does he think about the state of the world? “I think it’s a wonderful time to be alive,” he says. What does he mean by that? He pauses thoughtfully: “There are the unifying possibilities of digital technology, the internet.” (H.R. doesn’t use the internet. His MySpace page is currently maintained by Garretson.)

OK, how about “Happy Birthday My Son” from the H.R. album It’s About Luv? He speaks in the third person: “It’s the story about a man who’s in prison and his son is turning 5 years old. He wants to say hello to him.” And he wants to keep him happy while he’s doing badly. I ask him specifically if it’s about his own experiences with incarceration, since H.R. spent several months at D.C.’s Lorton prison in 1984 for possession of marijuana: “Yes, sir.” He says his son, Simeon, is now 32 and a computer programmer.

“Cool Mountaineer,” from the Bad Brains’ 1995 God of Love, originated on a farm in Vermont, he says: “We were sitting around, and someone just said, `Mountaineering, that’s cool!’” I ask how he came up with the lyrics for “Riot Squad,” a hoarse fist-pumper from Bad Brains’ early days that would send people diving into mosh pits. “It was a reflection of society’” he says. “A parody. It shows the irony of life.” And “Hey Wella,” the title song of H.R.’s new album? He pauses. “Well . . . sometimes when someone is thinking about what’s next, he says, `Well . . . uh . . . ‘”

I ask if, in his many years of singing in front of thrashing minors, he’s found he’s singing to people without much of a sense of irony. He pauses. “Yes.” Was that a problem? “No. Not really.”

A few nights later, we meet again in the warehouse. H.R. is wearing a jacket and his dreadlocks are covered with a red, green, and white knit hat. We head into a room lined with wall hangings, monitors, amplifiers, guitars, an armchair, and a stool. He opens the door for me and motions me in. He graciously gives me the armchair; he takes the stool. He gets up frequently and wanders around the room as he speaks in an exaggerated British accent that I’ve heard him use onstage.

The discussion turns to the word “polytechnical.” He’s using it to explain what sort of role technology plays in the life of the spirit. He considers the word and concept professorially. “Polytechnical,” he muses. “It has multiple meanings. Technical regeneration. So it goes into multiple, polytechnical functions. Regeneration. Reuniting. Re-Ignition.”

“Re-Ignition” is the title of a song from the Bad Brains’ 1986 album I Against I. Musically and philosophically, H.R. repeatedly refers to it as a turning point musically for the group. In 1986, H.R. and his brother Earl had left the Bad Brains to begin work on Human Rights, but with I Against I, producer and ardent fan Ron St. Germain led them back into the studio to create a funkier, more metallic sound.

“It took four years to get that song right,” H.R. says of “Re-Ignition.” The staggering riff and bass line dated from 1981; the I Against I sessions found him in the studio with his bandmates and the producer waiting for him to add lyrics. “[Darryl] kept on asking me, requesting me to play on it, and we would take it into the studio, and then he’d be like, `Play it!’” H.R. recalls. “I’d be like, `In time, Darryl.’

“Then Gary [Dr. Know] tells me, `You get in there, you put vocals on it.’ I say, `No way. You want me to put vocals on that kind of bass line?’ Gary said, `It’s either that, kid, or back to making pizza.’ Because that’s what I used to do at the Navy Yard, at Gino’s.” H.R. starts to laugh. “I’d be making my pizza, working at Gino’s. I’d set up all the chairs, and the placemats, and the napkins. . . . ”

St. Germain seemed to be the Bad Brains’ ticket to the big time. He had the connections and credibility to bring them closer to the break they deserved, and a metal-edged sound that was commercial but also encompassing. With St. Germain’s urging, the band crafted a hitherto unheard combination of funk, soul, and punk. “I’d put the vocal tracks on, and [St Germain would say], `I like that one! Can you try it again?’” H.R. recalls. “I’d say, `To that type of music?’”

But I Against I, though well received, was not the band’s big break. Shortly after recording the album, H.R. left the Bad Brains to concentrate on his solo career. It was not the first time he had left, and it would not be the last time he and the rest of the band would part ways, often seemingly just as they were attempting to make a significant career move. (Attempts to reach Gary Miller and Darryl Jenifer for this article were unsuccessful.)

With the Bad Brains, H.R. was a frontman, pure and simple. With Human Rights, he was beginning to think of himself as an orchestrator of music, dabbling in funk, jazz, and other genres.

“I was thinking about being in an orchestra, going to the White House” he laughs. “I never wanted to be in the back of an alley pretending to be Sid Vicious. I knew I was a conductor. I wanted to be onstage with my orchestra. Wherever I was. New York University, CBGB. . . .”

Of course, living a vision as a conductor is a little hard when “they”–and he doesn’t say exactly whom “they” are–always seem to want him to be a reincarnation of his former self.

“They’re like, `You want to be mean and angry, you want to be a bad dude,’” H.R. says. “I’m like, `I don’t want to be known as a bad dude at this time in my life.’”

The wailing whirling-dervish H.R. of early Bad Brains shows, immortalized on the recent Bad Brains Live–CBGB 1982 concert DVD, is now 26 years older and ambivalent about rehashing punk legend. In 2006, the Bad Brains delivered three sold-out shows at old stomping ground CBGB. The first night was distinguished by H.R. walking onstage with a motorcycle helmet, bulletproof vest, and headset mic; he was inaudible much of the time.

It ain’t easy being a punk icon at 52. “They’re like, `You’re going to have to be here, you’re going to have to be here. . . . Dude! You’re the man. I’ve been telling everybody you’re the man. Get with it!’” H.R. recounts breathlessly. “That’s Darryl. And Earl would be like, `Don’t get him started, he’ll vocalize all night long.’ And Darryl would be like, `You better not hate me, you’d better be entertaining.’ And I’d be like, `Darryl! Of course I don’t hate you.’

“Darryl’s like, `You’re crazy, you think you can go to a club and act like you’re in church?’ And you know what I’d say to him? I’d say, `I do what I want to.’” H.R. laughs out loud. “And I’d say, OK, `Gary, anybody else but you, I’d say no.’ And I’d go onstage.”

Human Rights guitarist and drummer Grant Garretson, who also is a drum technician for the Bad Brains and a longtime friend, acknowledges that when H.R. goes onstage wearing a motorcycle helmet, or perhaps wrapped in a robe, and stands stock still, as he usually does these days, it leaves some Bad Brains fans wondering what happened to the hyperkinetic punk avatar of old. Or they pass him off as off his rocker. “But none of them believe he’s a normal guy when I’m hanging out with him,” Garretson says. “He’s cursed, you’ve got to understand. The dude is 52 years old. He’ll do it. He’ll go ahead and play [with the Bad Brains]. They’re family. But a 52-year-old guy isn’t going to do the same thing as a 25-year-old.”

One afternoon, just before H.R. and the Human Rights Band are scheduled to start a mini-tour to promote Hey Wella, I visit H.R. in his room, which is no bigger than a college dorm room, with a window looking out on a parking lot, a large futon on the floor, and a large abstract painting on the wall. He’s resplendent in a kingly blue robe with a white scarf on his head and a huge crystal pendant in the shape of a crown. His voice is very low, sometimes inaudible.

He offers water or food. I decline. He sits back. A long, polite, and nonlinear discussion follows. Much of it concerns the early to mid-’90s, when the Bad Brains were being courted by various major labels.

H.R. was living in California during the period and involving himself in reggae-oriented projects. In 1993, the Bad Brains put out Rise on major label Epic with another singer, Israel Joseph I, but that album flopped. The Bad Brains asked him back again for their next record. It looked like the the band had landed another deal, with Maverick Records, a label run by one of the biggest pop stars in the world. “Madonna came to me and asked me, did I know reggae, and would I give her a copy of my records,” H.R. recalls.

In 1995, Maverick released the Bad Brains’ God of Love album. While on tour supporting the album, a violent confrontation between H.R. and an audience member landed the singer in jail, ending the tour and, ultimately, the band’s relationship with Maverick.

H.R. seems bored with discussing close calls with stardom. He pulls out his guitar and starts to noodle, then offers an unplugged version of “We Belong Together,” a reggae tune that appears on Hey Wella. After he puts the guitar down, his conversation goes in different directions, as he discusses the state of the nation. He says things look good. The conversation slips to the subject of warning labels on microwave ovens. We talk about the possibility of building a new nation, in reference to the most recent Bad Brains album, Build a Nation. He tells me as models he likes Mexico and Singapore.

Singapore, I say, is a very clean place.

“Yes, it’s a sterile location, definitely.”

But they put you in jail if you swear.

“Well, one does have to be careful.”

What do you like about Mexico?

“Well, the beer is very good.”

You like Corona?

“I haven’t tried to drink it, but I hear it’s very good.”

Building and governing. Acting. Reacting. Polytechnics. Corona. Microwaves. Love I and I. These sorts of phrases come together at the end of the meeting. The conversation travels all over the place, and I ask him what advice he would offer younger artists.

“Love I and I,” he says. “Move away from self-destruction and totalitarian views.”

A week later, around half past midnight, a flannel shirt-clad H.R. is resting on a sofa in the warehouse’s main rehearsal room, which is crammed with keyboards, guitars, amplifiers, and speakers. The Human Rights Band has just run through its Hey Wella set. There’s a large flat-screen television playing Entertainment Tonight, which H.R. is watching with purple-haired Doc Night, a former saxophone player with Human Rights and a friend since the mid-’80s. H.R. looks a little bleary-eyed, and the room is filled with pot smoke.

Human Rights just finished a short jaunt that ended with a gig on a boat in the harbor in New York City; H.R. also played with Bad Brains in Chicago, opening up for N*E*R*D. (H.R. appeared onstage wearing a floor-length robe.) He is now preparing for a record-release party on Oct. 21, in New York, and a Nov. 1 show at Rams Head Live in Baltimore. There’ll be a Bad Brains show a few days afterward, on Election Day, at the 9:30 Club in Washington.

Hey Wella, which Doc Night has placed in the CD player, pumps through a set of speakers. The album may be a grab at a larger audience. The guitars are heavy, in the service of a musical combination that Garretson and Doc Night call “funk/soul/rub-a-dub-dab.” Garretson says he thinks this one will do well.

For Hey Wella, Garretson laid down tracks, some of which he says he’s been developing for years in different versions. Then, as in the Bad Brains, H.R. added the vocals. Garretson plays some of the mixes for the album’s title track, a combination of heavy metal, funk, and rap with a guitar hook. In the initial version, H.R. overlays the instrumental track with improvised vocals, including an English-accented rap that mentions, among other things, Michael Jackson. By the final version, H.R. has gradually moved the lyrics and vocals into place over a complex interlay of rhythms. It’s the kind of technique that probably goes unnoticed at CBGB.

“I don’t know anyone who can [lay down vocals] like that,” says local filmmaker James Lathos, a friend of H.R.’s since the ’80s who has been working on a documentary about H.R. that he hopes to complete next year. “He just cuts through to the melody, even when it sounds like chaos to others.” Lathos shows me footage of H.R. laying down the vocals for his 1991 roots-reggae tune “I Luv.” In the clip, H.R. stands alone in the studio, with his four huge dreadlocks, working his way into an almost operatic mix of high wails and slow crooning.

Paul Cornwell, a friend and one-time manager, has known H.R. since the early ’80s and served as executive producer on two of H.R.’s reggae albums, It’s About Luv and Singin’ in the Heart. He speaks of H.R.’s disciplined vocal technique as something that frequently goes unnoticed. “He’s almost got a cantor voice, it’s almost jazz,” Cornwell says. “I love his voice. It touches the heart where few artists will.”

It’s no secret that if H.R. was a little more predictable, a little easier to deal with, he could loom larger in the music industry. But those close to him seem to feel that a more focused, goal-oriented artist wouldn’t really be H.R.

“That’s the whole enigma of him,” Lathos says, speaking carefully. “You never know what you’re going to get. I’m not a doctor, but there’s definitely something going on there. He’s an artist, you know. He’s a Rastafarian. His way of life isn’t about money. H.R. is always doing something. Bad Brains is one dimension. He’s got multiple dimensions.”

After four interviews, I ask H.R. if there have been low points in his life and career. He considers the question and, for the first time, seems to give a hint at a less positive side. “There’ve been little depressions, temporary delays,” he allows. He refers to “Saddest Day,” a slow, lilting reggae lullaby that appears on his 1990 release Charge. It’s H.R. at his vocal peak, with a voice that shifts from reggae lilt to crooning soul, from an album where he manages to flip back and forth between metal and mellow. “I’m gonna see the saddest day of my life,” he sings. “Keep us from those eruptions/ Don’t cry, my papa always said.”

I ask him what it’s about. He says it’s about an incarceration, one of several he experienced in the late ’80s. I ask him what it was for. “A case of mistaken identity,” he says, a little sadly.

That explanation may not have worked in court, but after four conversations with H.R., I’m inclined to believe him. There are dimensions to him that no police officer, and few of even his most faithful fans, will understand. That may be why, unlike many punk legends, he’s still a work in progress.

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When Lafayette Gilchrist celebrated the release of his 2005 album Towards the Shining Path at Highlandtown’s Creative Alliance at the Patterson, he wore his gray Kangol hat with the gold piping at a jaunty tilt and stomped on the keyboard pedals with his basketball shoes. He would not have looked out of place in a Run-D.M.C. video, and the rhythms of his compositions hinted at the hours he spent watching hip-hop videos as a teenager in Prince George’s County.

But as Gilchrist’s big hands massaged the keys of his Kurzweil PC88, the Bolton Hill resident did things to those funk and hip-hop beats that had never been heard on MTV. The central groove never faltered, but the big beats were shoved forward and backward; they might drop out momentarily or be surrounded by a cloud of secondary beats supplied by the drummer and electric bassist beside him. The beats linked up to catchy melodic phrases, which in turn opened up into shape-shifting harmonies played by the five horn players behind him. As the beats swirled around, hip-hop turned into jazz.

“I’m always seeking a dialogue between popular rhythms and the improvising process,” he explains. “For me to make personal music, I have to come out of the music I grew up with and love, and that’s hip-hop and go-go. But I want to go deeper into that music than what you hear on the radio. When I’m dialoguing with those musics, there has to be space in the conversation where we can really get into it and go somewhere no one’s gone before. The result is not so much the sound of jazz as the spirit of jazz.”

Something was happening at the Patterson that had implications far beyond the local music scene. Here was a solution to one of the most vexing dilemmas in modern music: How can jazz transform the black popular music of today into complex improvisations as it once transformed swing and ragtime? Or, to turn the question around, how can funk and hip-hop shrug off their formalist straitjackets and stretch out into new musical territory? Not that there’s anything wrong with swing-based jazz or commercial funk, but if you love both Thelonious Monk and George Clinton, surely there must be a way to forge a musical link between the two.

These questions are vexing because the very quality that makes funk and hip-hop so pleasurable–the power and the precision of their beats–makes them difficult for jazz to digest. Jazz requires a rhythmic elasticity for the sudden shifts that make it so pleasurable. As thousands of bad fusion and smooth-jazz records have demonstrated, adhering too closely to a repetitive groove kills the pleasures of jazz. As thousands of straight-ahead jazz records have proved, abandoning the groove too often kills the pleasures of pop. How can you accommodate the best of both worlds?

The most persuasive answers have come from three young African-American pianists: Houston’s Jason Moran, Delaware’s Matthew Shipp, and Baltimore’s Lafayette Gilchrist. Moran and Shipp have pursued strategies similar to what Gilchrist was doing at the Patterson that night; they have embraced funk and hip-hop grooves, but they have also messed with them and added to them, creating so many variables within each piece that the music can go in any direction at any time. Moran and Shipp have already won national acclaim for their efforts; Gilchrist is on the cusp of similar recognition.

The vehicles for that recognition are two new albums: Gilchrist’s first piano-trio project, Three (Hyena), and his first as a member of the David Murray Black Saint Quartet, Sacred Ground (Justin Time), two of the year’s best jazz releases thus far. To support the release of Three, Gilchrist brought his trio to An die Musik on June 9. Wearing a tuft of dark hair beneath his lower lip, a brick-red shirt over his black slacks, and a puffy khaki cap atop his head, he dug into the venue’s grand piano with a confidence that demonstrated how much he had grown in the 19 months since the Patterson gig.

In his liner notes for Three, Gilchrist describes his composition “In Depth” as reflecting “the pride of James Brown and the depth of inquiry of Andrew Hill.” At the downtown venue, he backed up that claim with a funk groove worthy of the Godfather of Soul and a lyrical piano solo worthy of the late, great Blue Note jazz pianist. But if you listened closely, you realized that drummer Nate Reynolds and bassist Anthony “Blue” Jenkins weren’t playing the same phrases over and over; they managed to keep the pulse strong and steady even as they restated the groove different ways and surrounded it with ancillary accents. Meanwhile, Gilchrist himself locked into the beat at certain junctures, let go of it to pursue a harmonic tangent, locked in again, and let go again.

It was an exhilarating performance. It demonstrated that you can improvise freely and creatively over beats that stomp rather than swing. It proved that jazz can be as persuasive physically as it is intellectually. It opened a door that might let hip-hop out of its formulaic box–and might let jazz escape from its locked-room obsession with the past. It was a fusion that could only be accomplished by someone who loves hip-hop as much as he loves jazz.

“When musicians try to play funk or hip-hop with a condescending attitude, like Wynton [Marsalis] does on his new album, they always sound corny,” Gilchrist says. “The drum timbres are all wrong, and the beats are whack. You can tell they’re slumming. To do it right, you have to have a knowledge and respect for the tradition–both the jazz tradition and the hip-hop tradition. It has to be part of you and you have to be part of it.”

Gilchrist, who turns 40 on Aug. 3, lived in Washington, D.C., till he was 14, when his mother remarried and moved out to Prince George’s County. As a teenager, one of his favorite musicians was Prince, but he absorbed all the rap and R&B hits on the radio as well as the local specialty, go-go music. He danced to all the top go-go acts–E.U., Trouble Funk, Rare Essence, Redds and the Boys–but his favorite was Chuck Brown.

“Chuck lived down the street from my Aunt Eudora in Capitol Heights,” Gilchrist remembers. “And we’d go over there and hear him rehearsing. I liked Chuck because he was different–he was playing jazz standards like `A Train’ and `Harlem Nocturne’ in go-go arrangements with these sophisticated horn lines. That’s how I learned those songs, and when I heard the standard jazz versions later, I thought they were playing the tunes wrong. But it taught me that you can combine funk grooves and jazz.”

Gilchrist hadn’t taken up an instrument; he was just going to the shows to check out the girls. His main pursuit at the time was boxing. He won some tournaments as a bantamweight, but he says his new stepfather pressured him to quit. By 15, he had no major activity to focus his mind; he was angry and not doing well in school. By the time he was a high school senior he was ready to join the Army.

“The one nice thing my stepfather did for me,” Gilchrist acknowledges, “was to steer me away from the Army. He was a Vietnam vet, so he knew. I made a deal with him and my mother that I would try a year of college. My SATs weren’t good enough to get into UMBC–I had to take summer courses there so I could enter as a freshman in the fall.”

It was the summer of 1986, and the sullen 18-year-old was in a remedial English class in UMBC’s Fine Arts Building, wishing he was at the pool with his friends. After class, he wandered through the building and happened upon the music department’s recital hall.

“I swear this is true,” Gilchrist insists, still a bit incredulous himself. “I walked in and a nine-foot Steinway piano was sitting on the stage, unattended and unlocked. The whole theater was dark except for one stage light shining on the piano. I sat down on the piano bench, put my foot on the sustain pedal, and pretended to play. But what I pretended to play sounded pretty good. My roommate came into the hall and said, `I didn’t know you played the piano,’ and I said, `I don’t.’

“I was very angry at the world at that time. When my boxing was taken away from me, I felt a bitterness I’d never felt before. I knew that bitterness was going to lead me nowhere, but I couldn’t get out of it. When I sat down at the piano, though, I felt peaceful. I knew I could heal whatever was ailing me with that piano.”

He was starting from scratch at age 18, long after most musicians pick up their instruments, but he was determined. That fall he befriended Freddie Dunn, a trumpeter who was an actual music major at UMBC. Gilchrist played Dunn some of the tunes he’d been improvising on the piano, and Dunn played them back on the trumpet and showed the musical neophyte how the notes looked on staff paper. They knew that improvised instrumental music meant jazz, but they didn’t know much about the genre.

“Wynton [Marsalis] was the only cat our age we’d heard of who played jazz,” Gilchrist recalls. “And he was so serious. He talked about Thelonious Monk like Monk was a friend of his. So we got a cassette tape of Monk’s greatest hits, played it several times, and finally decided we liked it. Our journey into jazz started right there–with that cheap little tape. Anything we heard Wynton talk about, we’d go get it–Coltrane, Parker, whatever.

“I’m a middle-class black kid from Prince George’s County, and I’ve never heard of these guys. What does that tell you? We went to see Wynton at Pier Six, and Stanley Jordan, a young guitarist, opened the show. That’s when it hit us–`Man, what’s happening here? Why’s Wynton always talking about Monk and Coltrane and never about cats his own age?’”

Marsalis was talking about some younger musicians, but they were his fellow “young lions,” musicians who’d been born in the ’60s but who were playing and dressing as if they were living in the ’50s. They claimed to be preserving the tradition, but Gilchrist didn’t buy it.

“That’s not the tradition,” he exclaims. “Jazz has always been about what’s happening `right now,’ as Duke Ellington put it. That’s the tradition. Yeah, if I play with Carl Grubbs, I’m glad to do Coltrane’s music, because he grew up with Coltrane. That’s his music, and he has something to teach me about it. But for me to hook up with a young musician and play `How High the Moon’? That never interested me. My model is Miles Davis, who said, `If you want to hear what I did in 1956, go buy the record, because there’s no way I’m going to play that in 1986.’

“I’m proud to be a child of hip-hop,” Gilchrist says. “That’s what we danced to–hip-hop parties are where we came on to girls. I think jazz musicians make a big mistake when they extricate themselves from their social milieu. That’s the mistake a lot of the young lions made when the record companies scooped them up, put them in suits, and encouraged them to pretend they were playing with Miles Davis in 1955. On the other hand, I can’t play hip-hop rhythms straight. If a groove can’t breathe, if you’ve drained away all the gooey, juicy lubrication by too much planning or programming, you’ve prevented any possibility of invention happening.”

Gilchrist had no interest in becoming another young lion, but neither did it interest him to make a career of playing behind rappers and R&B singers. He did some session work with the Basement Boys, the geniuses of Baltimore house music, and he enjoyed it, but it wasn’t something he wanted to do full-time. He wanted to compose and improvise his own music. To create his own sound, Gilchrist knew he’d have to subject the rhythms of his own generation to the improvisatory slicing, dicing, and blending of jazz.

To do that he’d have to find musicians who were equally comfortable in the worlds of hip-hop and jazz. He’d already bonded with Dunn. He convinced bassist Vince Loving, who’d played with local drum powerhouse Dennis Chambers in the legendary Baltimore fusion trio Skylab, to get involved. Gilchrist brought in the Chambers-like drummer Nate Reynolds as well. It was 1993, and Gilchrist named the band the New Volcanoes, because he thought they sounded like “a force of nature.”

When this foursome recorded some demos at the UMBC recording studio, the faculty engineer at the studio, Mike Cerri, proved such a like-minded trumpeter that the quartet became a quintet. That quintet (plus James Dephilipo on the tubalike euphonium) recorded Gilchrist’s debut album, The Art Is Life, which he released on his own label. Another UMBC student, reed player John Dierker, replaced Dephilipo for the second self-released album, Asphalt Revolt.

“I’d be walking through the halls at school late at night, and he’d be there playing,” Dierker remembers. “There weren’t many people around at 2 a.m., so that impressed me. When I started jamming with him, I found he was a piano player I enjoyed playing with, which was unusual. Most pianists have a tendency to cloud things up with too many notes and predictable chords. Lafayette’s playing is more open–he’s playing more interesting chords, more dissonant. It’s more in tune with the kind of stuff I enjoy playing.”

With a core of like-minded players behind him, Gilchrist wrestled with making jazz that made sense to him. How do you make a groove breathe without letting it get away from you? How do you sound as powerful and precise as a drum machine without sounding as monotonous as a drum machine? Gilchrist’s approach is to make sure everyone in the band is always thinking about the groove without always playing it. That’s especially true of his current bassist Anthony “Blue” Jenkins (Loving died unexpectedly in the fall of 1999) and drummer Nate Reynolds.

“Blue is able to take a groove and give it color, structure, thoughtfulness, and playfulness,” Gilchrist says. “I like a bass to sound like it’s rumbling under my feet. If I hear the same bass line through a whole song, it drives me crazy–I want to hear the music develop over the course of the piece. If I tell Nate, `The drums in my head are going boom-bap-boom-bappity-bap-bap,’ he’ll circle around that without playing exactly what I described. I love that. That’s what makes it elastic. I hate click tracks. Click tracks are the worst thing to happen to black music.”

In addition to the rhythm section, the New Volcanoes horns bear more of the melodic and harmonic weight, but they, too, are encouraged to think rhythmically at all times.

“No one else has a sense of rhythm like Lafayette,” Dierker says. “It definitely has more of a funk or hip-hop feel to it, but that’s no more confining than swing. You find a way to make it interesting or you don’t–a lot of straight-ahead players make swing time boring. Lafayette finds ways to overlay other things on those rhythms, you can take things out of the groove to break it up and add secondary patterns–sneaky rhythms, as I call them.”

“Most people think of funk as a repetitive groove that’s repeated over and over,” adds Greg Thompkins, who plays tenor sax in Gilchrist’s band. “But with this band, once the groove and melody are established, we’re encouraged to develop what we’re playing. Even when we’re soloing, the rhythm section will be changing the patterns. All the guys in the band have played in funk bands, so they know how to stay in the pocket, but they’ve also played in jazz bands, so they know how to get out of it as well.”

After a few years in area clubs, Gilchrist arrived at a point where he needed to be heard outside Baltimore, and to do that he needed connections. Summoning up his courage, he started walking up to famous jazz artists and introducing himself. In the spring of 1999, that approach paid off in two crucial contacts. He met Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid, who was playing with Cassandra Wilson at the Barns of Wolf Trap in Virginia. A few weeks later he met tenor saxophonist David Murray at the National Aquarium, after the Maryland Film Festival’s screening of Jazz Man, a documentary on Murray’s career. Both Reid and Murray encouraged Gilchrist to send them some music. He mailed off copies of Asphalt Revolt and got encouraging responses from both.

“David put the word out that he was looking for me,” Gilchrist recalls. “So I went down to meet him in D.C. after a show. The first thing he said to me was, `That’s a motherfucking bad CD you sent me.’ We went out to get something to eat, jammed for three hours, ate again, and jammed for another four hours. I could feel an instant rapport, like the place he was already in was where I was going. As we were leaving, he looked at me intently and said, `Get a passport.’”

Gilchrist’s first gig with Murray was at Iridium in Manhattan in April 2000. He was filling the piano chair in Murray’s octet, formerly occupied D.D. Jackson, and soon he was on the plane to Europe. Meanwhile, Reid put Gilchrist in touch with Joel Dorn, producer for Horace Silver, Keith Jarrett, and the Modern Jazz Quartet, who now headed up the Hyena Records label. (Dorn’s now-defunct 32Jazz label was also behind the release of vintage live tapes from Left Bank Jazz Society shows recorded at Baltimore’s Famous Ballroom.) The folks at Hyena liked what they heard and signed Gilchrist to a contract.

Gilchrist now faced the decision that every Baltimore musician faces sooner or later: Should I stay or should I go? The conventional wisdom is that a musician has to leave Maryland for a music center such as New York or Los Angeles to find the record companies, managers, lawyers, and fellow players to take a career to the next level. The conventional wisdom is often correct, but not always.

“I doubt very seriously if I could have landed the contract with Joel or the gig with David if I’d gone to New York,” Gilchrist says. “Because it was staying in Baltimore, building my own band and building my own sound, that got me where I am. I sat down with Joel and said, `I don’t want to do a young-lion bebop record,’ and Joel said, `That’s good, because we don’t want that shit anyway.’ After David hired me, he started telling people, `I’ve got a motherfucker who doesn’t sound like anyone else.’ [Saxophonist] Hamiet Bluiett told me, `Yeah, that’s why he got you, because the quartet sounds different with you in it.’”

Gilchrist decided to stay. Because the cost of living is so much cheaper here, he believed he could concentrate on his own music without having to take unwanted gigs to pay the rent. Because there’s less competition for good players here, it’s easier to hang onto them. And because trends seldom start here and usually arrive late and vitiated, there’s less pressure to follow trends. The pianist knew, because he often took the train to New York to test the waters.

“When you go to New York and don’t play like McCoy Tyner or Herbie Hancock,” he says, “the horn players give you a dirty look, like they want you to lay out. It’s like they’re saying, `If you don’t play like McCoy, I can’t do my Trane shit,’ or, `If you don’t play like Herbie, I can’t do my Wayne [Shorter] shit.’ You can very easily succumb to that pressure, and that’s why a lot of the players there sound alike. By staying in Baltimore, I can do something that sounds just like me. When you pull those chords from inside you, that’s how the music really happens.

“It’s been to my benefit to work out of the spotlight and not feel the pressure to do what everyone else is doing. It’s like the freedom Prince had when he developed a whole new sound in Minneapolis. That freedom gave him the courage to try new things, the courage to be vulnerable, the courage to put his weird stuff out there and endure the slings and arrows, like Ornette [Coleman] or Cecil Taylor.”

Gilchrist’s contrarian decision to stay put paid off when he finally assembled an octet of extraordinary players. Erve Madden took over the bass chair from the late Vince Loving for the 2001 album Collagic Dreams but was soon replaced by Jenkins. The final two pieces were Gabriel Ware on alto sax and Greg Thompkins on tenor sax.

“That was the band I’d been waiting for,” Gilchrist says. “In music sometimes you have to keep at it and keep at it until the right individuals show up. Andrew Hill once told me, `You have to wait for time to catch up to you and for the right individuals to come into your orbit.’ When I added Gabe on alto, I finally had all the voices for the harmonies I was writing already. Suddenly the sound was huge.”

When the New Volcanoes played Artscape 2005 in front of the Mount Royal Station clock tower, it was as if two different bands were sharing the stage. One band was a very funky piano trio that dug into the groove; the other resembled a gospel choir of horns. On Gilchrist composition “The Syndicate,” for example, the trio punched out a down-and-dirty funk riff while the horns shouted out a “joyful noise” like a full-throated choir. As the song progressed, the boundaries between the two subgroups slowly crumbled, as Gilchrist played darting piano passages that laced the melody into the beat and as Dierker took a solo that descended into the low register of the rhythm section and pulled it into the harmonies.

“He does look at the horn section as a choir,” Thompkins agrees. “But it’s a choir where anyone can get the spirit and take off. Sometimes the rhythm section will drop out and the horns will just play the chords, choosing whatever note in each chord we want. In Lafayette’s band you have a lot of choice in what you do–a lot. I can switch pitches each time I play the same section. That way we sound like we’re together even though we’re each doing what we want.”

Gilchrist’s first album for Hyena was 2004’s The Music According to Lafayette Gilchrist, a compilation of the best tracks from Asphalt Revolt and Collagic Dreams. His first album of new music for Hyena–and his first with the current New Volcanoes–was 2005’s Towards the Shining Path. It was a terrific record, but it got limited exposure because Gilchrist couldn’t afford to take the band on the road.

“I think I’m at my best when I have all my horns and we can dialogue with one another,” Gilchrist says wistfully. “I want to share the glory with them because these cats have been willing to work with me for almost no money, and that’s a big deal. But the economic reality is that it’s difficult to book the octet at this point in my career. So the plan is to get out there with the trio and raise my visibility, so I can eventually tour with the octet.”

Gilchrist finds himself caught in the age-old dilemma: He can’t get bookings until he’s better known, and he won’t be better known until he gets more bookings. It’s tough enough to book any up-and-coming jazz combo in today’s harsh economic climate, but it’s especially tough to book an up-and-coming octet. He figured he’d have a better shot with the smaller unit, but to take the trio on the road he needed a trio record. So he recorded his new album, Three, with just Jenkins and Reynolds.

“I sat down with the horn players and said, `Hang with me on this,’” Gilchrist explains. “`If we can draw some attention to the trio, eventually we’ll be able to take the whole band on the road.’”

“I think the trio record is great,” Thompkins says. “If you’re going to be a professional musician, you have to have several things going. How many groups does David Murray have? Seven or eight? The best thing about the trio disc is he’s getting press on it, and people are beginning to hear what Lafayette has been doing. That can only help us down the line.”

Three is not just an economic move, however; it’s also a document of how fast the pianist is growing. Because there’s more room in the arrangements than ever before, there’s more need for Gilchrist to solo. And because he needs strong themes to solo on, he’s writing stronger melodies than before. “The Last Train,” for example, is a lovely, melancholy ballad “inspired by a visit to the Baltimore office of the Urban League . . . built on one of the stops on the Underground Railroad.” Gilchrist’s piano solo twists the melody into new knots even as Jenkins and Reynolds are doing the same to the rhythm. The tension from one reinforces the tension in the other.

“I asked Mike Cerri once, `Why do people go nuts when we play “Syndicate”?’” Gilchrist says. “And he said, `Because they remember the melody.’ I realized he was right, so melody is the main thing I’m concentrating on now. Instead of writing the chords first and the melody second, I’m writing the melody first, because it’s easier to come up with interesting changes for a melody than it is to come up with an interesting melody for certain chords. And for a jazz tune to have personality it has to have a melody you can remember.”

Freddie Dunn once told Gilchrist, “Yeah, you’re the inside/outside cat.” That nickname sparked the title for “Inside Outside,” the final tune on the new album. When the trio played it at An die Musik in June, they began on the inside, working within the herky-jerky syncopation of the repeating rhythm figure. Before long, though, they were looking for a way out. Jenkins and Reynolds began shifting accents around, and Gilchrist began tackling the central two-bar motif with different voicings and in different keys. Soon he was outside the main theme, his fingers rippling across the keys in search of new melodic twists. He wasn’t out for very long, though, before he dived back inside the pocket, feeding on that rhythmic energy and looking for a new way out.

“That’s what creates the tension in the music,” he exclaims, “when I’m constrained within a structure and I’m straining to break out. The contradiction, of course, is I need the structure so I can break it down. I want the grooves, but I don’t want to be a prisoner of them. Sometimes I surrender to the current, sometimes I swim upstream. That’s the crucial contradiction in American music right now. It’s the main contradiction for the whole planet. Everyone loves freedom, but they also want running water and electricity, which requires a system, which requires restraint.”

Perhaps that’s why Gilchrist’s music feels so essential at this moment in time. As the modern world negotiates the relationship between freedom and structure, improvisation and repetition, individuality and collaboration, this Baltimore pianist of small renown is providing a model of how all those elements can co-exist without any one of them being diminished in the process.

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