Damani Nkosi Ill Camille
Harriett

Onoe Caponoe's High Focus Records debut 'Voices From Planet Cattele' on limited edition vinyl. The album is fully produced by South London Hip Hop veteran Chemo and features Jehst. The vinyl comes in full colour sleeve shrink wrapped.

Innercity Griots, the second album from Freestyle Fellowship, is perhaps the essential West Coast left-field rap album of the early ’90s. Released in 1993 on 4th & Broadway, it’s a towering, progressive hip-hop masterpiece that expanded rap’s boundaries through lyrical elevation and production innovation. Their talent was ahead of everybody else by light years. This is pure b-boy jazz.Freestyle Fellowship were some of the earliest technically dazzling rappers to come out of California. Mikah 9, P.E.A.C.E., Aceyalone and Self Jupiter – along with DJ Kiilu – forged their famed lyrical dexterity in the ultra-competitive crucible of the Good Life Cafe. Founded in Leimert Park, South Central LA in December 1989, this earthy health-food store and cafe was where the city’s finest microphone fiends would gather to showcase their freestyle skills at the Thursday night open-mic.Forcing MCs to raise the bar and stay fresh every week (a challenge made even tougher by the strict “no cussing” policy) the Good Life became an incubator for groups like the Pharcyde and Jurassic 5 and their events attracted big-names like Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, Ice-T, Pharrell, and John Singleton. To Self Jupiter, the Good Life was “college – you had to come with something peculiar, left-field each week”. It served as a predecessor to the Project Blowed scene, and inspired influential club nights like Low End Theory.The Fellowship’s “chopping” double-time raps were an evolutionary step for lyricism. A style that sounds freestyled: abstract hip hop before it existed. “We do double-time passages and runs and riffs” Mykah 9 told the LA Times in a 1993 article, “we improvise and play off of each other’s words and sounds-like jazz musicians do. What we are is liberators, liberating rap from its R&B/funk structures – that 4/4 [time] prison”. All 4 members were very different but they all had a unique jazz-scat style that was fresh. Their flamboyant chopping technique seemed like they were trying to rap at the speed of thought and it influenced everyone from Snoop to Ras Kass to Xzibit to Kendrick Lamar.In West African tradition a griot is a repository of vital history, sharing stories and wisdom with each generation by setting words to music. Over the past three decades, Innercity Griots has been ushered from rapper to rapper and from fan to fan as a rite of passage. As both oral history and foundational rap music, it will, indeed, outlast us all. Aceyalone was right.

In the words of the New York Times, “Kassa Overall’s new album — the irreverently titled 'Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz' — attests to the diverse musical identity of this drummer, producer and rapper. It’s one of the few genuine-sounding, full-scope amalgams of contemporary hip-hop and jazz to surface in recent years.""Go Get Ice Cream And Listen To Jazz is a window into the life of Overall – a Seattle born, Brooklyn based artist wrestling with the abhorrent American prison system, over prescription of pharmaceuticals, ebbs and flows of romantic relationships, and perils of trust all minced through a kaleidoscopic lens of a brilliant 21st Century composer. The storied intermingling of jazz and hip-hop are decades in the making, and Overall’s cross-genre mix is evidence of a musical revolution existing in the mind of a master musician. A drummer at heart, Overall’s depiction of new music is conceptualized through his versatility as a producer with an unruly passion for electronic-production and the use of laptops and samplers.

"The debut finale album from the original Lyrical supergroup HRSMN - Kurupt from Dogg Pound, Canibus from The Fugees, Killah Priest fro Wu-Tang and Ras Kass have finally formed like Voltron to give The Culture 'The Last Ride. Real Hip Hop is Back!