Rappers, producers, and drummers came together at Cafe Nine on the corner of State and Crown Wednesday night to celebrate the release of a new album, and give a sense of how the underground hip hop scene connects New Haven and New York.
The common thread among the six acts on the bill was the producer Sasco, who was there to build anticipation for his latest album, The Hottest Year on Record, to be released on Friday. As the night progressed, it became more obvious as to why, as each act felt part of a larger aesthetic they all shared. That mood was set, however, by the first act, New Haven-based producer Kiluhmanjaro, who has already created tracks for numerous rappers but on Wednesday night was performing his first-ever live set.
It began with a rush of voices, then a stately beat, a lush soundtrack that Kiluhmanjaro quickly manipulated. Sounds morphed from texture to texture and from genre to genre. An R&B vibe dissolved into a wall of bass and beats while saxophones skittered overhead. Then it all burst into a West African gallop with blasts of horns. Janky percussion and a synth-heavy anthem followed. It was all evocative of a jazz club somehow turned inside out, sometimes heard from a distance, through water. He offered a short bow when his set was done.
Brian Slattery Photos
Hester Valentine, at the mic at Cafe 9.
The Bronx-based rapper Hester Valentine — who appears on Sasco’s upcoming album — took the stage next with Sasco as DJ. Valentine distinguished himself as a rapper who could rap over nearly anything, whether it was a noisy, beatless squall, a lumbering groove that seemed to slow time, or a heavy beat with glitches and rumbling bass. His voice, clear and percussive, sometimes unfurled into a scream, making a track or two redolent of a horror movie. The overall sense was of a voice crying through murk, insisting on its presence and its importance. The clash between voice and surrounding tracks, meanwhile, was at odds with the obvious camaraderie between Valentine and Sasco; they were collaborators, creating the sound they wanted to hear together.
The New York-by-way-of-Connecticut producer Sasco next did a set of instrumentals — some from The Hottest Year on Record — that showcased the musical landscape he was interested in exploring. It was a place of big, swinging, lurching beats with roaring bass, off-kilter drums, and jazzy keyboards and horns, a set of ingredients that together created an atmosphere that was somehow both chill and anxious. Toward the end of the set he kicked up the tempo to create high-energy, skittering beats, also crafting a moment to invite another collaborator, shemar, to the stage.
The Brooklyn-based shemar was up next with a set that grew in energy as he dug into song after song. Where Valentine built his raps toward frenzy, shemar exuded a focused determination in his delivery, letting the music build around him. The set reached a peak, and fell, over the last three songs, back down into the amorphous place where it had started. Once again, the musical thread tying all the acts together was strong.
Next up was Child Actor, a.k.a. Max Heath, who, in addition to his own music, had produced tracks for a few of the other rappers that night. Heath took the stage with only a laptop; he was there to play some unreleased material, some of them instrumentals, some of them complete with rappers. All of them showed a musician and producer who was simpatico with Sasco in his predilection toward dark, complex, atmospheric beats. But they also revealed a producer finding serious variation from song to song, deploying voices, keyboards, strings, and other sounds to guide listeners through a variety of moods.
It was left to The Runners Up — New Haven’s David Ramos and DJ Creative — to close out the evening, and they did that with style. The set began with Ramos on drums and Creative on turntables, passing quickly from rhythm to rhythm that was danceable, upbeat, and something of a motorcycle ride through the pop culture of the past six decades, encompassing R&B, synth pop, hip hop, and beyond. The duo’s love of the music that had come before them was clear. It was just as clear that they had innovations of their own to bring.
In the middle of the set, Ramos stepped out from behind the drums to rap, in time joined by Sketch tha Cataclysm. The journey nearly complete, both Ramos and Creative took up portable percussion that let them slide offstage and join the audience, amplifying the swirling rhythms on Wilie Colón’s and Hector Lavoe’s salsa classic “La Murga.” It was the right sendoff for the evening, connecting indie hip hop to the wider world and showing how it has always been a part of it all along.