The NY saxophonist and composer Steve Lehman's music has always drawn from disparate sources in distinctive ways, but with 'S�l�b�yone', he takes an unexpected turn: drawing, from modern jazz, Senegalese rap, live electronics, and underground hip-hop, to create a unique form of urban experimentalism. The project stands apart from almost every other jazz/hip-hop collaboration that has preceded it.
Hailed by The New York Times as a state-of-the-art musical thinker with a reputation for sure-footed futurism, and a quietly dazzling saxophonist, Steve Lehman has built a career creating innovative new music that packs a visceral wallop.
His critically-acclaimed octet has previously released arrangements of seminal hip-hop tracks, like Wu-Tang Clan's Living In the World Today and Camp Lo's Luchini. And his professional ties with Meshell Ndegeocello and other pioneering members of the contemporary R&B community date back to 2004: most recently Lehman was a featured soloist on Ndegeocello and Jason Moran's 2014 Blue Note release 'All Rise'.
The musical relationships underpinning 'S�l�b�yone' are decades old. HPrizm (AKA High Priest) - a legend of New York's underground hip-hop scene and a founding member of Antipop Consortium - has been one of Lehman's closest collaborators for over a decade. Saxophonist Maciek Lasserre, began studying with Lehman in 2005 and introduced Lehman to the burgeoning Senegalese hip-hop scene in 2010 and began working with Gaston Bandimic - one of Senegal's most distinctive young rap stars - a few years later.
The distinctive sound on 'S�l�beyone' is a result of the sonic expertise of noted hip-hop engineer Andrew Wright, a childhood friend of Lehman's since the early 1980s. Wright received a GRAMMY-nomination for his work on Kendrick Lamar's Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City, and in some ways, S�l�b�yone delivers on the promise of Lamar's more mainstream collaborations with contemporary jazz artists like Ambrose Akinmusire, Robert Glasper, and Kamasi Washington.
Press:
The international jazz-rap project S�l�b�yone is a rare case of the two genres mixing at their most far-out, abstract corners...Over its 41 minutes, S�l�b�yone walks the fine line stretched between fusion's twin perils - too much accommodation of preexisting tastes the one side, too much invention on the other - and makes the unusual triumph look easy. - (8.1) Pitchfork
