R.I.P. Saafir

On Saafir, Ornette Coleman and the Art of Being ILL

By now, the notion that a great rapper’s flow can be compared to the phrasing of a skilled jazz musician is a well-worn-if inexact-analogy. The similarities between both forms are evident: BeBop, jazz’s great “modernist” revolution was born out of the social, political, and artistic ambitions of Black America during and immediately following World War 2. Hip-hop emerged in the 1970s in the wake of the Civil Rights/Black Power movement. Much like BeBop, Hip-Hop culture, and Rap music eventually took their places as young Black America’s predominant modes of creative expression.

If we were to accept the rapper-as-horn player metaphor as a truism, then the late West Oakland MC, Saafir would surely be rap’s version of free-jazz saxophonist and composer, Ornette Coleman. Despite becoming well-known as avant-gardists of the highest order, neither man’s innovations were divorced from the grassroots of their respective crafts. Before he would stun the jazz world with his radical flights of free improvisation, Coleman’s origins were extricable from jazz’s roots. Born in Fort Worth, Texas in the 1930s, Coleman grew up playing church music and the blues. As a young man, he toured with Silas Green From New Orleans, the country’s longest-running Black-owned Vaudeville show. A look at Saafir’s earliest recorded work shows that the innovative and distinct approach to MCing resulted from a profound stylistic breakthrough. The herky-jerky patterns, and abstract imagery that marked his best work only came after he’d mastered the more “conventional” style as heard in his guest verse on Plan Bee’s “Running From 5-0”. Despite being separated by so many elements (both significant and superficial), the core similarity between Saafir and Coleman is in their relationship to their respective art forms. Coleman took BeBop’s harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic foundation and upended it. By allowing the accompanists in his bands to follow the lead of the soloist/melodic lead and freely improvise around them, Coleman turned jazz’s structure and prevailing musical logic upside down. By questioning jazz’s established truisms, Ornette Coleman opened the form to new and exciting possibilities. Much like Coleman, Saafir disrupted rap’s conventions by cultivating a flow that often bounced around, on top of and behind the beat. In addition to his innovations in flow/pattern, Saafir pushed the conceptual and imagistic boundaries of what can be said in a rhyme. The vividness and absurdity of a Saafir verse is perfectly encapsulated in the song “Real Circus” from his landmark debut album, 1994’s Boxcar Sessions:

“I'm finally out of my cage, it's been ten swings since

I quenched the silence. Sure to erupt eyes-lids

Till they're queasy from the degree of the tilt of

A trapeze performer that's proven succession in

The progression of a juggler, vein-slitter, my spear

Shifted. Saafir's gifted like Black Santa…”

While there is no single turn of phrase, descriptive sentence, or essay that can effectively sum up the work of one of rap’s greatest innovators, a line from fellow rap disruptors, Anti-pop Consortium comes to mind: “Abstract but not arbitrary”. Saafir’s tendency to bend flows, words, and ideas to his will was not haphazard. His style was a crucial link in an old chain that unites a grand tradition. In this sense, rap music’s relationship to jazz goes deeper than any superficial connections that we may feel compelled to draw. Saafir, like Coleman and a host of other greats taught us that there are rewards for being relentlessly creative. You may not get rich in a world that both fetishizes and despises Black creativity, but when they lower you into the ground, those who know will remember you as one of the illest.

R.I.P. Saafir. Much love and deep condolences to his friends and family <3 

Saafir - Rarities, Unreleased, Guest Spots and B-Sides