Updated August 30, 2024 at 08:30 AM ET
RZA is almost inseparable from the legacy of the Wu-Tang Clan hip-hop collective he helped form in 1992, putting his stamp on the genre through his unique way of mixing soul samples. These days, though, he's trying his hand at classical music. A ballet he premiered with the Colorado Symphony last year has now made its way into an album.
A Ballet Through Mud began with an old notebook of lyrics RZA found during the COVID pandemic. He had written those lines while growing up as a teenager on Staten Island, N.Y.
"Every day I would go to school, I would make sure I write a lyric as my way of getting my art out, as well as kind of making a journal," he told NPR's Steve Inskeep. "Some of those lyrics, of course, was fantastical, some of them was dealing with your first experiences with love, alcohol, drugs, etc." Many of those lyrics were written in class.
After dusting off the notebook's faded denim cover, RZA sat down at the piano to express the memories it evoked. At first, he tried to recite the lyrics. "I fought with that for months," RZA recalled. But then his wife, Talani Rabb, convinced him he could do without the lyrics, notebook or not.
"The inspiration was there, but then I realized that the music I was creating didn't need any lyrics. The music itself would tell the story," he said.
RZA, who's composed for films and TV shows, says he finds links between hip-hop and composing for ballet, where dancers "mime or mimic" ideas in their movements that might otherwise be expressed in lyrics. In his ballet, the story is about six youths who find themselves and are "transposed to their higher selves," RZA explained.
He named each character after a different diatonic scale. There are in fact seven modes: Ionian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Dorian, Phrygian, Aeolian and Locrian. But one character combines two modes.
"Ionian becomes Aeolian, meaning it becomes minor. You have to get the scale back and resolve," RZA said. "The story of Ionian is that once she went to her lower self, Aeolian, she had to get back to a higher self, which is Ionian."
This approach also reflects how Eastern philosophies inspired the Wu-Tang Clan, which linked the struggles of impoverished Black urban youths to Buddhist teachings on overcoming suffering.
"Mud is known to be dirty, right?" RZA said. "But out of the mud grows the lotus, and the lotus flower is the symbol of enlightenment [in Buddhism]. And sometimes, we got to go to the mud to come out here. And that's why it's called A Ballet Through Mud."
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