Submitted by CRAIG D. LINDSEY — Correspondent
Usually, when one thinks of African-American scholars, the thought gravitates toward stately, seasoned gentlemen like Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates or Stanley Crouch - you know, old guys.
At 28, with his boho appearance, you'd assume Pierce Freelon was the front man of his own band, not a man who teaches African-American studies to college students. But it turns out you'd be right about the band too.
When Freelon isn't splitting his teaching time between UNC-Chapel Hill (his alma mater) and N.C. Central, he's also the leader of the hip-hop/jazz quartet The Beast. The group, comprising Freelon and fellow UNC grads Eric Hirsh (piano), Peter Kimosh (bass) and Stephen Coffman (drums), melds jazz influences with Freelon's rhythmic, verbal flow and extensive knowledge of African-American culture, which he picked up at UNC and Syracuse University, where he got his master's degree in Pan-African studies.
"It's tough to be reading three, four books a week in grad school and have that information not find its way into your lyrics," says Freelon, during a phone conversation. But even as the rhyme-spitting front man - the Black Thought to this Tar Heel-filled version of The Roots - Freelon collaborates with his boys as a jazz collective would. "I think we're a band that writes songs together. Someone will come up with an idea and we'll improvise together - you know, like any jazz quartet."
Touring with mother
In the four years or so that The Beast members have been together, they've dropped several releases on their Bandcamp site, including last year's Guru Legacy EP, where they salute the work of Guru, the late Gang Starr MC who also successfully fused hip-hop and jazz. The group's releases are very Triangle-centric, as evidenced by the appearances of such local artists as Phonte, 9th Wonder, Tyler Woods, Kooley High, Carlitta Durand and Freelon's mama, jazz singer Nnenna Freelon.
Despite having a jazz great for a mom, Freelon didn't get into jazz until he got a jazz band of his own. "I appreciated my mom's craft. But it was not the music I was into," says the married father of two. He was a child of rap, listening to the bars dropped by such greats as Nas (his favorite MC), LL Cool J ("the coolest guy on the planet"), Public Enemy and The Notorious B.I.G.
At the same time, he saw how his mom handled being a working jazz artist while accompanying her to rehearsals and touring with her during his middle-school days.
"Seeing what it's like to do two sets, to do an 11 o'clock and a 1 o'clock set, at a smoky jazz club in Tokyo when I'm 13 years old - that was a very life-changing experience. And it exposed me to what a career in music entails," he says.
Freelon is pursuing a music career on his own terms, as he and the guys in The Beast continue to make inspiring yet engaging music that merges hip-hop intellect, jazz stylings and, eventually, generations of black-music history. That's something the band will put to the test as they perform at "Roots to Rap: A Musical Conversation" tonight at the N.C. Museum of History.
Spanning history
For the event, which will kick off Saturday's 11th Annual African American Celebration (also at the museum; see story on Page 12D), Freelon will take the decades-spanning hip-hop curriculum he's accumulated since his UNC days, and give a lecture with a backbeat by The Beast. Freelon calls the whole thing an "informance."
"Instead of having a PowerPoint project where I'm looking back at Robert Johnson's music and Ella Fitzgerald's scatting and tying that to songwriting and hip-hop and beatboxing, now I have a live band that can actually perform those things at a high level," he says.
At the end of the day, Freelon, like most African-American scholars, wants to hip young people to their history, while inspiring them to go in their distinctive direction. It's what his parents passed to him, and it's something he wants to pass to his kids, especially his 3-year-old son.
"I want him to see that I'm pursuing my passion with kind of an unconditional courage and enthusiasm," he says. "And, as long as he follows that lead, then whatever he's into, whether it's music, art or whether it's science or something completely different, then what I would hope - like any young person that I connect with - he takes from my life and career is that you're doing something that you love and you're passionate about, whatever that may be."
