Sélébéyone - Steve Lehmann & Sélébéyone (2016)

I stopped posting Spotify player links for the most part because I didn’t want you, dear reader, to need a Spotify account in order to share my experience. But this record (along with the other Lehmann records I looked at) isn’t on Youtube anywhere and the Bandcamp page doesn’t offer streaming for most of the tracks. I don’t want to tell somebody how to run their business, but that’s an interesting choice for music that heads aren’t exactly lining up for around the block.

Lehmann has multiple albums exploring his interest in the intersection of edgy jazz and hip hop beats. This one leans into the hip hop side of the equation a bit more than his other records, but you still get Lehmann’s saxophone leading an accomplished jazz outfit.

Fronted mostly by Wolof-speaking Senegalese rapper Gaston Bandimic, this isn’t just some novelty musicology research project. Lehmann has some interesting ideas on the ways that hip hop culture can chew up and digest nearly any form of music and adapt it to its needs.