Innercity Griots Selections - Raiders Of The Lost Wax #2

An unofficial 12” pulling selections from Innercity Griots (1993), Freestyle Fellowship’s second album and the record that defined what the Good Life Café scene actually sounded like on wax. Aceyalone, Myka 9, P.E.A.C.E., Self Jupiter, and DJ Kiilu — four MCs who treated their voices like jazz instruments, switching cadences bar to bar, improvising off each other in real time.

The album was built on live instrumentation rather than samples — the Underground Railroad Band playing over Freddie Hubbard’s “Red Clay” and Miles Davis’s “Black Comedy” as jumping-off points, then spiraling outward. In a 1993 Los Angeles dominated by g-funk, this sounded like it came from a different city entirely. Myka 9’s description is the clearest: “We do double-time passages and runs and riffs. We improvise and play off of each other’s words and sounds — like jazz musicians do.”

What Tribe Called Quest was doing on the East Coast with sampled jazz, Freestyle Fellowship was doing live and freeform in South Central. The two movements are parallel rather than connected — same jazz-rap impulse, no direct transmission between them.