Malik Crumpler: In ‘99-2000, I started going to jam sessions & improvisation workshops at La Pena in Oakland, ran by jazz musicians Josh Jones & Mike Auberg. Before that, we always performed in the streets to sell our tapes and chapbooks. Then some college friends at SFSU & I started Bayonics (world music, funk hiphop band), and we gigged all over S.F. constantly until I moved to New York in 2004. We usually gigged at college parties, house parties, artists lofts until 2002, when we started getting the better gigs at Brunos,  Elbo Room, Minna’s, Club 6, Milk Bar, little gallery pop ups, parades, fraternities, festivals at least twice a week, every week. By myself as a rapper and poet, I did featured gigs and solo gigs to promote my albums at the time, Drapetomania, Sanctified, Enchantment leads to… and a couple songs from Nothing Better To do at places like CAL, SFSU, SFU, Sugar Lounge, Great American Music Hall, Buddha Lounge, Slim’s, a bunch of spots in Oakland and Berkeley too. I did too many gigs to count or remember exactly where, but I was always jamming with hip hop and jazz musicians like Lorin Benedict, David Michel Ruddy, O-Maya, Street Scholars, Attik, Otayo Dubb, Black Dot, Black Box, Co-Deez, Howard Wiley, Geechi Taylor, Valentino Pellizzer did a couple jam sessions at the Jazz School with Ambrose Akinmusire, Howard Wiley and all those cats 2000-2004. I also performed at a lot of protest, Anti- Police Brutality, Anti- Bush, Anti- War rallies, festivals too for different organizations like La Raza, Black Students Union, Green Party all that. There were so many places to perform back then, with so many different genres, so often that it was the best diverse learning ground possible. In terms of specific locations in San Francisco back then, we gigged in North Beach, Haight district and the Mission the most, but I can’t remember the names of all those clubs and art lofts.

 

CN: Was there a relationship between Oakland and San Francisco’s rap communities that you observed during the period covered in the book?

 

MC: I had cousins in both rap communities, so for me it was always linked. My cousins in San Francisco & East Palo Alto had rapping friends in Midtown, Hunters Point, Double Rock & Fillmore like RBL POSSE, Totally Insane, Herm, JT The Bigga Figga, Chunk, Dre Dog, that whole Frisco, E.P.A. underground scene in the early nineties, they didn’t really work with Oakland rappers, at all until all that started to change in the mid & late nineties, when the audiences got bigger for both scenes. Later on, I’d hangout as the anonymous youngster around rap crews like Get Low, Hobo Junction, Bored Stiff, Zion I, some of Heiroglyphics, Del especially and all them had a lot to do with that unifying SF & Oakland. To be honest, mob music brought it all together, but that’s an entirely different story. By the 2000s, there was lots of collaboration between Oakland & San Francisco in terms of doing gigs together and featuring on one anothers albums. In hindsight it seems like after the big drug war era declined, the gang wars decreased and that made it possible for the two cities to unite and share their scenes. Nonetheless, if you had a gig in San Francisco, it meant you were starting to bubble. As for the book, Sanctified is a collaboration between musicians and rappers from the entire bay, that was when I mixed genres musically, and collaborated with various world music musicians in the bay, various genres of all that. Prior to that, my albums were mainly Oakland and Berkeley, until Sanctified when I finally got my cousin Problem Child Da Menace from San Francisco and his East Palo Alto crew to rock. But the most collaborative between Oakland, San Jose, San Francisco was Co-Deez album at that time.

CN: What are the anglophone performance spaces you organize or perform at in Paris, and what makes each space and showcase unique?

MC: I organize Poets Live, which is currently in limbo as we’re looking for a new location. The other performances spaces I frequent most are Spoken Word Paris, Paris Lit Up, French Fried Comedy, which all have a open mics. Then there’s AWOL writing workshop, B’AM and several different pop up salons. Each is unique in its format and audience, but they’re all the same in that their readers are always from every continent on the globe, so you get an entree of the planet by being at their readings. Also, the caliber from master to beginner is in full effect until you go to Berkeley Books Of Paris features music and writers and artists of all genres, their unpredictable and always great readings, exhibitions, and performances. Ivy Writers is where you find only the professional poets, who publish widely, teach in university, have well known publishers and celebrated books available. At all of these venues you’ll find internationally respected poets, both in academia, street culture and often times in pop culture. Then there’s Poets Live, which I host, we feature poets from everywhere on earth who have books published or are finishing them, and also performance artists. We don’t do music, we don’t do open mics. Then there’s Angora which is a selection of professional poets only, that read in the open mic format. So between all those venues, you can learn and be inspired by the entire world of poetry.

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Christian Niedan is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer. In the past, he managed the film website Camera In The Sun, which looked at how people think of the places and cultures they see on screen. He is a regular contributor to literary arts site Nomadic Press and At Large Magazine, where he publishes interviews with writers and photographers.