JIBRIL HOUGH VIA FACEBOOK

Umar Bin Hassan, a member of pioneering recording group The Last Poets (left, with Charlotte community activist and promoter Jibril Hough), will perform Aug. 21 at Petra's. Tickets are $10 in advance and $15 day of the show.

One of the Last Poets is going solo in Charlotte.

Umar Bin Hassan will perform Aug. 21 at Petra’s, where doors open at 8 p.m. and show starts an hour later. Tickets are $10 in advance and $15 on Saturday. Admission is limited to people 21 years of age and older.

The program is billed as a night of spoken word, jazz, and hip-hop. Along with Bin Hassan, award-winning spoken word artist Bluz Rogers, Antonio Diaz and Tony McCullough of Charlotte-based jazz and funk band Groove 8 will perform.

Hassan, 72, who lives in Detroit, joined the Last Poets in 1969 at the confluence of Black nationalism and the civil rights revolution, still performs with the socially conscious group, whose breakout 1970 album This is Madness is a pioneering forerunner of the rap genre. In addition to performing spoken word, Bin Hassan has gone solo as a recording artist starting in 1993 with his debut album, Be Bop or Be Dead, which combined rap, house, and jazz elements, as well as To the Last (1996) and Life is Good (1999).

He has toured Charlotte with the Last Poets, but this is his first time here as a solo act.

“I’m glad I’m able to come back now just by myself,” Bin Hassan said via telephone. “It’s been some years since we’ve been there and never been back, so I’m happy to come again.”

As a godfather of modern hip hop, Bin Hassan said spoken word’s cultural impact has grown, as has the recognition for the genre’s best wordsmiths. Before legendary creatives like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Public Enemy Tupac Shakur or Common, there were The Last Poets.

“That’s what’s changed,” he said. “Giving the kids a whole lot of money … helps in the sense of using the word to inspire somebody or pick somebody up or make somebody’s world better.”

The late poet Amiri Baraka referred to The Last Poets as “the prototype rappers,” but traditional music genres are part of Bin Hassan’s family story. Combining social commentary, rap, spoken word and empowerment pays homage to those roots.

“A musician who happens to be a poet and a poet who happens to be a musician is the same thing,” he said. “Trying to express feelings at a moment in time when they can realize what’s going on and you can touch them with your skill and your art. My father was a jazz musician – he was a drummer – so I guess I had to be the poet.”

Comments