A jazz trio. A frenetic MC. A complex social message. A litany of references that range from Stormtroopers to Dragon Ball Z. It’s not a list of random words. It’s the formula for a hip-hop monster.
Durham’s The Beast makes jazz-infused, genre-bending music that uses booty-shaking rhythms to accomplish a long list of goals.
A year after graduating from UNC in 2006, music students Eric Hirsh, Pete Kimosh and Stephen Coffman hooked up with MC Pierce Freelon for an experimental jam session. The resulting band has honed its skills for two years and will release Silence Fiction, its debut full-length, Friday at Duke Coffeehouse.
“That first jam session was such a crazy experience for all of us that we knew that we had to take that creative energy and momentum and move forward with the band,” said Freelon.
With five songs resulting from that first meeting, the band moved forward, making its own twist on its genre, attempting to prove that hip-hop can achieve a larger appeal when its executed with great craft.
“Hopefully this band has crossover appeal because the emphasis is more on songrwiting than on verse-hook-verse-hook-beats-beats-beats,” said Hirsh, the group’s keyboardist. “Hopefully there’s something universal about that.”
The band doesn’t just use this accessible attack to have fun. In fact, the band chose its name to be emblematic of its social message.
“There’s a lot of different reasons we’re called The Beast,” Hirsh said. “One of them is that phrase, ‘in the belly of the beast.’ Here we are in the middle of this crazy society and universe that ultimately we are responsible for.”
This sense of higher responsibility goes further than musical intent. In addition to playing shows, the band also administers workshops on the makeup and history of hip-hop.
