Seconds into any Digable Planets’ song and you’ll hear it: the Afrofuturism of Sun Ra, the unorthodox free jazz of Albert Ayler, the black spirituality of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, the spoken-word funk of the Last Poets. Freedom, progressivism, oneness, harmony, and serendipity are the core tenets that would come to define the rap trio and their ideology throughout their career. How fitting, then, that intuition and a kiss of luck would birth their first jazz rap odyssey, 1993’s Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space), which is both a product of community and exploration.
Digable Planets followed in the conscious footsteps of the ’90s New York collective Native Tongues—spearheaded by A Tribe Called Quest, Jungle Brothers, and De La Soul—which was cultivating a more positive-minded, jazz-influenced rap community. Linking from varying backgrounds, the three Planets MCs—Ishmael Butler, Craig Irving, and Mary Ann Vieira—sought to embody the inclusivity their forebears had brought to rap. Reachin’ tested the limits of hip-hop alchemy, creating otherworldly transmissions that sampled hard-bopping jazz acts. They turned Karl Marx, Sonny Rollins, and Parliament into pillars of their cool, communal space.
The group formed through chance encounters in 1987, as if by kismet. Each member was already active on local rap scenes: Butler was workshopping Planets, pretending he was a group on his demo, Irving was booking shows around Howard University and rapping in another Tongues-inspired group called Dread Poet Society, and Vieira was in a dance crew that backed up rap acts when they came to town. After repeatedly running into each other along the coast—in New York, Philly, and D.C., at venues, house parties, and hangout spots—Butler finally enlisted Irving and Vieira for the third iteration of his ongoing, fledgling Digable Planets project. They took on the names Butterfly, Doodlebug, and Ladybug Mecca respectively, and the group quickly congealed, with each member possessing their own effortless style and indelible flavor.
The newly-minted trio signed with Pendulum Records in ’92, and they started recording songs for their debut album almost immediately. They needed to cut records for a production demo, and Butterfly suggested they use an old Dread Poets Society song called “Skin Treatment.” With the blessing of Doodlebug’s old group mates, Digable combined the song with another called “Brown Baby Funk,” a fusion that birthed “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat),” the unfadable jazz rap record that won the group a Grammy and put them on the map. With both local jazz and rap clubs backing the single, the airplay-boosted cut continued to build momentum. They didn’t set out to be a “jazz rap” group; they simply made use of available resources, sampling what was around them and being as creative as their circumstances would allow. Their raps reflected their respective worlds merging: Butler’s jazz roots, Irving’s street savvy, and Viera’s cross-cultural identity.
Reachin’ is an album about freedom—from convention, from oppression, from the limits imposed by the space-time continuum. It envisions slick rhythms and grooves as emancipation from the natural order of the physical universe; as Ladybug Mecca puts it on “Last of the Spiddyocks,” “It’s simple: Swing be the freakin’ of the time/The spinnin’ by the kings good for speakin’ of the mind.” Its smoothness feeds the agency of its inhabitants, whose vivid, weirdo raps conceptualize life outside of the binary.
There’s some talk of confrontational inner city street politics, but Digable were foremost promoters of peace and unity, and both their rap names and their music bore out their messages. Reachin’ found a through-line from more philosophical thinking to pragmatic street-dweller wisdom and logic. References from big thinkers like Marx, Fromm, Sartre, Camus, and Nietzsche are scattered across the record, on songs like “Pacifics (Sdtrk ‘N.Y. is Red Hot’).” The album got its name from an essay by Argentinian writer and theorist Jorge Luis Borges. They, like Borges, theorized that time and space are conceptual, relating only to individuals. Outside of its obvious jazz homage, the title track was meant as a mark of their aspirations, as Butterfly put it, their efforts “trying to get to a new place.”
Reachin’ is at once vintage and futuristic, a vision for a new utopia influenced by the past, daring to imagine insulated black communities as separate from Earth—unified, Afrocentric, and untarnished by subjugation. It’s a world within a world, complete with its own language and monuments and dogma—comparing New York to a museum, its graffiti as much high art as the work of Dadaist Salvador Dalí. Digable Planets make their own pre-internet information exchange, where traveling a few blocks could mean an introduction to a completely new milieu, where little ever gets lost in translation, where the inspiration for ideas occurs as spontaneously as a trumpet solo.
Butterfly produced Reachin’ alongside soundmen Shane Faber and Mike Mangini in basic, makeshift studios erected in their tiny Jersey apartments. They were each well equipped to help see the group’s vision through. (They had done programming and engineering work for Run-D.M.C., Sean Combs, Queen Latifah, and Leaders of the New School. Faber was the engineer for Tribe’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm.) The album’s soundbed is warm and swinging. Carefully selected samples are sewn together at the hem. One sample might split open to reveal another, as on “What Cool Breezes Do.” Or they’ll all feed right into each other; the flutes, guitars, and bass that segue one into the next on “Nickel Bags” are all separate elements from separate songs. The samples they couldn’t afford, they recreated. Each track is unique, and yet every one is a puzzle piece completing the group’s cosmic take on transference.
As the album’s primary architect, Butterfly is at its center, but songs are often driven by Ladybug Mecca, who is silvery in her delivery, slipping promptly in and out of moments like a preternatural guru. Doodlebug imparts his wisdom as digressions, kicking facts in a wingman capacity. As a unit, they never miss a beat, constantly attuned to each other’s frequencies, moving in sync and sharing ideas. So much of the action is reliant on their ability to read each other and react accordingly, to big-up someone when the moment strikes or to cede the spotlight just in time. This awareness pays off on “Time & Space (A New Refutation Of),” where each verse latches into the next, every MC propelling the one that comes after. The other members even give Butterfly the chance to do a few solo cuts, somehow never sucking the wind out of the group’s sail. “La Femme Fetal,” an upright bass-led pro-choice parable, is written in the style of Butterfly’s idol, Jalal Mansur Nuriddin of the Last Poets, with a loose, almost interpretive flow that ebbs and rises to suit the inflections of Nuriddin’s cosmic storytelling. The ode, one of rap’s earliest defenses of women’s rights, serves as a cornerstone of the group’s progressive sensibilities.
Reachin’ is among hip-hop’s greatest artifacts, the realization of the Native Tongues vision for perfect rap harmony. They personify the balance they promote. It’s an album that questions the very fabric of our existence while celebrating its nuances. As Digable Planets refute the boundaries of their continuum, their imagined cosmology creates a jazzy, spatial anomaly full of sonic wonders and game theory. It is an enduring, inclusive work that helped usher in a wave of vibrant, oddball thinkers in rap, a funk dimension that envelops you and embraces all. In service of the collective, one of rap’s mellowest crews shared a heartfelt ode to soul and jazz that sought to open the gateway into a more enlightened future.
