RZA is rarely without something to do, but during the pandemic, like many, he found himself with more downtime than usual. He decided to dedicate himself to another project: cleaning out the closet of his home library.
When you’re Bobby Digital, the urge to create can strike any moment. That day, inspiration arrived via a duffle bag stuffed in the back of his closet. Inside were old notebooks from his teenage years, each containing hundreds of lyrics written while growing up on Staten Island. Reading through them, now in his California outpost, the journals serve as a touchpoint in his story. “I saw the growth of myself as a person even, beyond my growth as just an artist or emcee,” RZA says.
Those notebooks would form RZA’s latest project and first classical album, A Ballet Through Mud, which debuted as an actual on-stage ballet in 2023. When the LP was first announced, fans speculated that it would infuse the genre with the hip-hop beats RZA is so revered for, but A Ballet Through Mud is a classical project through and through.
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After discovering his long-lost notebooks, RZA sat down at the piano to translate the flood of emotions he was grappling with into a song. He tried to rap the lyrics over the piano but the result was awkward. For months, he battled with the decision to pair the instrumentals with lyrics. It was his wife, Talani Diggs, who encouraged him to let the compositions stand on their own.
Few hip-hop artists possess the symbiotic dexterity that RZA has embodied throughout his nearly 40-year career. While best known as the de facto leader of the Wu-Tang Clan, he’s also scored movies like the first two installments in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill series and cult classics like Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. He also wrote and starred in The Man with the Iron Fists, a martial arts film set in 19th-century China and co-created a fictional series based on his own rap group’s rise, Wu-Tang: An American Saga.
To adapt the lyrics into a ballet, RZA created characters, six college freshmen, each named after a musical mode: Mixolydian, Dorian, Ionian, Lydian, Phrygian, Aeolian and Locrian. Reflective of a musical scale, the story follows the characters as they become “lower and higher versions” of themselves while exploring themes of love, personal growth and friendship.
“Maybe I have to start sharing this side of me.”
A Ballet Through Mud might have never seen the stage if not for a Zoom birthday party for RZA’s friend, during which the artist played a song on the piano for the 20 virtual attendees. “Everybody felt touched, and I usually only play the piano for my wife,” RZA says. “I thought, ‘maybe I have to start sharing this side of me.’”
When he had nearly finished the compositions, RZA approached Anthony Pierce, the Chief Artistic Officer of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, to ask if they would record the instrumentals for him. Pierce, however, wanted RZA to collaborate with the orchestra on a live production.
They settled on putting out a live rendition of the Wu-Tang’s 1993 debut LP Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and a ballet that would be performed to RZA’s new compositions. Choreography was fleshed out over four months by Yusha-Marie Sorzano and incorporated tai chi and kung fu, art forms that RZA frequently cites among his chief influences.
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“I would just go to the rehearsal, like a film director would, and make sure that everyone knew that there was a character, what that character was going through, what was the emotion, and then they had to translate that to dance,” RZA says. “It was like a Hollywood production, Broadway production and classical music production all in one.”
The format of the ballet borrows from that of a Greek epic. At the same time, the incorporation of martial arts reflects Buddhist teachings that RZA has been studying – the name of the album is inspired by the lotus flower as a symbol of enlightenment. The lotus grows from mud, mirroring Black youth’s struggles in the US and the Eastern philosophy of looking at suffering as part of the journey to something greater.
The track “Aeolian Beauty,” one of the project’s standouts, is a contemporary take on the story of a monk traveling from India to China to spread his teachings. He arrives covered in mud and is overlooked by the monks he encounters but he reminds them of the lotus’s origins, after which he’s heralded for his wisdom.
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Even in the classical genre, the music bears RZA’s fingerprints, with structured songs that gradually build as they progress. The artist likened the process of producing the ballet to scoring a film, in which he’s “trying to tell the story without stepping on the emotion.”
“You can’t be overbearing,” he notes. “The music has to be there, but kind of subtle. For instance, you might be able to hum the Indiana Jones theme song, but when you first watched the movie, you could only feel it.”
Since he composed the music before the ballet being choreographed, he lacked the same visual reference that a film would provide, solely working off of the lyrics he wrote decades prior. Thankfully, the raps penned by his teenage self were quite evocative. The song “Divine Intervention” was based on the witty rap “Joe Was a Nerd” in which a group smokes and drinks together before chasing their friend Joe through an abandoned building. As he’s running, a glass window breaks and injures him. In ballet form, the task lies in relaying the characters’ emotions through instrumentals and choreography without leaning too literal. Throughout the performance, RZA wanted to avoid “telling” the audience what to feel, offering a more ambiguous experience that allows them to derive their own interpretations.
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A Ballet Through Mud was performed across two nights in February 2023. It wasn’t until a year and a half later that the 11 songs that comprise the ballet were officially recorded and released as a digital album. Hearing the LP sans choreography is a different experience but not at all limiting, expanding the potential for the listener to develop their own conception of the story’s narrative.
Fresh off the album’s release, RZA says he still has more work to do in the classical genre. In fact, he’s already at work on composing a project entitled Black Fountain that converges classical and jazz music. The concept was inspired by the late jazz musician Barry Harris, who said there hasn’t been a classical album “made with a jazz mind.”
“It’s gonna take me a year to finish it, so maybe somebody will beat me to it,” RZA says. “But that’s my dream.”
