This event is General Admission Standing Room on the Floor, and Reserved in the Balcony.

The Digable Planets show previously scheduled at College Street Music Hall on September 15th has been moved to Middletown CT’s Harbor Park on the same night and is now a FREE event! Existing ticket holders will automatically be refunded and have the first chance to RSVP for the new show with code REACHIN until 12PM today here. RSVPs will be open to the public at 12PM at the same link, and are required for entry to the show at the new venue.

If you have any questions, please reach out to customersupport@manicpresents.com.

DIGABLE PLANETS

Digable Planets burst onto the music scene in 1993 with their Grammy-winning single, “Rebirth Of Slick (Cool Like Dat)”. Made up of Ishmael Butler (“Butterfly”), Craig Irving (“Doodlebug”) and Mary Ann Vieira (“Ladybug Mecca”), the trio carved out a unique style of jazz-informed Hip Hop. Shortly after, Digable Planets followed up with their debut album, Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time And Space), an ambitious offering that Pitchfork praised as “a world within a world, complete with its own language and monuments.” The group celebrates the 30th Anniversary of Reachin’ in 2023.

Melding Jazz samples, and complex rhymes that touched on everything from the nuances of city life (Where I’m From) to abortion rights (La Femme Fetal), Reachin’ was a rich and vibrant artistic statement as well as a huge commercial success (RIAA certified gold).

Digable Planets immediately followed up with Blowout Comb, a bold and colorful meditation on Black liberation. While the album did not initially reach the immediate commercial successes of Reachin’, the album has aged beautifully, influencing future generations of Hip Hop heads, young Jazz musicians and Afrofuturists. The trio spent the 2000s establishing their own individual creative voices with Butler’s Cherrywine and Shabazz Palaces projects, Mecca’s work with BROOKZILL! and Irving as “Cee Knowledge” leading Cee Knowledge & The Cosmic Funk Orchestra.

In 2015, the group embarked upon a string of wildly successful live shows and has been very active as a tight touring unit ever since. In 2017, they released Digable Planets Live, a live album that showcases many gems from the group’s catalog as well as the trio’s skill at rocking the crowd with a live band. A pioneering act that continues to cast a wide-ranging, genre-bending influence, Digable Planets have left an indelible mark on music. More than 30 years after their debut, their music still shines, and the iconic group continues to bring their celebrated stage show to excited crowds around the world.

Links: Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Spotify

KASSA OVERALL

Kassa Overall is a Grammy-nominated musician, emcee, singer, producer and drummer who melds avant-garde experimentation with hip-hop production techniques to tilt the nexus of jazz and rap in unmapped directions.

On his first two studio albums GO GET ICE CREAM AND LISTEN TO JAZZ and I THINK I’M GOOD, Kassa layered virtuosic drumming, meticulous production techniques, and incisive lyricism to establish himself as a rhythmic innovator and visionary poet, using his voice to address the injustices of the carceral system, the pharmaceutical industry, and anti-black racism, while wrangling with the perils of his own mental illness.

On ANIMALS, his Warp Records debut out May 26, Kassa pushes his kaleidoscopic, subversive vision further. He layers Roland 808s against avant-garde drumming in the vein of his mentors Elvin Jones and Billy Hart, the latter of whom he studied with at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Virtuoso musos appear alongside rap poets, including Danny Brown, Wiki, Lil B, and Shabazz Palaces. Top-flight jazz improvisation weaves in and out of orchestral string arrangements by Jherek Bischoff. The album’s diverse, all-star roster of collaborators includes several of his close friends, like vocalists Nick Hakim, Laura Mvula, Francis and the Lights, and jazz stars like Theo Croker and Vijay Iyer.

ANIMALS pushes Kassa’s message further too, the title a loaded metaphor for the paradoxes of his life as an entertainer and as a black man in America. ANIMALS is the sound of an artist aware of the cost of embodying one’s natural self in the public eye, a deep reckoning with the two-sided truth that to perform one’s freedom for an audience can mean succumbing to life inside a cage.

Links: Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Spotify