Klassik and Joey Grihalva delve into the story of a gifted yet archetypal “Milwaukeean.”

 

Klassik demonstrates how he blends a wide array of sonic and instrumental enhancement of his singing and rapping, here at an event at the forMartha wellness center on Center Street. All photos by Samer Ghani

Though it happened a week ago, this event still thunders through my memory, like a bolt of lightning across the Milwaukee skyline.

Because I’ve written in some depth about the book it celebrated, I’ll try to be quick, too. But I wanted to share some photos by Samer Ghani, of author Joey Grihalva’s reading and performance event with Kellen “Klassik” Abston, at the end of the recent Center Street Daze, last week.

The setting was unassuming, the new storefront forMartha, a wellness center on Center Street. Grihalva read from his new “biography-autobiography” The Milwaukeean, which is ostensibly a biography of his friend, hip-hop rapper-singer-songwriter-keyboardist Klassik. (The book is available at some retail outlets in Milwaukee, or directly from the author, who provides free shipping, here: https://www.joeygrihalva.com/product/the-milwaukeean )

Yet, including an array of wise-before-their time city voices, the book’s story amounts to a slightly oblique, thirty-something-crafted portrait of Milwaukee itself, which Klassik ingeniously thinks of as a “character” as much as a place. (Grihalva and Abston are close in age and friendship.) You see, Milwaukee wears the faces of countless young Black men with comparable personal stories, rife with tragedy, who grew up, lived and died, before their time.

And yet, Kellen Abston has survived, and finally begun to thrive, through simple twists of fate, spiritual will and a wealth of talent.

So, Grihalva, author of the pictorial history Milwaukee Jazz, has fashioned a story that reverberates closely with the heart of Abston’s daunting personal odyssey, ” A Tale of Tragedy and Triumph,” the book’s subtitle.

Here’s my previously posted review of the book:

In a new biography, hip-hop artist Klassik emerges transcendently talented, but still rooted, a native son of Milwaukee

At the reading/performance Grihalva also played recorded interviews that didn’t all make it into the book, including an extended interview with Milwaukee singer Adekola Adedapo about the “discovery” of a young Kellen Abston at a Heath Brothers jazz workshop, where the 10-year-old wowed people with an extended version of “Over the Rainbow” on saxophone.

Klassik and author Joey Grihalva share a light moment during their reading and performance event for the publication of Grihalva’s book about Klassik, “The Milwaukeean.”

This event alternated between book passage readings and Klassik’s performance, a rhythmic flurry of dancing, singing, rapping and electronic sound manipulation, which had an almost electrifying effect in such a small space, his voice often ranging into a gripping falsetto. At one point he sang “Not till everybody’s free in your mind…freedom has a price!”

His final untitled song swelled with startling power. At its climax, Kellen reached out repeatedly and implored the intimate audience, “Won’t you lift me up? Won’t you lift me up?” The effect had this listener feeling both the depths and the heights of the singer’s deep emotional cavern. I wasn’t alone. Afterwards, one burly, bearded man walked outside, leaned back against a car and said, “I almost came to tears.”

Klassik said he had written the song on July 4th, and this was its debut performance. One thinks back to Frederick Douglass’s bitterly eloquent public speech on July 4, 1875. It was a portrayal of the American Dream and its Constitutional ideals, betrayed by slavery and racism, Yet the speech also combined a despairing view of the political climate with criticisms of the black community and appeals for blacks to improve themselves.

Klassik, for his part, now strives “to make something beautiful,” in sunlit defiance of the shroud of ugliness and hatred that still haunts America.

Sometimes, in his effort “to make something beautiful” his voice cuts through black clouds of pain, soaring so high as if he might “kiss the sky.” And then come down like a bird, floating, winged by triumph.

Klassik is now busy preparing music for live performances to accompany Milwaukee Chamber Theater’s play Where Did We Sit on the Bus? running Sept.30 to Oct. 23.

At times, Klassik connected powerfully with his intimate audience at forMartha wellness center.

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In a new biography, hip-hop artist Klassik emerges transcendently talented, but still rooted, a native son of Milwaukee

Book review: The Milwaukeean: A Tale of Tragedy and Triumph by Joey Grihalva

Joey Grihalva will present SONSET — a book reading by the author and solo improv by Klassik — for The Milwaukeean, at a new venue, forMartha, 825 E. Center Street, from 7 to 9 p.m. Saturday. The event will follow the Center Street Daze street festival. Cover is $10, or $25 with book.

Is a thirty-ish hip-hopper with only regional renown worthy of a biography? In his new book about Klassik (Kellen Abston), author Joey Grihalva forges, in effect, a freshly painted, still-mutating portrait of a creative man, of Milwaukee and of contemporary times, with all the urgency and potential for tragedy and agency that all implies. In that sense, Klassik emerges as a comparatively humble embodiment of a Black Milwaukeean, even as he manifests genius that might characterize the city. The painfully enlightened and haunted saga – he watched his father die of bullet wounds at age 11 – bends toward the arc of triumph, if justice remains elusive.

The victory comes, in one sense, because the personal is still political. Klassik is one of many who’ve grown as the art of hip hop has grown – fitfully, defiantly, and dynamically – to where Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017. If there’s a connection, Klassik has much more in common with Lamar’s 2015 jazzy masterwork To Pimp a Butterfly than with Lamar’s ensuing album Damn.

It might also be the cultural difference between Compton, California and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Maybe, ultra-hipness vs. a kind of ultra-hopeness? As in “keep hope alive.” As this book reveals, Klassik’s deep troubled history with, and vision of his hometown, sets him apart. It’s partly why he’s watched many Milwaukee area rap artists become bigger names than him.

Standing over his hometown’s skyline, Kellen “Klassik” Abston says he thinks of Milwaukee as a character more than a place. Photo courtesy Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel 

That does not mean they’re better. That’s why, among increasingly aware Midwesterners, Klassik is as essentially Milwaukee as contemporary hip-hop gets. Grihalva captures a nearly lost Midwestern bonhomie, a pan-racial faith in humanity, hidden beneath the grime of post-industrialism and the crime of racism.

Klassik, who studied jazz saxophone with Milwaukee master Berkeley Fudge, was an early musical prodigy. To the degree he manifests his own filtered amalgam of jazz, classic R&B, and hip-hop, I hear and feel how much he makes good on the thoughtful presumption of his name, Klassik. His previous album, American Klassiks, demonstrated how he can reinvent classics of American vernacular musics, and make them present, alive for today and pointing a beacon forward, musically and spiritually. The artist in him won’t do it any other way.

“This is the problem with Kellen’s stuff – it’s too smart,” says his friend Jordan Lee, a DJ, and a former station director at 88/Nine Radio Milwaukee, who’s also a member of the jazz-hip-hop trio KASE, with whom Klassik as recorded and collaborated. 1 “It was never going to work at the beat battle,” referring to a competitive hip-hop event Lee produced from 2005 to 2015, known as the Miltown Beatdown, which brought together produces rappers, and hip-hop heads from all over the city.

Rather than always “on the beat,” that can be as delimiting as it is compulsively attractive, Klassik’s music unfolds with an almost Midwestern shapeliness, as if informed by the Kettle Moraine as much as by the staccato pulses of the urban environment. As a primal Klassik source, I’ve always heard the soul-praying-to-the-moon existential angst of Marvin Gaye, whom he shouts out on “Black-Spangled Banner,” on American Klassiks, recorded live late one night in Bay View’s Cactus Club.

Klassik’s expressive power dates back to, among other things, Marvin Gaye and the hauntings of his childhood. Courtesy IAMKLASSIK.com.

He’s also decidedly more improvisational than most hip-hop or pop. “Maybe it’s the jazz purist in me,” he muses to Grihalva. “When you think about live music and playing an instrument, even the most rehearsed and refined part has its own idiosyncrasies or little inflections that make it human. I’m making something, I’m adding layers and depth.” 2

Klassik performs at Pianofest, at the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, a few years ago. Singer Adekola Adedapo recalls, at age 10, Kellen played “Over the Rainbow,” on saxophone at a Heath Brothers jazz workshop at the Wisconsin Conservatory, one of the first discoveries of his talent. Photo courtesy JGCA

The book, a prime example of “new journalism,” is also the author’s own story, about his relationship to his subject and their shared hometown, “an eternal tie that binds.” Abston and Grihalva are virtual contemporaries and Grihalva teaches at Milwaukee’s High School of the Arts, which is Abston’s alma mater.

Part of Abston’s burden is that he feels he could have done more than simply freeze up, to possibly save his father from dying, and that, 20 years past, Robin Abston’s murder remains unsolved. That’s plenty to drive a young man to drink and drugs – a large part of his struggle, aside from his often-exquisite peculiarity as a young, gifted, and black man, within our race-obsessed culture. And yet he won’t leave Milwaukee, as partly a spiritual detective still on a homicide case grown cold for most others. His relationship with police is deep ambivalence, hardly hatred. But he’s also doing close investigation of his own identity, which messes with him, with ghosts of what he’s been, shouldn’t be, won’t be, and can be.

Klassik’s bling always includes the dog tags of his father, veteran Robin Abston, who was murdered 20 years ago, in a crime that remains unsolved. Courtesy Milwaukee Magazine

Ultimately the redemption and triumph of the story is the hard-earned wisdom that arises from it, in the experiences and voices of both author and subject, as well as a choir of street-sage homies. The way that choral mosaic enlightens the story, like a vast stain glass window, is Grihalva’s achievement, his crafting of a sense of authenticity by finding common cause with your roots. One of Klassik’s defining ventures into communal creativity was his key role, in the summer of 2016, in Milwaukee’s Strange Fruit Festival, named for the searing anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit” popularized by Billie Holiday. The festival was spurred in response to two police killings of unarmed black men on back-to-back days: Alton Sterling in Louisiana, and Philando Castile, killed in his car in St. Paul Minnesota.

“That was one of the first times where I felt pulled artistically, in terms of feeling a responsibility with my platform,” Kellen explained. “It heightened this desire to wield it, almost like a weapon, for good.” His profile was rising, as he was performing in New York City during the first two nights of Strange Fruit. Kellen flew back to Milwaukee for the final night of the festival.

Then, that weekend’s Saturday afternoon, Milwaukee police shot and killed Sylville Smith in the Sherman Park neighborhood. The incident sparked riots that culminated in the burning of a gas station, a bank, and a beauty supply store, images seen on international news the next morning.

And there, defying hell-on-earth fury, Klassik and friends conjured a lifeline to redemption. “Everybody was on their A-game…It was such an amazing event,” he says. “You could tell everybody was there for the betterment of the community in whatever small or large way they could. And was just crazy timing that we had this festival amid the madness that ensued.” The event played again the next two years, and Abston wrote a manifesto for a potential relaunch of the festival, though it never got off the ground.

Much chaos and transformation has come down since then, the era of Trump and George Floyd, and Klassik has achieved a kind of personal-is-political triumph of textured passion on his last album QUIET, with assists from Milwaukee artists who’ve gone to greater renown, SistaStrings, the nationally celebrated singers-string-players, and folk-rock artist Marielle Alschwang, among others.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about protest in the form of joy, specifically Black joy,” Abston says. “With the new stuff I’m working on, there is this element of defiance in being happy and free. That’s like the most powerful thing you can do as a minority in this country.”

The power, he understands, also derives from accepting himself as a Milwaukeean, “The Milwaukeean.” He’s lucky to have a biographer as attuned as this one, who can tell his story so tenderly and beautifully. Abston reflects on the notion of faith: “If I hit a good note or I’m writing a good melody or these chords have a certain color or have the ability to stir up emotion from thin air, that’s magic. That’s God. It’s all those things. It’s being connected to something greater than ourselves.”

Almost two years ago to this day, he meets with Grihalva at high, windswept Kilbourn Reservoir Park, which overlooks downtown where North Avenue curves into Riverwest. It’s one of his favorite places in the city. “I would go up to that hill over there when I was super-fucking depressed. I would just sit and cry, let it out and wipe them tears off. Then this warmth would come over me, especially at night. Something about the lights. It’s weird because it’s not a spectacular skyline. But it’s mine, you know?” He continues, “In all my videos, I’ve always thought of Milwaukee as a character, not a location.”

That idea of making a city a living, breathing character – a father figure? – seems to speak volumes about Klassik’s genius, as an archetypal son of a quintessential American city, in all its grit and glory, it’s patriarchal sorrow and shame, its defiant brotherhood and sisterhood.

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  1. Klassik’s most recent appearance on a recording is his largely wordless vocalizing on KASE + Klassik: Live at the Opera House, on B-Side Recordings.
  2. Grihalva’s previous book was Milwaukee Jazz, a photo history from Arcadia publishing’s Images of America series.