Oakland native son Kev Choice returned home Tuesday night to a well-attended show at Yoshi’s to play a concert with his band, the Kev Choice Ensemble.

At this point, it’s not a stretch to say the KCE may well be the most musical hip-hop act ever.

No, really.

Bandleader Choice is a classically-trained, jazz-educated pianist who also happens to be a highly-technical rapper, while his ensemble includes some of the Bay’s best young jazz lions — trumpeter Geechie Taylor and saxophonist Howard Wiley among them, as well as all-world funk-jazz bassist Uriah Duffy (who also has this little side gig with hair metal band Whitesnake).

Backstage after the show, Choice reflected on his musical journey and where he’s at, at this point in his artistic and creative process. Currently shuttling between Oakland and Atlanta, he said, “My whole thing now is just, putting out the music. I created 60 songs in 60 days so it’s not a problem creating the music. It’s letting people hear it and letting it speak for itself. So hopefully just putting out more music, getting on the road, things like that.”

His new album, "The Power of Choice," is “still in the baby stages,” yet early advance copies were available for the Yoshi’s audience. (Online copies should be available soon, Choice said.) The bandleader estimated that 60 percent of Tuesday’s set was new material, never before performed live — a lot to digest for both audience and his fellow musicians alike.

“Even my band members sometimes, they’re like, man, you hit us with so much new stuff, it’s hard to take it in,” he said. “But that’s kinda like how my mind creates.”



Anyone expecting by-the-numbers jazz or clichéd hip-hop was clearly at the wrong show. Apart from the radio hit “Definition of a Star,” during which Choice, D-Sharp and Tony Vic rapped about their stellar qualities, the music constantly shifted. Piano flurries transitioned into mid-tempo R&B, then surged into expansive jazz fusion or stanky funk, with hip-hop vocals on top. Any barriers between genres were methodically erased, as if they had no right to exist in the first place.

“I think [the complicated arrangements] are from my classical background. Classical, it’s not a four-bar loop," Choice explained. "Even when they restate the melody, they restate the melody with a different progression. Or there’s a coda, there’s a recapitulation.” Even with hip-hop music, he adds, “I try to make it flow like movements of a symphony. Symphonies, there’s no two bars, really, that’s the same. It’s all over. So that’s kinda my inspiration in that.”

Choice strives to create a balance between challenging listeners’ expectations and giving them easily-digestible material. His rhymes, similarly cover a wide range of topics.

“Even  tonight, I got into some deep stuff, then I tried to do some fun stuff. Tried to do some political stuff, tried to do some stuff for the women.”

The emotional catharsis of the set came on the songs “The Struggle” — which muses on the Oscar Grant shooting and the Johannes Mehserle verdict — and “Dearly Departed” — an elegy for former band member Dewey Tucker, who was murdered almost a year to the day of Choice’s Yoshi’s gig. (On January 12, it was reported that 4 men had been arrested for the crime.)

During the former, Choice rapped one of the most poignant lines of the night: The same day that Oscar Grant got murdered/I said forget music, I should have been an attorney.

Yet “Dearly Departed” resonated with even more feeling. Tucker’s girlfriend and family were present in the audience, Choice said, and though the band had rehearsed the music, he withheld the song’s lyrics during practice because he “didn’t know how they were gonna react.”

He and Tucker’s relationship had its ups and downs, he noted, but he clearly missed the man he called his “younger brother,” adding that it took him “306 days” to pen the song.

“It really took me that long to address that in a musical form,” Choice said. “I didn’t want to just make a tribute song and throw it on the net like, ‘yo this is for Dewey Tucker.’ I didn’t want to do that. It was hard to even address it ... I think it came out cool.”

The same could be said for the entire show, as Choice and the Ensemble didn’t waste a minute of their nearly two-hour set. Audience members were treated to complex arrangements with ever-changing progressions, interpolations of classic Stevie Wonder, P-Funk and Isaac Hayes (via Public Enemy), classical piano interludes and deeply-intellectual rhymes touching on a variety of subjects.

“I really don’t ever want the show to stop,” Choice said. "If it stops, sometimes, that’s cool, but I want it to keep flowing. It’s like a movement, it’s like a journey. That’s always how I want the ensemble to be.”

Experience more of Kev Choice at www.kevchoice.com.