Shafiq Husayn

Producer, multi-instrumentalist, and baritone rapper/singer Shafiq Husayn contemporizes and transmutes the funk of early-'70s Sly & the Family Stone and Stevie Wonder, bossa nova, avant-garde jazz, and Afro-beat, among other inspirations, all through a cosmopolitan hip-hop filter. One of the few musicians with bicoastal roots in early hip-hop, he ran with two of the form's most powerful organizations, Uncle Jamm's Army and the Zulu Nation, before he initiated his production career with Ice-T, heard most prominently on the Top 20, gold-selling album O.G. Original Gangster (1991...