Amerigo Gazaway is a producer from Nashville best known for mashup projects like Yasiin Gaye or Fela Kuti. Gazaway is not a one trick pony, though, as he’s actually been making his own beats and rapping for years as well, they just haven’t gotten the same shine since his mashups took off. In 2016, Gazaway provided the score to a short documentary called No Free Walls: Art and Gentrification Collide in Bushwick. The soundtrack was never officially released, so Gazaway took it upon himself to assemble all of the beats he made for the doc, add a few bonus beats, and then present No Free Beats.

The subject of the documentary is The Bushwick Art Collective, a street art/graffiti group started Joseph Ficalora in the Brooklyn neighborhood. It’s a compelling look at the push/pull relationship of art, gentrification, and trying to improve the place you live without getting priced out of it. If you watch the documentary, most of the music comes in the form of beats that play in the background while people talk about these issues, so you don’t necessarily notice the beats in any sort of major way. Now that Gazaway has released No Free Beats, you can finally appreciate what a Gazaway original beat tape sounds like. This is a documentary about graffiti in New York, so Gazaway channels a lot classic New York hip hop with his beats. It’s grimy, jazzy boom bap that makes for the perfect soundtrack for walking around the borough. Where the real interesting piece comes in is when you start to listen just a little more closely, and you can hear all these clever ways in which Gazaway is referencing these classic NYC hip hop tracks, but still making it his own beat that stands up on its own. It might sound simple while you’re listening to it, because all the beats sit back in the groove so well, but the balance that Gazaway is striking is pretty difficult to achieve. It only sounds easy because Gazaway has put in so much work over the years to absorb all of this music and learn how to filter everything through his own unique lens.

If you listened to No Free Beats with no outside information, you’d get a solid beat tape full of East Coast boom bap. When you listen to this release in context, you can start to pick up on all of these clever ways in which Amerigo Gazaway is communicating and contributing to the conversation about New York with his beats. It’s an incredibly interesting and enjoyable listen.