It’s wild to think that a little over ten years ago, most of us didn’t know if we’d ever hear from Ishmael Butler again. The artist formerly known as Butterfly performed as one-third of the group Digable Planets in the early ‘90s to great acclaim, but couldn’t get any traction in the early ‘00s when he formed a new act called Cherrywine. After a period of silence, though, Butler teamed up with Tendai Maraire to form a new group called Shabazz Palaces, making some of the most experimental and challenging music of his career. Surprisingly, this forward thinking abstract hip hop found an audience and they have been dropping grand projects every few years since 2011. Their most recent output came back in 2017, when they released two companion albums, Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star and Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines. Now they come back another ambitious musical vision, The Don of Diamond Dreams.

One of the aspects of The Don of Diamond Dreams that makes this particular album so interesting is the way that Shabazz Palaces is keeping one foot in the past and one foot in the future. By looking to the past, Butler in particular is bringing in narrative influence of Gil Scott-Heron, Last Poets, and Lightnin’ Rod, as he takes these tales of street hustlers and other marginalized members of society and puts them front and center, while also pushing their setting into the present. He then mixes that in with his personal life as he looks at the women who have shaped his life, his journey in the music industry, and now having a son (Lil Tracy) following in his foot steps and embarking on his own career in the business. This is balanced on the musical side in the same fashion, with influences from the past that include everyone from Sun Ra to Funkadelic to The Egyptian Lover, while also engaging with the music that his son and his peers are making, with modern hip hop production techniques and vocal manipulations employed throughout. The whole album moves at a deliberate pace – never too slow to feel plodding or hesitant about it’s musical ideas, but never so fast that the message gets lost in the mix. Butler might be using vocoders, autotune, and other production techniques to manipulate his voice to stir up different emotions and reactions in listeners, but he never does it so much that you still can’t hear his words loud and clear. While Butler is the voice that is leading your journey through the album, Shabazz Palaces also gets a lot of help along the way, with contributions on vocals from Purple Tape Nate and Stas THEE Boss, vocals and keyboards from Darrius Willrich, percussion from Carlos Niño, sax from Carlos Overall, and bass from Evan Flory-Barnes. The whole thing comes together to form an album that is at once challenging and exciting, as Shabazz Palace bring together the past and the future in present, for all of us to enjoy.

Ishmael Butler isn’t making it easy on anybody, delivering an album not only this good, but this innovative, at this point in his career. The Don of Diamond Dreams is incredibly inventive as it walks a fine line between a wide array of influences, connecting the dots and forging a new path ahead. Once again, Shabazz Palaces has delivered one of the best albums of the year.