Black Milk’s rebellion

For years, fans kept coming up to Curtis Cross after shows begging for an album that didn’t exist. On record, Cross was known for concocting dusky, moonlit beats in the vein of greats such as the late J Dilla, who hailed from his hometown of Detroit. However, his live show is a different beast. Cross, better known by his producer alias Black Milk, strips his beats bare on stage and rebuilds them with the help of a three-piece live band known as Nat Turner.

“People would always come up to the merchandise table and ask if we had a live project or a project that represented what we just did on stage,” Cross says. “We decided that we definitely had to take some time to record a Black Milk Nat Turner project on wax.”

The result is the tight-yet-unrestrained experimentation of the The Rebellion Sessions, his latest and most daring album to date. On 2010’s Album of the Year, Cross worked in live instrumentation among his patchwork of disembodied funk, hard-hitting drums, and crisp engineering. Since then, Nat Turner joined Cross on tour, filtering his beats through a keyboard, bass, and drums.

On The Rebellion Sessions, Cross’s grizzled verses are absent throughout the album, allowing Nat Turner’s grooves to dominate the record. He eschews the typical role of producer, instead using his discerning ear for melody to curate and shape Nat Turner’s expansive jams. The album was recorded in six days with only a few song sketches prepared beforehand, giving every song a raw sense of spontaneity.

“I didn’t want a project that sounded like a jam session, so I had to edit stuff down, and arrange it in a way that made it feel like songs, but with the feeling of having fun and jamming out,” he says.

Initially he found it difficult to translate the sounds in his mind into technical terms musicians could easily understand. Producers often speak in the language of samplers and software, rather than music theory terminology. As a result, Cross directed Nat Turner by trusting his instinct for what sounds satisfying.

“Everything I do is based off of feeling, nothing I do is calculated,” Cross says. “If someone is explaining how great a record is but I don’t connect with it, then it doesn’t matter to me.”

Without any context, the finished product emulates the genre-defying styles of modern jazz musicians such as keyboardist Robert Glasper and trumpeter Christian Scott. Cross blurs the line between hip-hop and jazz to a greater degree than albums such as Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, where wordplay takes precedence over improvisation. The fact that The Rebellion Sessions comes from the mind of an esteemed hip-hop producer only cements Black Milk’s ability to favor compelling music over the rigid lines of genres.

“When people ask why I want to mess with electronic stuff over there and progressive rock stuff over here, I tell them that it’s second nature to me,” he says. “It’s all that I’ve known and heard since I’ve been in Detroit.”

Growing up in Detroit, Cross absorbed the city’s rich legacies of Motown, moody techno, and hard-bop jazz. All of those influences flicker in and out of his production through chopped-up soul samples or funky basslines lurking in the background. Detroit’s immense talent shaped Cross’s work ethic when he produced for Slum Village after J Dilla left to focus on his solo material in 2001.

“Slum Village was hard to please, which is rightfully so because Dilla was their producer so they had the best beats ever,” Cross says. “Having that kind of experience put me in the kind of mentality where I strive to progress and push the envelope and not just stay in one place.”

That mentality defines The Rebellion Sessions, and continues to make Cross one of hip-hop’s most original producers.