Chuck D. wants to help hip-hop. He's looking to the jazz world for ideas at NJPAC

Chuck D. is a very busy man. The iconic Public Enemy emcee and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee has the future of hip-hop on his mind.

He’s the co-founder and president of the Hip-Hop Alliance, a union fighting for fair wages and royalties, as well as health and retirement benefits for members of the hip-hop and R&B communities. He also works with the organization Hip-Hop Public Health to increase health literacy and inspire healthy choices in communities of color.

“We’re dealing with grown-folks (stuff), man,” said the Long Island native, now 62. “And I know the performance and the artist is the core of it, but it’s sort of like rushing to get that chocolate cake dessert and you didn’t eat your greens. I’m in greens mode right now.”

It’s been 35 years since Chuck D. and Public Enemy exploded into the popular consciousness with the band’s debut LP, 1987’s “Yo! Bum Rush the Show,” and more than two years since the group’s latest album, the 2020 release “What You Gonna Do When the Grid Goes Down?”

These days, Chuck D. said, his focus has been largely on matters beyond the realm of artistic creation.

“I’ve been trying very hard to build the road of respectability of hip-hop so the Lamborghinis or the Teslas can roll on top of it,” he said. “I was just tired of the genre being in the swamp. And it’s one thing you see jazz artists understand because they’re sort of on a road that’s been paved decades before with a respectability or a certain autonomy that was able to tell the world to (expletive) off if you weren’t on that wavelength.”

The hip-hop community, he said, hasn’t had that same respectability or autonomy.

“We’ve had the casualty of trainwrecks being our narrative,” he said. “So 2020, I said, ‘Well, it’s never going to be a road that works unless I start road-building,’ so that’s where I am on that.”

That road-building work brings Chuck D. to Prudential Hall at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark on Saturday, Nov. 19. “Represent! A Night of Jazz, Hip-Hop and Spoken Word” will feature Chuck D., Black Thought of The Roots, Rakim, Speech of Arrested Development, and Dupre “Doitall Kelly” of Lords of the Underground.

There also will be poets and spoken word performers, including Nikki Giovanni, jessica Care moore, The Last Poets (Abiodun Oyewole, Umar Bin Hassan and Babadon Babatunde), Sean Battle and Treasure Borde of EvoluCulture.

Grammy-winning bassist and NJPAC jazz advisor Christian McBride will serve as musical director and perform with his electric ensemble, A Christian McBride Situation. Saxophonists Javon Jackson and Ravi Coltrane are also on the evening’s roster, and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka is expected to attend.

“Represent!” is part of NJPAC’s 11th annual TD James Moody Jazz Festival, with performances running Thursday, Nov. 10, to Sunday, Nov. 20. "Represent" is also a presentation of City Verses: Amplifying New Voices through Jazz and Poetry, a joint initiative of NJPAC and the Newark campus of Rutgers University.

“We’ve covered so much ground over the last decade (of the festival) in terms of presenting so many different styles of jazz and spoken word, but we haven’t done a concert where we’ve addressed the correlations and the parallels between jazz, hip-hop and spoken word,” said McBride, who noted that the three artistic styles are “all part of the same tree.”

Being a part of “Represent!” is consistent with Chuck D.’s current goal of facilitating maturity and growth in the hip-hop business.

“As long as you treat it and yourself like a kid, then you’ll get treated like a kid,” he said. “But Christian McBride knows that It’s been a long time since jazz has been treated like a kid, or kid music. It might have been looked away from or abandoned, but there has been a lot of grown-up (stuff) that has surrounded the integrity and protection of jazz just because people said they dug it and they want it presented to them it the best way most of the time.”

The seeds for “Represent!” were planted three years ago, when A Christian McBride Situation and The Roots shared a double bill at NJPAC in November 2019.

“I think after that concert, we all collectively went, ‘Hmm, I think we have something here,’ " McBride said. “And for as much of a demarcation point in Black popular music as hip-hop became, the thread between jazz and hip-hop is so strong and so close together, I think enough time has gone by where we can now have that conversation without too many older people really getting offended by that.”

McBride is a Philadelphia native who was a classmate of future Roots co-founders Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter and Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts in the 1980s. He recalled the impact the work of Chuck D. and Public Enemy had on his formative years.

“I graduated from high school in 1989,” he said. “So in the summer of 1989 when ‘Fight the Power’ came out, it was sort of this resurgence of Black consciousness, which Public Enemy were the face of almost, so he is very important to me.”

While Chuck D will be hitting the NJPAC stage, he will also be in Newark as a researcher of sorts.

"Being part of the performance on Nov. 19, more than a gathering to me it’s going to be another idea,” he said. “I’ll figure out how can we use it in a hip-hop way.”

Go: “Represent! A Night of Jazz, Hip-Hop and Spoken Word,” 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 19, Prudential Hall Betty Wold Johnson Stage, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, 1 Center St., Newark, $29 to $89; njpac.org.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Chuck D. of Public Enemy connects with jazz world at NJPAC in Newark