Ka (1972- )

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    A New Venue Celebrates the Sound of the Bronx

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    The Bronx Music Hall is the first new independent music venue in the borough in more than 50 years.Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll get a look at the Bronx Music Hall, the first brand-new music performance space to open in that borough in more than 50 years.David Dee Delgado for The New York TimesThe 250-seat music performance space that is opening tonight in the Melrose section of the Bronx began with a cassette recording that was played at a staff meeting of a nonprofit organization. This was in the early 2000s, when cassette tapes were still a thing.The tape was a sampling of the musical legacy of the Bronx — music that had been written or performed there.“Everyone’s eyes lit up,” recalled Nancy Biberman, who at the time was the president of the nonprofit, the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation.She remembers telling herself after the meeting that “maybe we are thinking too narrowly about what community development could mean — it’s not just bricks and mortar.” That realization morphed into thinking about what tenants would want besides basic needs like food, health care and education. What would make them happy?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ka Made Rap on His Own Terms. Hear How in 7 Songs.

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      Remembering the hip-hop artist (and New York City firefighter), who died over the weekend at 52.Ka onstage in 2014.Brecheisen/WireImage, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,One of the great joys of being a pop music critic is being able to ingest an artist’s whole body of work, find the throughlines and themes and meaningful resonances, and then be a bullhorn, sharing them with the world. And perhaps the job’s greatest grimness is to do the very same, but in service of memorial.That’s what I’ll be doing below, about the unfailingly and perspective-shiftingly great Brooklyn rapper Ka, who died this weekend, at a far-too-young 52.Ka’s music was a frame of mind as much as a sound — beginning in the late 2000s, when he was in his mid-30s, he made rap music as if by ancient, tattered blueprint. His raw material was the hip-hop of the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, but he didn’t seek to faithfully remake it. Instead, he distilled it, burned off its excesses, and created a thing of extreme concentration, thick poetry and icy tone.He was an inheritor of the woozily intricate narrative work of MF Doom, of the cocksure twistiness of his childhood friend Smoothe Da Hustler, and the more esoteric members of the Wu-Tang Clan, like GZA and Killah Priest.Ka produced most of his own music, though words were always his primary concern. Sometimes, he went drumless, or something very close to it — a negative-space perversion that served to outline his words in hard chalk.“They’re not for the radio, the club or the masses,” Ka wrote of his songs, in an early biographical statement on his website. “My music is for those who miss early ’90s hip-hop when pain and struggle were the dominant themes.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ka, Lone Soldier of New York’s Underground Rap Scene, Dies at 52

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      The rapper, whose name was Kaseem Ryan, was known for self-producing 11 albums while also a maintaining a career with the New York Fire Department.Kaseem Ryan, who built a small but fervent following as an underground Brooklyn rapper known as Ka while maintaining a career as a New York City firefighter, died in the city on Saturday. He was 52.His death was announced by his wife, Mimi Valdés, on Instagram, as well as in a statement posted on his Instagram page. No cause was given, though the statement said that he had “died unexpectedly.”First with the mid-1990s underground group Natural Elements, and then on 11 solo albums he produced himself and released over nearly two decades, Ka gripped hard-core hip-hop listeners with gloomy beats and vivid descriptions of street life and struggle.In a 2012 review of his second album “Grief Pedigree”, The New York Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica described Ka as “a striking rapper largely for what he forgoes: flash, filigree, any sense that the hard work is already done.”Kaseem Ryan was born in 1972 and raised in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York. During his teen years, he dealt crack and sold firearms.He spent much of the 1990s trying to make a name for himself as a rapper, but then quit music altogether, only to come back a decade later.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More