Saul Williams goes beyond music on the uncompromisingly experimental Leap Life

Take John Coltrane and co’s mid-60s questioning whether jazz really needed to be constrained by harmony, key, set tempo or chord changes, or whether an honest attempt to channel and communicate a feeling was enough. A nod towards the foundations of free jazz is apt in relation to Leap Life. Saul Williams’s first album in seven years (which marks the musician/rapper/singer/poet/ writer/actor’s return to Big Dada, the label that put out his earliest releases) also seeks to venture beyond the comfortable certainties of expected norms, conventions and structures by focusing on intuitive exchanges and in-the-moment improvisation over carefully plotted out gameplans. Anyone expecting a rerun of the kinetic hip-hop energy and traces of funk-informed pulses that unite much of Williams’s back catalogue may feel adrift amidst the album’s weightlessly floating expanses of freeform abstraction. Also keeping with free jazz’s ethos of unbounded creativity, Leap Life – including contributions from Carlos Nino, Kamasi Washington, Moor Mother and Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja – doesn’t feel overly concerned whether the listener can keep up with the boundary-pushing ethos. Anyone with limited aff...