The genesis of “A Ballet Through Mud,” the newest project from Wu-Tang Clan producer and rapper RZA, can be found in a childhood notebook.
Specifically, it’s a Mead notebook binder with a denim cover, and it’s “so old it looks like it has hair,” RZA — real name Robert Diggs — said in a Zoom interview from California. There are lyrics in that notebook from the pre-Wu days, he said. Memories too; rapper Busta Rhymes’s old phone number is also in there: “We knew each other back when.”
That notebook, and many others like it, have traveled with RZA through the years, from his Staten Island childhood home to the “Wu Mansion” in New Jersey to his current home base in California, but he never considered turning his teenage scribblings into a project. “As an artist, as an MC, you strive to get better, and once you start getting better you would think something you wrote when you were 15, 16, is too corny.”
But then the pandemic hit, and “after two months in the house, you just start digging,” he said. He reread the notebooks and was inspired, he said, so much so that he would wake up in the morning and go straight to the piano to work on the music for “A Ballet Through Mud”; now a recording releases Friday via the Apple-owned Platoon. He hadn’t been so motivated without a deadline since the days of “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers),” the 1993 debut album that put Wu-Tang Clan on the map.
“And no drugs!” he said.
He didn’t know what the project would turn out to be at first. Originally, he was writing music to go with those old lyrics, but eventually the “music started to have its own vibration,” he said. Upon hearing some early demos, Universal Music president Evan Lamberg suggested that instead of a “rap opera,” which RZA had been considering, the style sounded balletic.
RZA knew he’d been influenced heavily by “Peter and the Wolf,” “Nutcracker,” and “Swan Lake,” pieces that had been formative for him while he cut his teeth as a film composer for movies such as Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” saga and Jim Jarmusch’s “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai”.
The last ingredient was a documentary on the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. As a New Yorker, “you see his name all the time,” RZA said, but he hadn’t dug into Ailey’s work. “I never was into it, because I was into hip-hop, but after I saw his documentary, I realized that he was trying to tell stories through body movements and dance.”
Australian conductor Christopher Dragon and the Colorado Symphony delivered the world premiere of “A Ballet Through Mud” in 2023, with dancers performing in front of the orchestra, and also recorded the piece for the album. The piece’s title is inspired by Buddhist philosophy; “out of the mud grows the lotus,” RZA said. Though not a Buddhist himself, he was first exposed to those principles through the martial-arts movies that so heavily influenced Wu-Tang Clan’s art and style; first at a theater on Manhattan’s 42nd Street, where “we would cut school and get three movies for $1.50,” then through his growing collection of VHS tapes. “I still have thousands,” he said.
In a phone interview, Dragon said that the Colorado Symphony had been involved in the project since the workshop stages, before it was officially a ballet. Wu-Tang Clan’s partnership with the symphony had begun with a 2021 concert at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, in which the hip-hop collective and orchestra performed together while the kung fu film “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin” played in the background. RZA has returned several times since, and when they worked on “Ballet through Mud,” he was present to “make adjustments in real time,” Dragon said.
The final product “does have quite a film score feel to it, because each of the movements have a clear story and idea,” Dragon said, calling RZA a “true artist.”
“He really cares about the art form,” Dragon said. “Regardless of what it is, he’s fully invested in it. So I only have respect for him doing all these collaborations outside of the hip-hop box.”
RZA suggested that even without lyrical or visual elements, the album could score the lives of listeners. “It can actually change your day. Really, I’m serious,” he said. “Take a shot at it — you get some time driving home or walking to the store. Listen to it while you’re doing that, and watch the change of the vibe.”