Few comebacks have been as eagerly awaited as that of
Q-Tip. The silent spell lasted over nine years and now that it has been broken, the reward is astounding. The album Q-Tip recently released is called
The Renaissance. You can rightly call it that; most of the time, Q-Tip has been the messenger of a new era. At the beginning of the 90s, he was part of the hip-hop formation A Tribe Called Quest, which introduced jazz into hip-hop and gave rap a similar artistic weight to a Coltrane solo. This inspiration has been feeding a whole generation and has given us artists like Common, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, The Fugees and Kanye West. There is no saying what effect
The Renaissance will have, but a guest appearance of Raphael Saadiq during
Fight/Love, one of the album's highlights, at the North Sea Jazz Festival is not entirely unthinkable.
