Photo by Kareem Ali
Kareem Ali is at his best beneath an open sky.
His songs, often shaped around pulsating synths, big piano chords and atmospheric backdrops, sound the most fitting in places that give them room to breathe and build.
“I’m not really a club person,” he says. “I like more open areas.”
It’s been nearly a decade since the 28-year-old house and electronic producer left his home state of New York for Arizona, where space is in abundance and the clouds seem to sit higher in the sky than elsewhere in the country.
The openness of the Southwest is a stark contrast to the tightly packed Manhattan jazz clubs he often gigged as a trumpeter and the loud Brooklyn dance clubs he tried to infiltrate as an inspiring DJ back in the early 2010s, when Ali was simply waiting on a chance to shine but was constantly ignored.
“It’s that clique culture … these people that want to have their little group, and they don’t want to let anyone else in,” he tells me. “I’m just asking, ‘Yo, can somebody just teach me something?’ And I’m just shut out completely.”
Rather than continue to haul his music equipment on the subway just to encounter frosty looks from scenesters, he decided to leave. At the time, he had a friend who would travel to Phoenix during winters to caddy—and Ali, who had only recently started doing music full-time, decided to do the same. He hit the open road in 2014, driving three days straight to Arizona without ever having visited the state beforehand.
During the drive, he remembers being astonished by the forests and mountains of Arizona, which he had assumed would look like the black-and-white Westerns he loved as a kid, full of sprawling desert and cacti.
“A lot of people, especially from New York, don’t think of Arizona as having forests and stuff like that,” he says. “My neighborhood, there’s like a huge mountain in the distance…that stuff never gets old to me, it’s just so cool. I always tell people that I’m definitely inspired by everything I see.”
You can hear this inspiration vividly in songs like “Como Me Siento Por Ti,” with its soaring synths, dramatic build-ups and vocals of being alone (sung by Ali himself). One can imagine it scoring an epic sunrise over the dramatic rock formations of Papago Park in Phoenix, which Ali took a photo of for the cover of his Getting Through EP last year.
There’s also “They Can’t Stop Us,” which has all the makings of a classic Midwest house song, with its open hi-hats and heavy kick drums, but gets more ethereal and expansive as it progresses. Around two minutes in, instead of facing a big bass drop, we hear Ali hum over pretty piano chords and a floating pad line.
But even though Ali draws heavily from the natural world, his music is still firmly rooted in New York. Ali grew up working on golf courses in Westchester County, where his parents, who were both raised in the Bronx, moved the family when he was born. But as a teen, he spent most of the week in the city, specifically Harlem, where his father served as an assistant minister at a Nation of Islam mosque while also working as a homicide detective back in Westchester. It quickly became his second home.
Seeing it become increasingly gentrified over the years has had a huge impact on him, as well as his music, demonstrated by tracks like “Buy Back The Hood (Make The Hood A Decent Place To Live),” which incorporates a Laurence Fishburne soundbite from Boyz N The Hood around gentrification, or on “Mom’s Interlude,” where his mom, who’s now a psychologist Upstate, reads a poem that compares the oddities of her current cushy white neighborhood to her upbringing in the Bronx.
This social commentary—combined with the fact that his sound is greatly informed by his background in jazz, a distinctly Black artform, and imbued with the Black nationalistic pride of the Nation, which he grew up learning in his dad’s mosque — makes his music, as a whole, unequivocally Black. It’s also made it somewhat of an anomaly in the increasingly white world of dance music, despite it being founded on the work of Black artists.
Ali is conscious of this, and thus often builds whole projects around the notion of Black pride, with titles like Black Power, Blackbody, Black Woman IV (The One For Me) and, perhaps his opus so far, Quantum Blackness. I spoke with him about his time in Harlem and how the Nation’s teachings stick with him today even out in the bucolic Arizona countryside, as well as his love for golf, EDM and listening to dance music sober. – Reed Jackson
