My Favorite Performances from Q1 Part Three: Nim / Wakai

Music is one of the easiest forms of time travel. Through Nim’s set I was immediately taken to Moses Sumney’s performance at the Knockdown Center in 2024. It took me back to Monday evenings at Harlem Nights where the most churchiest of folk gathered in all the notes they carried.

With just his guitarist, his voice, and a willing audience, he opened the ESOTERICA showcase at The Sultan Room performing a couple of his songs as well as one of the best D’Angelo covers I’ve heard. Velvet is certainly an appropriate word to describe the feeling.

Chantal - curator of the showcase - provided an amazing line-up including our fav Precious Jewel, T.C Silk, Yego, and Kash Kenni who each brought their own dynamic energies to the showcase.

My favorite performance from the first three months is Wakai’s performance at Diabolical Disc’s January showcase at Songbyrd.  With words, his guitarist, and instrumental, the Baton Rouge artist came to the District as the penultimate performer before the area’s own Blaxian took the stage.

The poetry and storytelling in rap makes it one of my favorite genres, hence most of my favorite performances this year being rap. This year in particular I’ve been paying more attention to the words I’m listening to looking for mastery in language. I need to do more than just liking the beat.

Wakai’s storytelling is augmented by his performance as he seems to literally spit the words as if disgusted by just saying them. His blues speak to experiences being a working class Black man from Baton Rouge trying to make it and given the cultural and political climate of the world today, the contempt is appriopriate.

A couple songs into his set, Wakai asked the audience to give him three words - of which people gave “pizza”, “family”, and a third word I can’t remember.  Watching him weave these words into bars that not only made sense, but were rather progressive, felt like a moment that shouldn’t be lost to history. It’s one thing to freestyle but weaving Palestine and the humanity of nonbinary people into it was legendary. Also legendary was parting the crowd into two with one side saying “Fuck” and the other side saying “ICE”.

After having listened to Jireh and Quadry for two years, Wakai’s addition to my music library made me curious about Baton Rouge and the crop of rappers from there who’ve been bubbling under the radar.  For a city of about 230,000 something must be said for the quality of its cultural output especially in comparison to cities of similar size. But that’s another story for another day (I’m working on it).

I left Songbyrd and went right to iTunes and bought Some People Scream, Some People Talk to extend the experience beyond the too short set (or what felt too short at least).  I certainly could’ve used another hour.