The Knight's Gambit (Album Reflection by MC Till)

You are in a dark alley. You sit down in an old wooden chair. You don’t even move and it creaks. The wood is soft like it has water damage and fog clouds your eyesight. The air feels crisp and cold to your nose. You see something starting to emerge. You can’t make it out at first. As the shape gets closer you realize it is a person walking toward you. You are on high alert but for some reason you are not afraid. You feel wisdom approaching. All of a sudden a light hangs from the sky, illuminating you and him. He sits down in front of you on a milk crate. His head is down in his hands like he feels shame or maybe he’s just had a long day...maybe both. He reaches down with one hand and begins drawing, doodling in the gravel. Finally, he looks up, opens his mouth and says:

Left behind my childish ways.
Deal in adult matters for petty pay
Work every day like there’s no Sabbath
From Flatbush, the crack push
Get popped for ‘lo fabrics
We bubble and shovel to the snow addicts
Porch archdiocese, each ave’s its own parish
This my pulpit and I don’t preach no bullsh*t.

These are the opening lines to the first verse of Ka’s brilliant The Night’s Gambit. The man in front of you is Ka, an emcee from Brownsville in Brooklyn, New York. He is also a fireman. And he is the man behind the lyrics and production of The Night’s Gambit. Lyrically, Ka is in a league of his own. His words demand the listener give not just one listen but a second, third, fourth listen at a bare minimum. We do his words a disservice if we only listen once. They are dense and they come to us through what sounds like a wise oracle, sitting there before us in that dark alley. Each line is wet with anticipation for the next. Like an oracle, his words are not often straightforward. They are vague, ambiguous even. But they always come across important and necessary.

Ka is not just a pro on the mic. He is gifted with the production as well. I would normally say he is dope with the beats but his music comes with limited drums. Nowhere are his drums overpowering. Rather the soft guidance of light drums keeps the instrumentation moving along. Ka creates the feeling that at any moment it can all fall out from underneath, just like those bridges that don’t use cement. If you knock out one stone, it all comes crumbling down. But all the stones positioned just right makes for a strong bridge. Ka’s music are those stones. Each element depends on the other. It is rather beautiful.

Ka is not the first person to create music with limited drums. However, to my knowledge he is one of the first to create an entire album in that vein. There is also something different about how he did it. Sure, there are examples dating back to the early 90s and probably even the 80s of emcees rhyming over music without any drums or very little percussion. However, it is dispersed between thumping beats. RZA is the first producer I’m aware of that dropped out drums for an entire song. I’m sure someone did it before him. But even with RZA it was not what he was known for. It was not a trend he was following or even started. He just did all kinds of wild stuff with beats and dropping out the drums was one of many different experimental elements he tried. Ka didn’t do that. He did not experiment. At least it does not come across that way. He created this album with intentionality. He purposely utilized a limited percussion approach to accent his vocal presence and it worked. If you go back and listen to his two albums that preceded The Night’s Gambit, you can find hints of this type of production. However, both albums (Iron Works and Chief Pedigree) feature plenty of drums, specifically a kick drum and snare among other percussive sounds. That’s not the case with The Night’s Gambit. This is different. Different from RZA’s experimentation here and there. Different even from what Jay Electronica did over drumless production. This was a very meticulously and intentionally crafted album around the union of slow moving samples, limited drums, and Ka’s chilling voice bringing it all into completion. 

Now I don’t know the exact thought process behind the making of The Night’s Gambit. Perhaps I’m way off. Regardless of how and why he created this album, the result is the same. The Night’s Gambit is a unique offering that in my opinion foreshadowed and helped usher in the new trend of drumless Hip-Hop production. As stated, it has been done before. But not like this. A gambit is defined as “a device, action, or opening remark, typically one entailing a degree of risk, that is calculated to gain an advantage.” The Night’s Gambit was just that. It was the opening statement to where Hip-Hop would go. Today it is commonplace for an emcee to rap over drumless production. Not so in 2013 when this album came out, so in a sense it was a bit of a gamble and a risk. But in my opinion it was a well-calculated one and gave Ka a one-up on the competition. 

*This reflection was published in The Boom Bap Review Vol. 5: 2023. Check it out here.