JAZZ | Peter Margasak
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“You could feel the newness of it, for its time,” Rosaly says. “It’s mostly plena [music], and there’s a life to it and messages that I never felt from salsa.” Since then he’s been researching the island’s musical past—recordings by Efrain “Mon” Rivera, Rafael Cortijo, and Andres “El Jibaro” Jimenez have resonated with him especially strongly. Earlier this month he finally began incorporating that research into his own music, launching a quartet called Bootstrap—it’s named after Operation Bootstrap, a controversial midcentury industrialization project the U.S. led in Puerto Rico. The group also features reedist Mars Williams, bassist Nate McBride, and pianist Jim Baker, and it’s in the middle of a residency at the Whistler, playing every Tuesday in June.
Bootstrap is an outgrowth of a bigger project Rosaly has in the works, which will debut on August 25 in Millennium Park as part of the Made in Chicago series. Called ¡Todos de Pie! (“Everybody Stand Up!”), it’s a more explicit celebration of Puerto Rican music; its lineup will include McBride, tres player Alex Farha, flutist and saxophonist Cameron Pfiffner, trombonists Jeb Bishop (who moved to Carrboro, North Carolina, last week) and Nick Broste, and four members of local plena and bomba group Las BomPleneras.
Long before he got hooked on Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis, though, the 20-year-old MC was into hip-hop. In sixth grade he dove into the rap world and was soon dabbling with rapping himself, but it wasn’t until he was a sophomore at Thornridge High in Dolton that he began to take his own work seriously. Israel says he used to be a “stereotypical rapper,” rhyming about drug dealing and trafficking in the usual misogyny, but he eventually decided to drop the front and create a style that faithfully reflected his personality—hence the name Legit.
