Saul Williams goes beyond music on the uncompromisingly experimental Leap Life

Take John Coltrane and co’s mid-60s questioning whether jazz really needed to be constrained by harmony, key, set tempo or chord changes, or whether an honest attempt to channel and communicate a feeling was enough.

A nod towards the foundations of free jazz is apt in relation to Leap Life. Saul Williams’s first album in seven years (which marks the musician/rapper/singer/poet/ writer/actor’s return to Big Dada, the label that put out his earliest releases) also seeks to venture beyond the comfortable certainties of expected norms, conventions and structures by focusing on intuitive exchanges and in-the-moment improvisation over carefully plotted out gameplans. Anyone expecting a rerun of the kinetic hip-hop energy and traces of funk-informed pulses that unite much of Williams’s back catalogue may feel adrift amidst the album’s weightlessly floating expanses of freeform abstraction.

Also keeping with free jazz’s ethos of unbounded creativity, Leap Life – including contributions from Carlos Nino, Kamasi Washington, Moor Mother and Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja – doesn’t feel overly concerned whether the listener can keep up with the boundary-pushing ethos. Anyone with limited affinity to poetry and spoken word may be excused for struggling for a foothold during the album’s more decidedly avant garde sections.

A collection of spoken word recitals over often ghostly and deliberately sketchy tracks that typically eschew beats and groove over murkily formless atmospherics, Leap Life refuses to commit to an easily definable categorisation: is this jazz, spoken word, ambient electronics, a poetry recital, an out-there sound collage, or an experimental tone poem combining all of the above for a haunted sermon to a world gone wrong? Maybe it’s all of the above. What it doesn’t conform to, however, is anyone’s first impressions of what constitutes ‘music’. In this, it resembles Gil Scott-Heron’s final album I’m New Here, albeit without its smattering of conventional songs, and with the easy relatability of Scott-Heron’s emotionally resonant ruminations of a life gone astray exchanged for occasionally improvised word associations that emphasise the sound, texture and feel of Williams’s voice over any obvious immediately clear meaning.

Apart from an overarching feel of defiance and resistance in face of a world brought to a boiling point amidst environmental vandalism, greed, war and destruction, and injustices old and new, what binds the disparate aspects of Leap Life together is an appreciation of music as a timeless communication system. As such, it’s unfortunate how difficult the shape-shifting, occasionally frustratingly opaque and alienatingly experimental album can be to get a meaningful hold of. For every delightfully clattering concession to the simple pleasures of rhythm (the jaw-dropping, Blues-y chant of “Dagger”, the irresistibly relentless mutant electro of “Robot Slave”) there is a meandering sound collage that hovers forever on the brink of elusive ignition.

"It’s not the size of the rock, it’s the precision", Williams intones on “Mazahua”, another of the album’s hauntingly atmospheric highpoints. Leap Life is a bold and admirable experiment, but the listener isn’t always let in on its secrets amidst the brave creative risk-taking.