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Beat-boxer Zack Freeman delivers a mouthful of ideas on peace, justice

By J.A. Montalbano
Friday, May 18, 2007

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Albuquerque beat-boxer Zechariah T. Freeman lays down feel-good beats and lyrics with just one instrument: his voice.

Albuquerque beat-boxer Zechariah T. Freeman lays down feel-good beats and lyrics with just one instrument: his voice. Watch »

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Influences

When asked to cite influences, Zack Freeman names early hip-hop artists like Doug E. Fresh, the Fat Boys and the Fresh Prince.

He has praise for contemporaries: the Roots, Rahzel, fellow beat-boxer Kenny Muhammad.

And his longtime idol is the voice master Bobby McFerrin, who was immortalized by the hit "Don't Worry, Be Happy."

Freeman says that the way McFerrin sang was like he was expressing several kinds of voices at the same time. Freeman says he could see that concept in his head, but he had to study McFerrin's music in order to begin to master it.

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Keep it positive, he says

"If I can't play the music in front of my kids," Zack Freeman says, "then I'm not going to listen to it."

During an interview that lasts nearly an hour and a half in a computer lab at the studios of cable-access Channel 27, Freeman takes a long detour into the history of music, ending in the present, with the state of hip-hop in a post-Imus world.

"There are black kids and brown kids now that are making the wrong kind of hip-hop," he says. "Any song that tells you to have sex with somebody, to go shoot somebody or to brag about shooting somebody, or is about having a lot of money and being materialistic - all that is bad music."

He calls the MTV hip-hop lifestyle a facade, a cynical marketing tool. He blames the commercial takeover of rap by corporations who care about money, not people.

"They want to promote music that tells black people to kill each other."

Freeman returns to the history lesson, tracing the sound to the Jamaican DJs in New York in the late 1970s and early '80s. He follows it through the positive, rootsy performers of the '90s and the present.

Like his own genre-hopping songs, rap and hip-hop can be tough to define, he says.

"If I start beat-boxing and the kid next to me starts dancing, that's hip-hop," he says. "If someone claps their hands and another person starts rapping, that's hip-hop. If someone decides to spin on their head instead of square-dancing, that's hip-hop.

"It's like the difference between punk and rock 'n' roll - the way people hear it and perceive it and turn it into a lifestyle."

-J.A. Montalbano

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It's 11 o'clock on a Friday and Zack Freeman is playing his beat-box music to an enthusiastic crowd.

But there's no beer sloshing, no cigarette smoke swirling. He isn't on a stage tucked into a dark corner.

No, Freeman is standing in the middle of the gymnasium at the Southwest Learning Centers, and his fans today are fourth- to eighth-graders at the charter school in the Northeast Heights.

It's 11 in the morning.

And the only adults at this all-ages show are of the teacher and chaperone variety. Freeman is focused on the kids, who gather closely around him and the device that lets him create his bass and drum lines and his harmonies with just his voice.

He takes a break between songs and gives the students this message :

"I found a way to make my music the way I wanted to hear it. And you all have the ability to do that. And you will owe it to the world to show what you have inside you."

Zack Freeman has the energy of a schoolkid but luckily not the concentration issues of one. He is busy and tries to stay focused.

He is a veteran of the 1990s a cappella music scene who came to Albuquerque from Denver about six years ago to settle down and go back to school.

His main gig now is at the cable-access TV station Channel 27, where he helps oversee the programming and outreach programs.

This month he wraps up six years of part-time study by earning a degree from the Albuquerque Art Center Design College.

He performs around town as a one-man musical group, a vocal percussionist using a device known as a repeater, and with Sina Soul as Beat Hive.

He and his wife, April Adams, are raising two children: son Keiran, 8, and daughter Ave, 3.

The family gathered in early April when Freeman took part in the city's monthly songwriters circle at a restaurant in Old Town. Freeman sat between two traditional singer/songwriter/guitarists.

He had the repeater in his lap. When he creates a song, he first lays down a drum beat in classic rap style. Then his voice becomes an electric bass, and that gets layered over the drum track. Next comes a vocal harmony that will loop through the song. And then Freeman sings live over the whole mix.

His songs preach a message of peace, community and social justice.

His lyrics, he says, are "about not being rich and also feeling respect for your community."

One song sounds like a shuffle mixed with doo-wop.

"I'm still waitin' for my nickel and dime," he sings.

He's partial to lyrics that shine a light on the gap between rich and poor. But they don't come off as the gripes of a man hustling to provide for his family.

"I own a car and a motorcycle, I'm employed and go to school, and I have a computer and my wife has a computer, and my kids have too many toys - so how am I poor?" he asks, not leaving time for an answer. "I don't live in grinding poverty, but when you hear me sing, you'd think I do."

Where he does struggle is in trying to define his music.

"I'm a cappella - nope. I'm electronica - nope. I'm . . . ahhhh . . ."

After a conversation detours through a discussion of the role of critics and the idea of good vs. popular (the Three Stooges came up) he says: "I base it on music and lyrics, so I call it folk."

It's not political, he says. "It's what happens in my life and in the lives of people like me."

In the 1990s, in Denver, where he spent his adolescence and young adult years, he was a cappella.

He sang with Graffiti Tribe, which toured the East Coast regularly and won top honors at the Harmony Sweepstakes A Cappella Festival in 1997. He still has a connection with the 17th Avenue All-Stars and Q-Zone Records in Denver.

Whatever his musical genre, his lifestyle was classic rock Õn' roll: "smoking, drinking and chasing girls."

In 1998 his son was born. And by 2000 he was looking to slow down, so he came to Albuquerque "to get my life on track."

He said his dad didn't like the life he was living in Denver but he liked the music his son was making.

"So he gave me a truck and a mobile home and said, `Go to school.' So I left Denver, and it changed my life."

Freeman didn't make it into the University of New Mexico.

"When I moved here, I wanted to study music and (get) a performance degree," he said. "After being rejected, I figured, `OK, I guess we're going to go for the art thing.' "

He said his design degree will help him market himself and his music. ("So when I graduate I can spend my $50,000 degree on myself." He graduates this month.)

Promos and professionalism are important, he said.

"You have to have a really nice-looking package; otherwise you're a hobbyist."

He also has returned to his Mormon roots and the sense of community he knew from his early childhood growing up on Brigham Young University's campus in Hawaii, in a culturally mixed community, himself half black and half Samoan.

He remembers going to the library and getting books to read and films to watch. He sang in a choir. "You learn how to stand and sing and present yourself," he said of his early performances.

He said he returned to the Mormon church in earnest about a year ago. (The hours he sets aside for religion, he says, gives him "the incubation time to come up with the music and creativity.") He was recruited to work with 12-year-olds. He wants to be an example for kids.

He does workshops with students, teaching them the basics of voice looping. By the second or third time they try it out, he says, they get ideas and work beats.

"At the end," he said, "the kids are like, `You mean I can just do that? I don't need a computer?' No, you don't."

Freeman wishes he could reach young adults without playing all-ages shows that mix teens with those of drinking age.

"But that's how it is here in the U.S. You have to play bars," he said. "Kids have no place to see live music. So most of the time you are playing to people who are there to drink."

A few years ago he worked at the club Pulse, and for a while he helped manage the Sunshine Theater. He doesn't want to model that behavior for his kids.

"That's the last of the rock-star things I needed to learn," he said.

Elementary schools are a "captive audience," he said, and those gigs give him a lift.

"It makes me feel better spiritually to not play bars," he said.

At the recent Friday morning multicultural festival at Southwest Learning Centers, Freeman arrives while Concepto Tambor plays its infectious drumbeat music that has the gymful of kids clapping and dancing.

Jos n Perales, who organized the event, drinks in the midday merriment.

"I love music and I love to entertain," he says, "and we need to teach it to the kids so we don't lose it."

Freeman is invited into a circle of six girls holding hands, and he dances with them.

Booths ring the gym with reports about the Berlin Wall, parades around the world, origami, South American myths and Japanese calligraphy. Two girls walk around in full karate gear. (They were to do a demonstration during the afternoon portion.) A boy who towered above most of his peers is dressed head to toe in black, and he has a copper mohawk. Three girls wear hula skirts.

Freeman himself wears a black skirt.

When it's his turn to perform, he slaps the outstretched hands of kids as he makes his way to the stage to set up his simple equipment.

After his first song, he kicks off his sandals.

He ends his set after about a half dozen songs. About 30 kids gather around him. He reads aloud a boy's T-shirt that lists a bunch of sarcastic excuses for not doing homework.

The crowd eventually thins. He was the warm-up act for lunch. It's a multicultural buffet.

The kids line up by age group.

In just a minute or two, Freeman has his equipment unplugged and packed. It's not much.

He carries everything at once - a hefty speaker in one hand and a mixer in another, and over his shoulder is a bag that holds the repeater and cables - and he heads out into the noontime sunshine.