ReadNex Poetry Squad

Words to Live By

by Peter Aaron and photographs by Fionn Reilly, August 27, 2010

There’s a dude in the corner of the room playing the piano. And doing it well. He’s putting down some soft and beautiful tinkling, like maybe he has a few Bill Evans or George Shearing records at home. It’s late in the afternoon and he’s making the place feel more like cocktail time at the Rainbow Room than happy hour at Kingston’s Keegan Ales, which is what it is, actually. Probably not what you’d expect from a mike-rocking hip-hop MC.

“I can fake it okay, I guess,” says a grinning Jarabe Del Sol, who, with his co-MCs Decora, Freeflowin, and Latin Translator and turntablist DJ H20, makes up Hudson Valley words-and-music crew ReadNex Poetry Squad. Further confounding expectations, perhaps, is the fact that Del Sol is actually a multi-instrumentalist: “I play guitar, too, but I’m more of a drummer,” adds the rapper known as Cuttz El Colombiano on the group’s early releases. “I was playing the drums before I could speak English.” For ReadNex, however, defying the general public’s perception of what it means to be a hip-hop band—and what hip-hop itself means—is par for the course. Heroically so.

Right from the group’s 2001 inception, when the members met as students at Middletown’s Orange County Community College during a campus open-mike night, ReadNex has been as much about effecting positive social change as it has been about music. The band is an out-and-out activist machine, for whose members art and progressive work are simply inseparable. Besides releasing three albums on the band’s own DeBefore label; playing on HBO Latino and at hallowed venues the Apollo Theater and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe; touring the US, Canada, Europe, and Brazil; and performing regionally as a group and as individuals at spoken-word gigs, ReadNex maintains a packed itinerary of educational and public advocacy efforts. Along with steady appearances at benefit and awareness-raising events—the group was en route to a climate-control-themed affair at the time of its Chronogram interview, after having played a state education conference in Hew Hampshire the night before—examples of the outreach actions the outfit regularly organizes include food and clothing drives, inner-city farmers’ markets, youth-mentoring programs, and student-empowerment workshops. But because the media only likes to occasionally play up the odd cause-boosting but less-than-sincere photo op by splashy money men like P. Diddy or his swaggering gangsta peers, for many ReadNex’s steady regimen of altruistic endeavors will likely be another expectation-shattering revelation.