This Weekend's Top Stop: One Self

RAPPERS LOVE to big-up the places they're from. For the hip-hop collective One Self, that list could take a while. DJ Vadim could give shout-outs to St. Petersburg, Russia, and London, and his MC wife, Yarah Bravo, could call out Chile, Brazil and Sweden. Then they'd have to give love to Brooklyn, which is their current home. The third member, MC BluRum13, could give props to New York City and Gaithersburg.

One Self brings that melting pot together on its debut CD, "Children of Possibility," which blends worldly influences (from sitars to shakuhachi) with banging beats straight outta the Bronx, the birthplace of hip-hop.

"One Self was born out of the Russian Percussion," Vadim said, name-checking the touring collective he put together in 2003. "The response was amazing, and people kept saying that we should put out a live record, but we never did. Instead, I took the two front people in that collective, Yarah and James, and made a studio album."

But the spirit of "Children of Possibility" is that of a live CD because of Vadim's energetic production, which doesn't rely on lazy loops. "In fact, maybe 85 percent of the One Self album was live in the sense that I had musicians come in and I sampled what they played," Vadim said. "The thing with hip-hop that saddens me now is the plagiarism: You can hear the same beat on 10 different artists' albums. We're not trying to sound like the next Puffy; we're trying to create our own sound."
Photo by Inocuo
» Rock and Roll Hotel, 1353 H St. NE; Saturday, 9 p.m., $12; 202-388-7625.

» MORE TOP STOPS, including Plein Air Painting at the National Garden, can be found here.
This post was written by Express contributor Christopher Porter