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"The way it was run, Solesides couldn't have sustained itself," Davis comments. "It would've crashed and burned."
After being told of the dissolution, Chang slipped out the back door in a daze and wandered into the gathering snow.
"It was difficult," he remembers of the meeting. "I'd devoted so much of my life to Solesides, and it was fucking hard. I probably went outside and cried that night."
"From our perspective, Jeff was the founding father," Shimura recalls with equal parts warmth and sadness. "We used to call him Papa Zen. He was older than us and he had the wisdom. And none of us felt it was right to go on without him. He was such an integral factor in why we came together, and it didn't feel right to continue on with the same name."
Nevertheless, they did continue on. After a brief period in which the artists took stock and contemplated the future, Quannum Projects was born in the spring of 1997. Chang would go on to a lucrative career in hip hop journalism, while Shimura, Mosley, Parker, Daumont, and Davis relocated the center of operations to the Bay Area. They began putting together a strategy for the future that included both a tighter and more effective infrastructure and a plan to be less insular and reach beyond their core artists. It would take two years before Quannum would release its first album. New faces and fresh thinking would be introduced, but the essential values would remain the same: dedication, perseverance, and an adherence to a vision of hip hop that valued craft and ingenuity over empty theatrics and hype.
In September '99, Isaac Bess walked into the Quannum Projects office in downtown Oakland, where the crew had relocated following its transformation. Following a series of interviews, Bess had moved to the Bay Area from New York to become Quannum's general manager. A former employee of Matador Records during that label's halcyon days of the '90s, Bess knew what it took to make an independent label successful. But as he looked around the nearly vacant office, and waited for over 45 minutes for his new bosses to show up, it was clear that Quannum would have to be rebuilt from the ground up.
If the first half of the Quannum/Solesides story concerns a group of college kids finding their artistic voices, then the second half chronicles an increasingly savvy group of entrepreneurs learning to navigate an increasingly complex hip hop world.
"We realized that over the past eight years we had created a brand, a platform," Shimura says. "We had people's ears worldwide. And I started to look around, and I started to see other independent labels. The game was changing. The world was changing."
By the time Bess took the reins, the primary decision-makers in Quannum were so often out on the road or in the studio that the day-to-day execution of their vision largely fell on the new GM's shoulders. And Bess' first project was a daunting one: overseeing the release of Blackalicious' long-delayed full-length debut, Nia.
Though the label still lacked basic organization, Bess did have several factors working to his advantage. For one, 1999 was the height of what he calls "independent hip hop mania." Thanks in no small part to the success of groundbreaking crews like Quannum, there was a larger audience for non-major-label artists than ever before. Commercial hip hop was still floundering in a sea of bling, so for die-hard hip hop fans the heart and soul of the genre was to be found underground. The media were anxious to spotlight this burgeoning scene, and it looked as though Quannum and its independent brethren would continue to grow and bring in new converts.
And it didn't hurt that Blackalicious had delivered a remarkable album. Nia drew from 20 years of hip hop history without feeling confined by the genre's parameters. It emphasized dense lyrics and intricate productions. Amidst a flurry of Xcel's soul-tinged samples and rocket-fueled breaks, Gift of Gab offered up evocative storytelling ("Deception" and "Cliff Hanger"), trenchant meditations on the state of the art ("Shallow Days"), and dizzying wordplay ("A to G").
Confident in his product, Bess dedicated himself to making sure that Nia received the proper push. At the time, Quannum did not have a publicist, so all media, street, and radio campaigns fell to him. There were 20-hour days and an endless procession of working weekends. (Bess says the secret to succeeding in the Bay Area hip hop scene is to work weekends.) There were thousands of conversations with hundreds of radio DJs, dozens of magazine editors and writers, and a Fellini-esque carnival of other contacts. If you imagine the life of a hip hop executive is filled with champagne and cute little butlers, you're wrong.
But the hard work paid off. Nia sold more than 250,000 copies, an incredible figure for an indie release. The album's success resulted in an intense bidding war over Blackalicious from major labels. And while Mosley and Parker remained ideologically loyal to Quannum and its values, they decided to record their next album for MCA. Just as the hoopla surrounding Shadow's Entroducing effectively introduced the Solesides crew to the rest of the world, Blackalicious knew that increased exposure via a major would benefit both the group and the label.
"When Blackalicious got to the point in 2001 when they were signed to MCA and we knew that their next record would be extremely successful," Bess says, "I realized that what the album really warranted was beyond what I could do in one small office."
2002 saw the release of both Blackalicious' Blazing Arrow and Shadow's The Private Press (on Universal). Full of sonic juxtapositions and genre-defying technical wizardry, The Private Press was heralded as the return of the master, and Blazing Arrow was considered Gift of Gab's and Chief Xcel's finest moment to date.
