How Kev Choice Made Room for Hip-Hop in Classical Music

This story is part of The California Report Magazine’s series about California composers. Listen to this and more in-depth storytelling by subscribing to The California Report Magazine podcast.

It’s a Wednesday morning in Kev Choice’s studio, tucked away in the back of an industrial warehouse in East Oakland. The small, dark-purple room looks something like a wizard’s lair out of a fantasy novel, with tall, epic columns and dark curtains.

The Kev Choice Ensemble is rehearsing for a conference that’s bringing 2,000 activists, artists and academics from across the nation to Oakland to discuss topics like the Indigenous Land Back movement and Palestinian liberation. Choice sits at his keyboard, rapping about the painful legacy of slavery before affirming the power of everyday people to make change. As his jazz band grooves, they alchemize devastation into hope.

“What I try to bring is the purpose, the intention, of the message, and uplift the issues while giving people encouragement,” he says. “[I try] to create an environment where we can just have fun and be free and enjoy together for a moment in time, before we get back to the work.”

Choice speaks with the ease of someone who knows who he is and owns it, but it took him decades to move comfortably between his roots in hip-hop culture, his love of jazz and his classical training. Classical music used to turn its nose up at hip-hop. But in recent years orchestras have begun looking to collaborate with rappers to appeal to younger, more diverse audiences — basically, to stay relevant in the 21st century.

Now, the world is finally catching up to the forward-thinking vision Kev Choice has had for decades.

Navigating separate musical worlds

For Choice, breaking boundaries wasn’t easy — and not just musical boundaries, but those of race, class and culture. Growing up in Oakland in the ’80s and ’90s, he began writing rhymes and studying piano seriously in middle school. Even back then, he knew he’d have to compartmentalize his two worlds.

“I couldn’t talk to any of my teachers about hip-hop or making beats. They had no connection to that,” he says. “And then my hip-hop friends would kind of tease me about playing the piano.”

Still, Choice was undeterred: He excelled in high school orchestra and big band, and continued to rap and make beats after school. After nailing an audition at Xavier University, an HBCU in New Orleans, he got a full scholarship on the spot to study piano performance in the birthplace of jazz. Afterwards, he took off to Southern Illinois University for his master’s degree.

Choice excelled in classical piano, but he couldn’t see himself going the traditional orchestral route.

“Number one, because of the lack of diversity in that world,” he says. “It just seemed like it was such a narrow opportunity for a young African American pianist who wasn’t a prodigy at age four.”

An international tour with Michael Franti

After grad school, Choice decided it was time to return to his roots. In 2000, he moved back to Oakland with the ambition of becoming a rap star. It was a fertile time for Bay Area hip-hop. Artists like E-40 and Too Short had already reached major-label success in years prior. Alternative hip-hop artists like Deltron 3030 were also making waves.

While working on his own music, Choice would also regularly pop up behind the keys at jam sessions, open mics or really anywhere there was a piano. Calls for auditions started coming, and he got hired to join Michael Franti and Spearhead on an international tour.

Franti had come out of the Bay Area’s underground hip-hop scene, and he attracted a global fan base with his fusion of hip-hop, reggae and funk. The opportunity expanded Choice’s world.

“Being a kid from Oakland and, you know, to be walking down the street in Switzerland or France or Belgium,” he reflects, “it blew my mind on what the world looked like and the connection of people to music as well. Like, how strong that was.”

The tour pushed Choice to grow his skillset — he had to trade his sheet music and piano for playing by ear on an electric keyboard. He had his own ambitions as a solo artist. But word got out after the Spearhead tour, and he became an in-demand sideman. In the years that followed, he went on the road with alternative and conscious hip-hop artists like Zion I and Lyrics Born.

Around the world with Lauryn Hill

In 2006, Choice got the opportunity of a lifetime: performing with Lauryn Hill. He even worked with her on a demo for a track that became “Lose Myself.” (It was featured on the soundtrack of Surf’s Up, a 2007 animated film about surfing penguins.)

Choice says their collaboration came together in a complete whirlwind. One day he got a call to meet Hill at an Emeryville studio. She was one of his idols, so of course, he said yes. It turned out to be an audition.

As she started playing her guitar, he began playing along on his keyboard.

“I think the other guys were, like, just confused,” he says, laughing. “They were like, what the hell is going on?”

Afterwards, Choice got another call: Could he put a band together for her? He scrambled, calling everyone he knew. Before long he was the musical director of an all-Bay Area band that accompanied Hill to shows in Hawaii, Japan and Brazil.

On tour, Choice was inspired by the way Hill carried herself, how she charted her own path and defied expectations.

“It gave me the courage that I could achieve anything in this industry,” he says.

Giving it his all as a solo artist

Choice came back to Oakland fired up. He was ready to dedicate himself to his own music, wholeheartedly. It paid off in 2014 when he came out with an album that made waves: Oakland Riviera. With lyrics addressing racial injustice, healing and Oakland pride, the project’s elaborate, propulsive instrumentation has a funky, jazzy Afrofuturist vibe.

At this point, Choice had cemented his reputation in hip-hop and jazz. And after Oakland Riviera, he got the chance to show the world what he could do with his classical training. The opportunity arrived thanks to Michael Morgan, the late music director of the Oakland Symphony, who passed away in 2021.

Morgan was one of the nation’s few Black leaders of a major orchestra — and Choice had looked up to him since high school. When they met at a Recording Academy mixer, it turned out the maestro was already familiar with the younger man’s work. He invited Choice to compose his first piece for a full orchestra: 2018’s Soul Restoration Suite.

The five-movement piece took that blend of hip-hop, classical and jazz that Choice had been trying to pull off for decades, and brought it to the next level. Choice conceptualized it as a love letter to Oakland through all of its struggles and triumphs. The first movement tells the story of the Spanish conquest of the area’s Ohlone inhabitants, and Choice’s words flow over lush orchestration.

Before this, Choice had composed for quartets and smaller ensembles, but he had never written for a full orchestra before. In Morgan, he found an open-minded mentor who took hip-hop seriously as an art form and appreciated Choice’s personal voice.

“I feel like he just kept encouraging me to take what I do as a band director, as a musician, as a hip-hop artist, and use the orchestra to enhance it,” he says. “And keep my original style. Like, don’t try to write like Beethoven. Don’t try to do Stravinsky, do your original music. But using the orchestra as another palette or as more colors to enhance.”

Morgan had charted a path for Choice and so many others. He used his position and influence to create more space for Black musicians to be themselves in a largely white and notoriously elitist industry.

Today, Choice sits on the Oakland Symphony’s board, and he’s made it his mission to create opportunities for the next generation. In fact, if you drive past the intersection of 51st Street and Shattuck Avenue in North Oakland, you’ll see Choice and Michael Morgan in a mural together, looking hopefully out at a starry sky.

Like his mentor, who championed public music education, Choice spent nearly eight years teaching at Oakland School for the Arts. Today, he continues to serve the community in the music education program Elevate Oakland.

A singular vision emerges

Back at Choice’s rehearsal space, I chat with saxophonist Ayo Brame.

“Kev is definitely the reason I’m a musician today,” he says.

Brame is one of Choice’s former students. At only 17 years old, he’s already headlined two sold-out shows at the jazz club Yoshi’s. He says it’s Choice’s versatility that inspires him.

“It shows how important that skillset is to know all genres of music and not be like, I don’t play classical or I don’t play rock music,” Brame adds. “He knows all of it. So yeah definitely, that’s one of my inspirations.”

These days, Choice might be busy with community work, but he hasn’t lost sight of his own music. His 2024 EP, All My Love, is the clearest distillation yet of his personal voice and vision.

It’s a vulnerable project that takes stock of how he’s shown up in relationships over the years. It examines his personal growth and maturation as a man.

The project culminates in the bittersweet song “Congratulations.”

Choice raps over moving piano arrangements, accompanied by a string quartet, harp and upright bass. In the lyrics, he speaks to an ex who is now getting married.

He’s happy for her and a little regretful, looking back at what went wrong and what could have been.

At his piano, Choice breaks down how his arrangements underscore the emotion of the track.

“Whenever I play ninth chords or minor chords, sometimes it can be dark. Some people say it may be very sad,” he says. “But I almost feel like it’s more sentimental. I’m thinking about what I was going through. And that chord really offers a lot of space to me for reflection.”

As I listen to him play, it’s hard not to feel an appreciation for the complicated beauty of the life lessons all of us go through.

Choice says All My Love is just a teaser for a full-length project that’ll come out later this year. He also recently accepted a position as a tenure-track music professor at San Francisco State University. Over two decades into his career as a musician, educator and community advocate, Choice is finally getting the recognition he deserves.

“I feel like as a hip hop artist, I’m always trying to grow, try to get more expressive, try to stay relevant,” Choice affirms. “I don’t want my sound to ever get stale or not continue to evolve.”

That growth mindset has been a theme in Choice’s career since the very beginning, and it’s propelled so much more than his personal evolution. The hundreds of students he’s taught, and the countless audience members who’ve seen him live, have left with a little piece of his vision: to look beyond arbitrary boundaries, to come together and to better ourselves and our communities through art.