PASADENA, Calif. _ It's not only politics that make strange bedfellows. Sometimes it's art. And an unexpected collaboration will fill the tube on Friday when hip-hop artist Nas performs with a full symphony orchestra on PBS.
The network's "Great Performances" presents "Nas Live from the Kennedy Center: Classical Hip-Hop," a concert featuring the 13-time Grammy nominated artist's first album, "Illmatic."
Mournful strings and sassy street poetry don't usually mix. And Nas admits he was nervous to try it. "It was one rehearsal before the actual thing. So I was, like, we did two shows. The first show I was really nervous, and what we taped was the second show. And I was a little less nervous, but nervous meaning, like, I didn't want to mess up. So I wanted it to be just the way we rehearsed it, and of course one rehearsal, it gets your nerves," he says.
In spite of his trepidation, Nas (whose real name is Nasir Jones) remained optimistic. "When musicians get together, it's a lot of us. We tend to come up with some good ideas. I knew I was up for a challenge, but it turned out easier than I thought it would be," he says.
He cut the definitive album back in 1994 and felt at the time that its scope was limited. "Growing up, I would think that hip-hop music only reached the communities of the people that made it," he says.
"I didn't really see outside of my own neighborhood to know if anybody outside my neighborhood cared. But hip-hop is huge. So many people have gotten into hip-hop through the years that it's almost not surprising anymore. There's still surprise elements to it, the people that tell me they listen to rap music or heard of this artist or that artist. I surprise people with some of the artists that I know that I'm not going to mention."
Nas says at first he felt the members of the National Symphony Orchestra would be reluctant to back him. "I thought the symphony got people (who) were going to be like, 'Ugh. THIS music? I don't want to do this, but I'll just do it for a buck.' But it turns out we were really connecting as a family for that moment, and I loved it. I just loved it."
Nas explains that "Illmatic" _ now considered the best hip-hop album of all time _ began when he was just a kid. "I realized writing the first album, you've been writing it all your life until that point. I'm sure you've heard that before. So I'd been writing it, I guess, since I was 9 years old, in a way. But when I narrowed it down to what would be album material ... I probably started at 16 years old and got a record deal at 18 and then finished the record at 20. So it's not done till it's being mastered and pressed up and ready to go. That's when the album is really done. So it was a two-year period from me signing the deal to actually getting it out there. And so it took maybe probably six years really."
The music changed during that time, says Nas, who grew up in a housing project in Queens. "I saw what was working, what wasn't working. I saw artists make bad decisions. And I realized that what was, of course, the sound that would be. I trust in sound and that the listener would really feel comfortable with that sound without going too far this way or that way. What's the sound that really represents most of the elements of hip-hop music? I wanted it to be that way."
For the 44 year old, appearing with a full backup orchestra is a lifelong goal. "A dream come true. As a young guy making this album, it was about me being a dreamer, and there were no limits," he shakes his head.
" ... I look at classical music as the hip-hop of its day ... and I feel like there's a strong connection with all music. So doing things with the music, things like this show, is just part of the dream. It's not only just: record the music and put it out and tour and do traditional things. It was more like, 'What can I do now to make this experience for people something more fun; something that's not the thing you see every day?'
"That's our job as musicians, I think, is to make the experience the best experience possible for people. So it's about fulfilling a dream that I had for a long time. I felt like at this point like I had made it as a mature artist, in a way."
'PHYSICAL' COMEDY WORKS OUT
The gym is the main character in Pop TV's new eight-episode comedy "Let's Get Physical," which co-stars Jane Seymour ("Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman," "Wedding Crashers"). Seymour says she's not a gym aficionado in real life but prefers Pilates. "Gyrotonics, light weights, not as often, probably, as I should," she says. (
"But I used to be a ballet dancer back in the day, and I actually was on the cover of Jane Fonda's workout book for pregnancy, in a striped leotard," she recalls.
"So that shows you how old I am and how authentic I am to this project because I still have those leotards and those leg warmers. And I still vaguely remember how to do those things. So I thought this was hilarious. I think what's so great is everyone wants to laugh these days. There's so much serious stuff going on in the world. And people are obsessed with their figures, obsessed with their health. So I think here we're able, in this show, to show how ridiculous that is and to what ridiculous extremes we can go."
EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN
Nothing is new under the sun, certainly not in TV. We have the rebooted "Will & Grace," "Roseanne" and soon "Murphy Brown." While some reincarnations _ like Netflix's "One Day at a Time" _ carry huge agendas, Eric McCormack, one of the stars of "Will & Grace," says the goal for its return was simply humor.
"We've always said that the good effects that we had were fantastic gravy, but we set out to be funny. We set out to be a sitcom that brought as many people in as possible, and I think the effect that we actually brought in people from both colored states, from a wide range (was terrific). But I think that still _ first and foremost _ is the job to be funny. Will that include political and cultural things? Of course it will. First and foremost, it's a funny show," he says.
ANIMALS DO THE SHOOTING
As technology advances and camera equipment gets smaller and smaller, the folks over at PBS' "Nature" program are strapping cameras on animals and creating an up-close-and-personal miniseries, "Animals with Cameras," premiering Wednesday. (Check local listings.) Series producer Dan Rees insists no animals were harmed during the taping.
"We worked very hard to make sure that the animals were comfortable with the cameras, because obviously we don't want in any way a distressed animal, obviously. Also, there's no point doing it if you don't capture natural behavior. So there's an awful lot of preparation for every single one of those cameras," he says.
"They're all built bespoke for that particular animal ... none of those are off the shelf. They're all painstaking to put together and very much with the guidance of the scientists," he says. "We'd only do it if they (the scientists) wanted us to do it. If they said, 'All right ... we need these cameras to answer these key questions,' so then we'd go ahead and then we'd work very closely with them to figure out the maximum weight of the camera, where it should be positioned, all of those things.
" So by the time we got to this stage and we were actually putting a camera on, we were confident that it was sufficiently light. The animal wouldn't even notice it ... They just didn't bat an eyelid. Perhaps surprisingly, but it seemed to be a comfortable experience for them ..."
