The second performance in Melvin Gibbs’ multi-part residency with FourOneOne, The Issa Iyer Gibbs Coalition is a new collaboration between three of the deepest practitioners working in the overlapping worlds of hip hop, go-go, jazz, rock and electronic music: emcee Kokayi Issa, keyboardist Vijay Iyer, and bassist/producer Melvin Gibbs. The debut performance by this trio of singular artists will fuse the charged unpredictability of human improvisation with the relentless precision of machine music, and the sheer volume of sound system culture. 

Always the sonic architect, Gibbs’ now legendary bass playing did little to prepare listeners for his highly idiosyncratic take on sound design when his Anamibia Sessions: The Wave dropped in 2022 (on legendary electronic music imprint Editions Mego). In The IIGC Gibbs leans hard into the production revelations of both The Wave and its followup, 2025’s Amasia: Anamibia Sessions 2, providing rhythmic propulsion and trunk-rattling low end for Kokayi and Iyer's lyrical and harmonic flow states. 

In "Penumbras," Chapter 14 of Gibbs’ new book, How Black Music Took Over the World, he describes the recombination of African elements in different parts of the Americas as the essence of a "Black Atlantic sound." A sound world forged in the forced migration and hostile power structures of slavery, and kept alive by Black people in churches, clandestine spaces and on touring circuits ever since. Gibbs has spent much of his life "making music that reconnect[s] members of the scattered Black musical family," so it's no surprise that the origins of the IIGC are intertwined with this pursuit. 

Kokayi, a Washington DC-based MC and Go-Go advocate who once shared mic-duties with Black Thought over the shifting street-polyrhythms of Metrics, participated alongside Gibbs in artist/filmmaker Arthur Jafa’s performance A Series of Utterly, Yet Extraordinary Renditions at The Serpentine Gallery in London in 2017. A few years later they collaborated closely on Gibbs' 4+1 equals 5 for May 25 EP, which tackled the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the spontaneous protests and organizing that happened as a result in 2021. Renowned pianist and Harvard professor Vijay Iyer has honed his voice with inspirations from Ellington, Monk, and Alice Coltrane, and through collaborations with Wadada Leo Smith, Henry Threadgill and other luminaries of 60s and 70s Black creative music. Along with legendary Chicago guitarist Pete Cosey, in 2002 he and Gibbs were special guests on Burnt Sugar's The Rites. A reworking of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, the piece was conceptualized by the late great writer/bandleader Greg Tate, and was then conducted by another major connector in the history of NYC creative music, Butch Morris. 

Rahway, NJ underground rapper and Backwoodz associate, Fatboi Sharif, whose vocal delivery and productions toe the line between the trance inducing and unsettlingly surrealistic, will open the evening.