Saul Williams made the album Leap Life with Moor Mother and LA jazz players

Saul Williams has spent thirty years being difficult to file, and Leap Life does not solve the problem. The record is his first solo release in seven years, out on Big Dada, and it was built with the Los Angeles free jazz producer and percussionist Carlos Nino alongside Massive Attack's Robert Del Naja.

The players around them are the strongest argument for where the record sits. Saxophonist Kamasi Washington, pianist Georgia Anne Muldrow, keyboardist Surya Botofasina and the poet and musician Moor Mother all appear, which puts Williams squarely inside the loose Los Angeles creative music scene rather than adjacent to it. He and Nino had already worked together on Saul Williams Meets Carlos Nino and Friends at TreePeople, released on International Anthem in 2025, which earned Williams his first Grammy nomination, for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album.

Williams came up through slam poetry in the 1990s and was better known for a time as a collaborator with Nine Inch Nails, but his own lineage runs closer to Sonia Sanchez and to books such as The Seventh Octave, published in 1998. He describes the vocal change since then as ordinary artistic evolution: finding your voice, building your chops, and gaining the patience to say a thing precisely, alongside a sense of obligation to use those skills for something larger than an ego.

He drew a clean line between Leap Life and Martyr Loser King, his debut graphic novel, published by 23rd St. With the book he wanted to move himself out of the centre of what he was writing, shifting from first-person poetry into something novelistic, with allegory and world-building. The album, he said, does the opposite. He is not building a world there unless the word is meant socially, and he is trying to give the clearest testimony he can of what he hears, how he loves and what moves him.

Part of that testimony is a defence of dance music, which he knows some of his audience finds hard to square with the rest. He points out that in 1999 he was writing and delivering the same material over drum and bass. He also argues the position is political, naming Nina Simone, Fela Kuti and James Brown as figures whose common trait was a relationship to rhythm and no relationship to genre at all, each of them at the front of something that had not yet been named.

His own account of his path fits that. He started as an MC, got bored of it quickly, and went looking for other ways to talk over music, citing Fela and Jim Morrison as the models. He describes himself as an explorer, which is the tidiest available explanation for a discography that includes industrial rock, electro-ambient records and now a jazz album.

There is more to come this year. A new collection of Paul Robeson-inspired psalms, poems and essays, Songs My Mother Taught Me: Why the Artist Must Take Sides, is due in September, and he is playing live shows both with Nino and with the Detroit electronic collective Underground Resistance. The album also lands on a quarter-century mark: his recorded debut, Amethyst Rock Star, came out on American Recordings in 2001.

Leap Life sits among the year's jazz and hip-hop crossovers on the release calendar. Kamasi Washington has been busy across the same scene, appearing on Dexter Story's album TSOM and returning with Dinner Party's latest short set of songs.