Malik Yusef

Southside Chicago poet turned rapper Malik Yusef (aka the Wordsmyth) started honing his art within the mid-’90s with appearances at open-mike evenings. While he was carrying out a spoken term set, movie director Ted Witcher is at the audience searching for motivation for his following movie about metropolitan poetry. Impressed by Yusef’s loose but effective free-form design, he employed him like a trainer for Lorenz Tate in 1997’s Like Jones. This opened up some doorways in Hollywood, resulting in looks on BET’s Rap Town and HBO’s Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Television shows, where he performed “I Spit….” Main corporations started acquiring notice, as well, and he was asked to seem on some promotional compilations by Nike, ASCAP, Sprite, and Coca-Cola. Branching in to the rap globe was an all natural development, and he was presented on Route Live’s Armaghetto and Common’s 1 DAY It’ll All SEEM SENSIBLE albums. R&B vocalist Carl Thomas also presented Yusef on his debut recording, Emotional, which resulted in a tour collectively. While on the highway, he fulfilled jazz saxophonist Mike Phillips from Hidden Seaside and both combined up in 2002 to produce a spoken term jazz song entitled “THIS ISN’T a casino game,” that was selected to seem on the CD-ROM incorporated with pairs of Michael Jordan’s 17 sneakers. Jordan described in ad promotions the shoes experienced a sleek style, “inspired from the clean lines of the jazz single.” Moving back again to rap, in 2003, Yusef released his debut single album, THE FANTASTIC Chicago Open fire — A Chilly Day time in Hell, which presented more information on creation credits and visitor looks that included Kanye Western, Xtreme, Chantay Savage, Common, and Bigg Nastee, amongst others.