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RZA Reveals How Debussy, Leonard Bernstein and Bill Evans Inspired His Classical Music Album ‘A Ballet Through Mud’
Wu-Tang Clan's RZA discusses how Debussy, Leonard Bernstein and Bill Evans inspired ‘A Ballet Through Mud,’ his first classical music album.
After rediscovering a notebook of lyrics he’d written as a teenager, Diggs spent the Covid-19 pandemic creating a project that synthesized decades of firsthand musical knowledge with an education in orchestral composition that, though largely self-taught, was no less rigorous for its informality. Two days ahead of the release of “A Ballet Through Mud,” RZA sat with Variety at his studio in Woodland Hills, California for a lengthy conversation about what initially drove the project, how it connected to his earlier work, and how it is already shaping what he hopes to do with his career in the future. It starts with “Aeolian Beauty,” and it tells you about the sixth century South Indian monk named Bodhidharma, who sojourned from India to China to spread his teachings, known as Chan Buddhism — which is commonly known as Zen, when the Japanese got it.
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