Hustlers Convention

Recorded by Last Poets member Jalal Mansur Nuriddin under a pseudonym and backed by an incognito yet deeply funky amalgam of Kool & the Gang, Full Moon, and the Chuck Rainey Coalition, Hustlers Convention would be a hell of a record even if it wasn’t a clear prototype for old-school hip-hop. And not just in the relentless cadence of Nuriddin’s spoken rhymed verse, delivered entirely in an unconventional but rollicking AABCCB scheme, but in the fact that, at one point, he spits over an interpolation of Buddy Miles’ “Them Changes” — a pre-sampling re-interpretive reappropriation pulled off the same year Herc threw his historic 1520 Sedgwick party. And as an exercise in album-length storytelling, it puts nearly every other concept record to shame, and more than a few Blaxploitation films, too: the tale of its principal characters and their exploits at an underground high-stakes gambling extravaganza is overflowing with streetwise panache, bawdy humor, and fast-thrills action to rival any Fred “The Hammer” Williamson flick. That it ends in gunfire, car chases, and prison for our narrator brings it closer to noir tragedy than you might expect, though the last-track epiphanies of “Sentenced to the Chair” gives it a post-Civil Rights-era moral last word. Nuriddin’s performance here is one of the great underheralded turns of the decade, leaving you hanging on every slyly-slung and deep-focus-detailed word whether he’s setting a massive cast-of-thousands tableau (“Hammock’s Hall Was Big”) building tension and bringing it to the breaking point (“Grit’s Den”), or just reveling in the joy of being so stylish you feel invincible (“Coppin’ Some Fronts for the Set”).