By Robert Israel

“When you collaborate with an audience and other artists, and you let hip hop flow and intertwine, anything goes.”

To hear hip hop and theater artist 51-year-old Baba Israel tell it (no relation to this writer), hip hop is not only here to stay, it’s thriving. On July 6, Israel returns to Tanglewood for his second, free-flowing, audience participation event. Presented by Tanglewood Learning Institute, I Spy an Adventure! is an exercise in “storytelling in music and art” inspired by the art of Walter Wick that unites a cast of likely (and unlikely) artists.

Schooled in hip hop  on the streets of his native New York City, Israel is carrying on a raucous arts tradition that has inspired the likes of wunderkind Lin-Manuel Miranda (creator of Broadway musicals Hamilton and In the Heights), and performers such as the late Tupac Shakur (whose music pulsates in the hip hop show Holler If You Hear Me). Billed as a family event, the upcoming Tanglewood concert brings together Sesame Street’s illustrator Louis Henry Mitchell, jazz saxophonist Sean Nowell, Boston Symphony Orchestra percussionist Will Hudgins, and bassist Mary Ann McSweeney. Arts Fuse spoke to Israel via telephone from his apartment in New York City.

Baba Israel. Photo: Pen America

Arts Fuse: How did you get involved in hip hop?

Baba Israel: My parents were members of the Living Theatre in New York so I was exposed to theater and music early on. When I was growing up in the 1970s, hip hop was everywhere. You couldn’t move around the city without smashing into it. It was like electricity. My dad was a jazz drummer, too, so I grew up hearing the rhythms, the beat, and he sang scat. I listened to hip hop before gangsta rap, which came about as a later development. There are a lot of influences on the art form. It’s a political art; it draws from martial arts, and jazz, rock, and poetry. When I turned 18, I went looking for a “scene,” a place where I could immerse myself in the thing I loved. At that time, hip hop was centered around a place called the Music and Poetry Café in NYC. I found my scene there!

AF: In today’s NYC, it must be more difficult to find a “scene,” never mind afford to be part of one.

Israel: It’s becoming more and more difficult to be a hip hop artist – or any kind of artist — in New York, nowadays. When I was coming of age in the city, it was somewhat more affordable. Today, it’s becoming almost impossible. And that’s one of the reasons why hip hop has latched onto theater, and vice versa. It’s a matter of survival, surely, and a natural coming together of art forms, an organic fusion, of sorts.

AF:The upcoming show at Tanglewood brings together quite a cast of artists. How did that come about?

Israel: I had worked with the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge—they are one of the co-sponsors of the show—and they introduced me to the folks at the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood. One of the themes we’re working with in this show is riffing off the work of artist Walter Wick, who dreamed up the I Spy series for youngsters. His work is featured in an exhibit at the museum. So the piece became a cross-pollinating of talents: it is about storytelling; it’s about sonic reactions to stories; it’s about illustration.  Sesame Street‘s Louis Henry Mitchell will be there drawing away on his drafting table on stage. We’ve got cameras trained on him as he makes his drawings, and they will be projected on screens above the stage.

AF: In a way, it’s like a happening, a spontaneous event.

Israel: Yes. We spark off each other. And we take ideas from the young people in the audience and their families. I have a history of performing with LaMaMA Experimental Theatre Company in New York. It was there that I learned to become comfortable with discomfort. When you are performing improvisation, anything can happen.

AF: So for the upcoming show in Lenox, it’s anybody’s guess what might happen.

Israel: In a way, yes. We’re all getting together to create the show, so it’s not entirely loose. But when you collaborate with an audience and other artists, and you let hip hop flow and intertwine, anything goes.

Robert Israel, an Arts Fuse contributor since 2013, can be reached at risrael_97@yahoo.com.