Jazz trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah taps on the lyrical talents of Vic Mensa for new single, “Freedom is a Word”: Stream

Here’s an inspired pairing: Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, a genre-defying jazz trumpeter out of New Orleans, and soul-searching Chicago rapper Vic Mensa, still riding high on the success of his debut studio LP, The Autobiography, which dropped earlier this year. Their collaboration is called “Freedom Is A Word”, and is both a sonic and lyrical feast.

There’s a noirish quality to the cut, which finds Scott’s improvisatory instrumentation dancing over a steady beat while Mensa’s fiercely relevant lyrics confront the culture of negativity sweeping throughout Chicago’s low-income neighborhoods, where kids are “dying young in the streets because they’re tired of living.” Listen to it below.