No matter how great your weekend was, Graph Nobel’s was better. The local singer spent Saturday night opening for Philly hip-hop heroes The Roots at a more-than-sold-out show at Kool Haus.
“It’s crazy,” laughs Graph, a.k.a Christa Gonzales, over the line from her T-dot home. “I’ve been listening to them for ten years, and six years ago I met them and had my little poster signed and everything, and now I get to open up for them—that’s an incredible thing for me. So yeah, it was really exciting.”
Excitement seems to have been following Nobel ever since she burst onto the scene over a year ago. The protégé of producer Doc (Esthero), she’s already graced the cover of NOW Magazine, won the award for best new artist at the North by Northeast festival, and has every record label in town vying to sign her to a contract—all before even releasing an album.
And now she’s got the premier hip-hop crew in the land inviting her out on tour (“We were asked to play not only that show, but all of Canada. But we have some work to do, so we can’t leave and go on tour, unfortunately”). It’d all be too charmed, if it weren’t for that darn uptight Toronto audience.
“They were a little scared and didn’t want to get into it, which is fine,” Nobel said. “We have a kind of set audience that’s used to what we do, and they’re totally cool with it, and I’m sure they were in the crowd as well, but the general urban audience is not entirely receptive to it, which can be fun, too.”
The Kool Haus crowd aside, Graph has been busy making new fans show-by-show, tirelessly working the local club scene. Despite all the buzz surrounding her, she insists she’s ready and willing to pay her dues.
“You gotta work for your audience, and that means putting in years, and that’s just a part of it, so it’s cool,” she says. “We don’t even have a record out or a single out, so I think people are unfamiliar just in general—it’s just a part of how it goes. I like playing small rooms—I like to be able to jump out into the crowd or be at the same level. The audience is just an arm’s stretch away, as opposed to a big crowd where you can’t really see all the faces, and it’s hard to communicate because everyone’s so far. I like club shows—the energy is better, it’s cozy. Even though everybody may not know each other, the vibe is really cool.”
The diminutive Graph is a sparkplug onstage, moving furiously between hard-edged hip-hop and rock-pop-folk numbers. Her music puts the boot to tired old notions of stratified genres—we’ve all grown up listening to everything from pop to rap to R&B, she argues, so why shouldn’t the music of today’s generation reflect that?
“The trend is starting to change with artists, and also definitely the younger audience—they’re definitely into whatever’s popular, and it doesn’t matter what genre it is,” Nobel said. “And all the time, you see someone like Redman with Mariah Carey, or The Roots, they’re going on tour with Linkin Park. So younger audiences are used to seeing and hearing a whole bunch of different things at the same time. And that’s how our culture is pretty much functioning right now.”
Starting out in drama, the half-Spanish, half-Trinidadian Graph moved on to rapping before turning her attention to singing and songwriting. Collaborations with like-minded urban artists like 2Rude and K-OS preceded her partnership with Doc, who brought her into the fold of his Black Corners urban collective.
“Working with Doc is a lot of fun,” Nobel enthused. “A lot of work, but a lot of fun. If I feel like rapping, it’s cool. If I feel like singing, it’s cool. If we feel like doing some downtempo stuff, or rockin’ stuff, it’s cool. He’s blending everything together the right way. I was just an MC—I was in my twenties and hadn’t sung before. I went through a phase where I didn’t want to rap anymore, and just wanted to sing, and singing was totally different from rhyming in terms of mindset. So I had to go through a lot of schooling, and he helped me out with that.”
The pair has been slowly working on Nobel’s debut full-length album, drawing on the energy and inspiration of her live shows with a full band. Meanwhile, rumours persist that the sought-after singer has recently closed a major-label deal with Sony in the U.S. Despite an excellent response at showcases in New York and here at home, Graph maintains she has yet to sign with anyone.
“You want to make sure that whatever label’s involved, they understand the project, they’re willing to take into account what you think on how things should be done,” she said. “I want to wait it out and get the best possible deal for this project. It’s a job like any other, but you don’t get paid every two weeks, and make sure all your bills are paid, so there’s an urgency in that aspect. But we’ve put in a lot of work ourselves so that we never had to sign right away—we don’t really count on a label to make us popular or to help us put a record together. We’ve done some good work on our own.”
Graph hopes to have an album out this year, either independently or on a label. In the meantime, she continues to tour with a full band, hitting the Arbor Room at Hart House this Thursday (Feb. 6) for a free rare intimate show as part of Hart House’s Black History Month events.
The multitalented performer has a ready answer when asked who her black hero or influence is: “I love Spike Lee! I’m a huge Spike Lee fan. I like his perspective, and that he’s a risk-taker that cares so much about the community. Not only the black community, but he can depict other communities just as well—whether it’s the Italian culture in Summer of Sam, or just the general New York culture in The 25th Hour (just saw that a couple of weeks ago). He’s just great at being a voice for us—an intelligent voice for black people. That would be my guy for black history, and the year 2003.”
Despite her definitive response, though, it’s obvious the query has got Graph thinking, because she calls back ten minutes later to clarify.
“Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, these are icons that we always relate to at this time of year,” she says. “But sometimes the past overshadows the present. I think we need to look at the present moment and see what some of these people are accomplishing right now. We’re still evolving as a people, and there are new things we need to deal with.”
