Wu-Tang Clan's RZA on finding the confidence to call himself a composer

At 22, RZA was accused of shooting a man in the leg. If he was charged with assault, he would spend at least eight years in prison — but he was acquitted.

After that experience, the legendary producer and founding member of Wu-Tang Clan decided to make some changes. Not just for him, but for his mom.

"My mother was so angry with me," he tells Q's Tom Power. "She was so disappointed in me. She did not want to raise a criminal. I was hurt by her disappointment…. She said, 'You got another chance.' I didn't waste that chance."

RZA always wanted to be a musician. As a kid, he sold newspapers on New York City's Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to earn enough money to buy a turntable.

After his acquittal, he decided to quit drinking and smoking to focus solely on this goal. He'd already made a record before forming Wu-Tang Clan, but now it was time for the group to make an album.

The result was Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). The 1993 hip-hop album sold 30,000 albums in its first week of release, and received rave reviews in magazines like Rolling Stone. In 2022, the U.S. Library of Congress archived the album due to its massive cultural impact.

But RZA wasn't surprised by the fanfare. "I knew that my peers [were] great in their own right, but they were missing something," he says. "And we had it."

I realize now I'm a composer and I've been composing my whole life.- RZA

RZA became known as the "architect" of Wu-Tang Clan's sound, adding in kung-fu movie samples and hard-core beats. He even took the "grimy" sounds coming out of his cheap sampler and used it to create the group's signature sound.

Though he always thought of himself as a producer, he didn't initially think of himself as a composer, even when he started scoring films like Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill.

"I kept looking at myself as a producer, that's the hip-hop title for the guy who makes the beats," he says. "But I realize now I'm a composer and I've been composing my whole life."

Now, RZA has embraced the composer title with his first album of orchestral music, A Ballet Through Mud. The Colorado Symphony plays the music that RZA wrote.

RZA's journey to classical music started in the mid-'90s, when he met an angry man at a music shop. "Some guy comes over to me and says, 'You're not a real musician,'" he remembers. "'You don't play estimates. You actually put musicians out of business.'"

That day, RZA bought a music theory textbook. Since then, he's studied more music theory, as well as the music of Bach, Mozart and other classical composers.

He decided to create classical music during the pandemic. It started after he re-read his journals from his teen years, where he wrote about friendships, substances, girls and more. They inspired him to compose classical music.

Around the same time, he also saw a documentary about Alvin Ailey, the acclaimed Black ballet dancer and choreographer.

"Being a New Yorker, Alvin Ailey's name was all over … but being hip-hop, I couldn't stand it," he says. "But watching this documentary, I understood that he also was striving to tell a story through dance."

RZA then reached out to The Ailey School, the prestigious ballet school which Ailey himself started in 1969. He gave his classical music composition to a choreographer there and asked her to create a ballet around it. This eventually became the dance for the two-night, live performance of A Ballet Through Mud, with RZA's music played by the Colorado Symphony.

He wasn't planning to create an album out of this performance. He only decided to do it after the Colorado Symphony's chief artistic officer, Anthony Pierce, urged him to keep going. "He came to me and was like, 'You got to keep composing,'" RZA recalls. "'You got to keep it up. It feels new enough, it feels pure.'"

The full interview with RZA is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with RZA produced by Vanessa Greco.