"[7] In an interview, Christylez explains the concept of this debut recording, I called the album Advanced Artistry because it takes on traditional hip-hop elements and expands everything about it, with the use of piano solos in between the chorus & verses, heavy extended chord progressions, altered song structuring, and all original composition without sampling records.

Being a student at Duke Ellington School of the Arts...I always saw these connections between sonata-allegro form and hip-hop song structure, scat & rapping.

That takes a true ear, music theory, and natural flava...I created this album out of a dream and a longing to hear the combination of cultures, genres, and social classes.

It takes traditional hip-hop elements and fuses live instrumentation and genres from around the world...From there, my executive producer/friend/mentor, Bomani Armah, helped me sort through the collection, discarding the fluff.

I worked exclusively with pianist, Mychael "Myke P" Pollard, in flushing out some of the arrangements...it's a musical journal of a kid in high school transitioning towards a short-term of college and a space in the 'real world'[7]