The artist as his own collage

Carl Hancock Rux is caught between destinations. A sudden late-summer downpour has stranded him -- without an umbrella, between engagements.

But in his typically fluid way he makes the best of it. Pulling up a stool at a Brooklyn bar, he settles in for this pre-appointed chat on his cellphone. “I was almost home. And then it just started pouring.” Rux speaks over shouted political opinions and happy hour flirtations, in his big, lush basso. “This will work. Just fine.”

The effect is somewhat like house party, or club, with Rux the host, or better, MC.

Much like his own layered music, the ambience adds here-and-now texture to his thoughts and words. It’s clear Rux learned long ago to more than make do -- to spin an awkward situation into introspection, then into art.

Rux is one of those freestyling creative spirits -- a singer-songwriter-poet-novelist and then some. However, the old standby “Renaissance man” tag seems too cliched for an artist who has tried mightily to wriggle out of so many of them. Rux is all about unusual hybrids and open borders.

His latest album, “Apothecary: Rx” on Giant Step Records, is a vivid collage of found sound, grooves and modes -- talking drums and New Orleans second line beats, gospel and art rock -- an armful of souvenirs from a cacophonous world.

In a culture that adores the cut-to-the-chase, condensed version, one can’t sum Rux up in a sentence or two. And that makes him happy. He doesn’t want you to know what to expect.

His first CD, 1999’s “Rux Revue,” was a panoply of flirtations -- not quite hip-hop, not quite soul, not quite jazz, not quite spoken word, but filling a space somewhere between.

He knows that he is a round peg for a square hole, in an industry that doesn’t always make room for artists who choose to draw outside the lines.

His new sophomore album arrived on the heels of a first novel, “Asphalt,” a hallucinatory journey of a displaced DJ, set in a sooty, just-a-day-after-tomorrow future. The book blends speculative fiction and myth with real-life post-9/11 unease embroidered throughout. “I wanted to write a book that honored hip-hop the way [Ralph] Ellison honored jazz. But it’s not all about hip-hop and it’s not an African American book: It’s about people and souls and existence.”

That’s only what he’s been up to in the last few months. Rux, at 36, has a whole store more rattling around in his creative basement. There’ve been collaborations with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Urban Bush Women, an Obie Award-winning play “Talk” (produced in 2002, arriving in book form later this year) and a collection of poems, “Pagan Operetta” (1999). He spent the middle part of last year in Europe playing the lead in the opera “The Temptation of St. Anthony,” adapted by Sweet Honey in the Rock’s Bernice Johnson Reagon and directed by Robert Wilson.

“Apothecary: Rx” pushes even further, with Rux’s speech/song -- something he calls “hip-bop” -- hovering over a musical melange. “It’s about music that didn’t try to be anything self-conscious. It was a collage. Sitars and other Asian instruments. Strings ... African drummers. I was thinking [Qawwali singer] Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, but I was also thinking about old underground soul records you can only find in the U.K. They are just as straight out of the church as gospel.” It is no coincidence that something as ephemeral as a song’s bridge or break-beat would be connected to spirituality in Rux’s head and heart.

It was his way, he understands now, of dealing with displacement and loneliness. “Art served my social and emotional needs as I was growing up. It was my survival instinct,” says Rux. It came first with drawing. “I would start on one side of the paper. It would look like a collage. I wouldn’t turn the paper over. I didn’t get a new piece of paper. All I cared about was keeping the story going. Keeping the pictures coming. Some kind of narrative was always important to me.”

Coming to Rux’s work either on page or on disc, that passion is clear. He is enamored with densely arranged assemblages -- quirky juxtapositions, blurry borders -- in prose and in song.

Spinning dross into gold, at the very least creative fodder, began early: Rux never knew his father. His mother suffered from mental illness. So much of that and more is stitched through Rux’s works -- a brother’s death of AIDS, the cycle of foster care. He was born in Harlem and grew up around its history, dreams and frustrations. At 15 he was adopted by grandparents, and his arts education began in their living room. Books by Jean Genet and James Baldwin were stacked on shelves. “There was something about the danger and the beauty and the loveliness,” he recalls. “I began to understand that my thing, my life, was not so beautiful. But it wasn’t so ugly.”

And there was music. “They would talk to me about Billie Holiday or Betty Carter. The abstraction of a song, the bend of a note behind a voice. Their interests went as far as soul and R&B.; If they saw a rock singer on TV they liked, they’d buy their records. They were incredibly diverse.”

Those casual sessions taught Rux how to listen for connections. After attending the Fiorello H. La Guardia performing arts high school, he plugged into an assortment of projects and scenes -- it was life as assemblage, or mix tape. He tried his hand as a playwright and dipped into the Lower Eastside and East Village performance orbit. “Even then I knew I wasn’t interested in just reciting words. Music had so much to do with it. So, I ended up chanting some of it to find the musicality of literature.”

Around that time he caught the attention of singer-songwriter Nona Hendryx. “I thought he was an amazing communicator,” she recalls, “a talented writer and completely unique.” Immediately, the two set down to work on a record.

“It wasn’t quite like anything, but was part of everything,” says Rux. “It wasn’t soul. Wasn’t R&B.; She was the first person in the industry who got it.” It was never released, but on the strength of it -- and a spoken word event, Rux came to the attention of Sony Records.

His first album, “Rux Revue,” wasn’t easily categorized. It wasn’t spoken word but spoken mood. “I remember, when they were throwing [producers’] names around, it was ‘Timbaland?’ ‘Puffy?’ And I was thinking, ‘Why are they only throwing out the names of black producers?’

“So, I decided just to be a little arrogant about it. I said, ‘How about the Dust Brothers?’ I was a fan of what of what they did with Beck and the Beastie Boys -- and that kind of Sugar Hill Gang kind of vibe. Nobody who was African American would have gotten away with something like that at the time. And I thought: Why not?”

He got his wish. Produced by John King of the Dust Brothers and Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf, also Beck alums, “Rux Revue” emerged as a fresh blend of spoken word and instrumentation, which gave each equal footing. The reviews were laudatory: “Rux is coming from a place beyond anger or regret and from beyond a whole museum full of pop culture stereotypes,” said Spin magazine. But despite the adulation, Rux was dropped shortly thereafter. The record sold 2,600 copies.

While “Rux Revue” surveyed the ruins of his life and “Asphalt,” the novel, the ruins of his native city, “Apothecary: Rx” began to evolve into both an antidote and a balm. A more impressionistic foray into the psyche, the album allowed Rux to push off onto a journey -- artistic and spiritual. This time out, rather than writing music to fit around already constructed poems, he wanted to create the music and words together. “I wanted the words to be informed by the music.”

The album -- co-produced with Stewart Lerman -- wanders wild terrain, collecting the unexpected with guest performances by Brazilian composer Vinicius Cantuaria, jazz violinist Leroy Jenkins and singer-songwriter Marc Anthony Thompson (a.k.a. Chocolate Genius). In tandem with the novel, this project, says Rux, was freeing. “I realized that the record I was making was a record that I needed to make in order to understand that everything was not all right.” Not the outside world nor his interior one. “Even the political is personal to me,” says Rux. It was time to stop looking at the pieces and consider the whole.

The first record, he says, was cathartic. “I’ve had hard times in my life.” On the disc, he revealed all his grief and nightmares in confessionals that were spoken rather than sung. The project forced him to re-examine his past. “As I was growing up, I realized I was just losing so many parts of myself,” he says. “Casting everything aside. I didn’t want to go back to the Bronx and visit my mother in the institution. I’d put it all away. I didn’t want those things to affect my life. I wanted to move so far forward that they would vanish. I finally just realized, I’m in a place now that I can remember what was good, what was necessary. All of those things are me.”

Taken together, this album and novel are grand-scale collage. They’ve become, says Rux, “a way to remember myself. To retrieve myself, and all the things that I’d left behind.”