Jaheim, Musiq Soulchild, and Tank – some rappers just seem to fit better with rappers than others. Then, there’s Grammy-nominated Ryan Leslie. The Harvard-educated music man, Ryan Leslie, originally from Washington, D.C., has been known over the years for his Hip-Hop flavored anthems such “Diamond Girl” and “Addicted” with Cassie. The fact that he plays the piano and has an Ivy League educational background may have lumped him into a certain lane with his R&B peers. Still, Leslie says fans should get ready to see him in a whole new light – as a rapper. MC-ing isn’t new to the crooner, he says – it just hasn’t had its turn in the sun. AllHipHop.com interviewed Ryan Leslie as he prepares for a special “Black Music Month” performance on June 15 at the 14th Street Apple Store in New York, and later, Tunisia, North Africa on a goodwill mission. He also dropped us his Top 5 Dead or Alive before signing off: AllHipHop.com: Hi Ryan, how are you? Ryan: I’m good, Seandra. Thanks so much for having me at 11:30 on a Monday morning! I’m actually going to be talking to London and Paris coming up so…they’re six hours ahead of me, so I’ve been up since about 6 already. AllHipHop.com: Oh my goodness. Well you did a good job performing at [Hot97] Summer Jam recently, a super quick job, but good. Ryan: Thank you very much. AllHipHop.com: Was it your first time at Summer Jam? Ryan: Well, that was the longest I’ve ever been on stage at Summer Jam. I came out with Jim Jones and Dipset in 2009. I made a record with Jim Jones called “Precious.” AllHipHop.com: Right, ok. Well, I want to backtrack a little bit, and just talk a little bit about your background real quick for anybody who’s been living under a rock for the past few years and doesn’t know a lot about you. The thing that always stood out about you for me was your musicianship. You play the piano, you know, and you’re not just a guy who walked into the studio without some training. So tell me about your early music years. Ryan: Well, I come from a musical family. My parents are both musicians. My father, his main instrument was the trumpet, and he still plays from time to time, and my mother’s main instrument is the piano. She still plays and loves it to death. So it was just only natural that me and my sister would be drawn to music as a way to express ourselves and as a way to just have a bond with the family, I mean, we would sing together and it was a really big part of my childhood, and you know, my parents are Salvation Army officers so we didn’t really have the money to have formal training. I mean they tried to pick and choose what they could afford to send us to in terms of education, education and extracurriculars. So my father really, you know, he wanted me to go to karate school (laughs)… AllHipHop.com: You said karate? [laughter] Ryan: Yeah. Japanese karate. And my mother, who’s actually half Chinese, her cousin in Canada actually ran a karate school so there were many summers that they would just have me go up to Canada to train. And my sister was actually the one who got the piano lessons. I was so jealous. But what I would do is I would take her piano books, or take my mother’s piano books, you know, and I taught myself all of the musical proficiency that I have today. And you know that’s not to say I didn’t have an environment to practice in because the Salvation Army has a really rich musical tradition, so I was in band camp for a week out of a year or something like that. Really a lot of the musicanship and my ability to play instruments just comes from my own curiosity and approach to learning which was “hey, if I can’t take classes I’ll teach myself.” AllHipHop.com: Right. You have a pretty impressive educational background, too, that people might not know about. What did you study when you were in college? Ryan: Well, I actually went to went to…I concentrated in…I majored in Government at Harvard with a concentration in Economics (Macroeconomics) and Political Science. AllHipHop.com: But the music, I guess, rose to the surface as what you really felt your passion was. Is that it? Ryan: Absolutely. Absolutely. AllHipHop.com: Ok. So I want to ask you about the new album “Les is More” and first I want to ask you to explain the title. Why is less more? Ryan: Why is less more? Well less is actually a play on my name, L-e-s, and in a lot of my productions or when I’ve actually mentioned my tag in songs that I produce or I’m a part of, I use the shortened version of my name RLES and so this album’s title is actually that everyone’s always toyed with when they hear my nickname RLES. “Oh RLES is more. You should do an album like that.” And at this juncture in my career, I really, really feel strongly about sharing more of myself, and what I mean by that is I feel like there are so many other dimensions to me that I really haven’t shared as an artist to this point, and one of the most probably obvious changes from everything you’ve heard from me is that this album is a Rap album so to actually go from being a Grammy-nominated contemporary R&B artist to deciding his next album is going to be a Rap album may catch some people off guard. But I’ve been rapping ever since I was a teenager and actually you know that’s because my sister always had the beautiful voice in the family, and I just always had an affinity for Rap as a medium of expressing myself. So I […]