06/02/2026
Your Ottawa Bluesfest Featured Artist of the Day is... Digable Planets! đ€đ¶
Digable Planets will play on the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Ottawa Stage at 7:45 PM on Thursday, July 9.
Digable Planets burst onto the music scene in 1993 with their Grammy-winning single, âRebirth Of Slick (Cool Like Dat).â Made up of Ishmael "Butterfly" Butler, Craig âDoodlebugâ Irving, and Mary Ann âLadybug Meccaâ Vieira, the pioneering trio carved out a uniquely appealing style of jazz-informed hip hop that catapulted their first single to the 15th spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Shortly after, Digable Planets followed up with their debut album, Reachinâ (A New Refutation of Time And Space), an ambitious offering that Pitchfork praised as âa world within a world, complete with its own language and monuments.â Melding jazz samples, and complex rhymes that touched on everything from the nuances of city life ("Where Iâm From") to abortion rights ("La Femme Fetal"), Reachinâ was a rich and vibrant artistic statement as well as a huge commercial success (RIAA certified gold). The group celebrated the 30th anniversary of Reachinâ in 2023.
Digable Planets quickly followed up in 1994 with Blowout Comb, a bold and colorful meditation on Black liberation. While the album did not initially attain the immediate commercial successes of Reachinâ, the 13-track sophomore opus has gone on to age beautifully, influencing future generations of hip hop heads, young jazz musicians, and Afrofuturists. In celebration of the three decades passed since the release of the landmark second album, Digable Planets, once again, takes their full five-piece band on the road for the Blowout Comb 30th Anniversary Tour, now touching North American cities from coast to coast. "Together, we're able to take all of the music, which is, you know, a bunch of disparate samples from here and there, and really represent that era of music in an updated way with one foot in the past, but another foot firmly with a sneaker on sprinting into the future with a lot of new sounds and a lot of new concepts," said Digable Planets founder Butterfly.
