Alfred Banks and Tank and the Bangas’ Albert Allenback enjoy the freedom that comes with time off from their main gigs.

“Alfred has a few levels of verbal approval that really help while we make music. The lowest, which is ‘Okay,’ is I'm not mad at that. The next one, which is when you know you've hit a sound that's getting pretty good, he says, That's hard! The highest level of Banks' approval is when he listens and says That's FLAMES!”

Albert Allenback, horn player for Tank and the Bangas, is talking about collaborating with rapper Alfred Banks in the duo SaxKixAve. Recently, the duo released their first EP, I Don’t Wear Suits, with Allenback providing the beats and Banks, the flow. The collaboration began last year when Banks opened for Tank and the Bangas on tour. They hit it off while on tour, and when they got home, their manager Tavia Osbey suggested that they ought to try to work together. But according to Allenback, the project has deeper roots than that.

In 2013, he had just started making beats, and he sent Banks a lengthy Facebook message when he still performed under the name Lyrics Da Lyriciss. Allenback introduced himself as a student in the UNO Jazz Studies program who had started writing beats and he thought Banks should check them out. He emphasized that he didn’t use samples, and—“I wrote this,” Allenback says, laughing—“these biscuits are made from scratch!” 

“Alfred had this dry-ass response,” he continues. “He said, like, Word, man.”

Amazingly, nothing came of that initial outreach, and even now the project seems improbable. Banks has worked primarily with one producer, CZA, so a new producer is a step out of his comfort zone. And as the EP’s title suggests, comfort is important to him. Allenback had continued to work on his production chops, but he made beats without any specific rapper in mind. Still, the collaboration sounds natural on I Don’t Wear Suits, and both show more than they have before in the process.

Banks is old school. He values bars, and as his Underdog Central brand suggests, struggle lurks in almost every song. That narrative doesn’t weigh down his songs though, and he can express it in novel ways, most obviously on “Black Murakami” on 2019’s Road to a Rolex. What other emcee uses the popularity of pop culture-influenced Japanese artist Takashi Murakami as a benchmark of success? 

Allenback feeds that side of Banks’ creativity in SaxKixAve, but not deliberately. The sometimes wobbly, sometimes woozy beats came while Allenback was listening to a lot of Kendrick Lamar, Thundercat, Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment, Chance the Rapper, Flying Lotus, and Kanye West.  

“My music is piano-driven, nuts-and-bolts composition-based. How melody nestles in harmony and how chords move to inform arrangement,” he says. “I am often aware that my favorite stuff that I make has harmony I love, a groove, and something kinda shitty in it.”

In ways, the collaboration makes sense. Banks clearly believes in hip-hop’s core values, and artists who embodied them inspired Allenback as well. His hip-hop north star is A Tribe Called Quest, which he heard for the first time at age 11. “I first heard A Tribe Called Quest’s ‘Award Tour’ in a baseball video game and I was hooked, like Whaaaaat is this sound?” he recalls. “I devoured Tribe and took great pride in not listening to D4L, Soulja Boy, and Lil Boosie like all my 6th grade friends. Oh no, I only listened to real hip-hop.” Kanye West’s “Good Life” music video started to open his mind, but “the harmony, the exploration, the authenticity, the musicality, the actual skill, all that stuff got inside me and informs my taste to this day,” he says. 

To test drive the concept, Allenback sent Banks a folder of files, and he considered the ones Banks chose to work on a good sign. “He picked some of the weirder and more musical beats,” Allenback says, and the first one they worked on became “Tawny,” the last track on I Don’t Wear Suits. Banks wrote to it, and when they finally got together to work on it, the session took forever because they kept cracking each other up. “We were laughing the entire time,” Banks says. “Mad jokes. Like, the back of my throat hurt from laughing.” It was a continuation of the vibe that the two established while on tour together, and that level of connection made them think they should pursue the EP. It wasn’t just fun; it was productive. Still, they did three sessions together before they decided that it was an actual project that needed a name and a release. 

Both found it liberating that they had other gigs. The music they were recording as SaxKixAve didn’t carry the burden of their aspirations since Tank and the Bangas is clearly Allenback’s main outlet, and Alfred Banks has a full time job being Alfred Banks. Instead, SaxKixAve gave them a chance to flex musical muscles that they otherwise might not use. 

“It takes the pressure off,” Allenback says. “We can be ourselves fully. And in a weird way, since all this is going on right now, it feels like more of a green light to try stuff and experiment. Because our main things aren’t guaranteed, you know? Tank and the Bangas is going through it just like everybody else. We’re set up in our living room asking for Venmo donations just like everybody else.”

Banks knows that his belief in classic hip-hop values is part of his brand. It locates him in the indie hip-hop world, which exists as an implicit—and sometimes explicit—critique of the pop hip-hop mainstream, where bars and freestyles have become a thing of the past. When he went in the studio with Allenback, he had a clear sense of what he does and doesn’t do, but he trusted Allenback, even when he didn’t see or hear the vision yet. When Allenback asked him to sing, he reluctantly agreed, and he clearly remembers a moment in the first session when Allenback asked him to shout “Cribs!”

“I went with him, but in the back of my head, I’m like, What is this dude talking about?” Banks says. They shouted “Cribs” a number of times, and when Banks heard it, he realized, “Ahhh, that makes sense.”

Allenback appreciated that such musical gestures didn’t come naturally to Banks and were a sign of trust. “I am so glad he'll go there and let me go there,” Allenback says. “He started out gracious in the studio. When I asked him to do vocal harmonies and weird voices and high octaves and screams and stuff, he was like, Yeah okay, I can try. And then he really got into it when it worked.”

Banks admits that SaxKixAve is a side hustle, but the project expanded his awareness of his own musical possibilities. “We know what to do when we do our main thing, but when we come together, we can do that plus a thousand things more,” he says.

Now, they have an EP, but the conventional ways to market it have been Corona-fied. The planned tour to promote I Don’t Wear Suits is off. They played a live-streamed show from Republic on the EP’s drop date, but they’re like every other musician trying to figure out how to get themselves and their music into the world when they can’t go their physically.

“We know we have to spend a lot more time on the Internet,” Allenback says. “All the people who were social media- and tech-savvy before this are laughing at the rest of us catching up right now. But making your social media content is kind of like touring now.” He likes the live streams he has seen, but he recognizes that they’re not a substitute for the live experience, and that many don’t really capture the band’s essence. “They feel like a good attempt,” he says diplomatically.

“Right now, content is king, and we’re brainstorming about some stuff we’re going to do later,” Banks says. “Personally, this is the most content I’ve ever put out. I’m usually a very simple person. My background is basic hip-hop: You create the project, you shoot the promo video, you go on tour, and you call it a day. Whereas with Albert, it has been, Okay, outside of that, we have to do something creative. We can’t hit the road, so we have to do something. We’ve got to catch people’s eye. And then, on top of that, we’re a new group and battling the idea that people have never heard of this before. It’s got three different levels to it, but it’s been fun. I’m not as stressed out about it as I thought I’d be.”