Freestyle Fellowship were often pinpointed for being atypical — a West Coast crew that seemed to swim against the g-funk current, and the catalysts of an indie-rap abstractionist movement that expanded what South Central L.A. (and all points Eastward) could represent in hip-hop. And it’s true that, by their 1993 sophomore album Innercity Griots, the crew had few local peers who resembled them — not just in terms of style, but breadth, building off the structures of their region’s funk-heavy production and lacing it with an ensemble of MCs whose styles would elude easy categorization until the parameters of “indie rap” were codified years later. But they were also atypical compared to themselves — Aceyalone, Myka 9, P.E.A.C.E., and Self Jupiter rapped like writers who made English seem polyglot, overburdened with ideas and gifted with the enthusiasm that made their refinements and perspective shifts feel rich with possibility. “Bullies of the Block” might position P.E.A.C.E. as a a combative shit-talker, Self Jupiter as an Afrocentric poet, Aceyalone as a self-ruminating battler, and Myka 9 as a powerful snapshot storyteller — but those are roles that they go on to recast, exchange, or otherwise mutate on further tracks like the uptempo technique-driven “Everything’s Everything,” the pugilistic posse cut “Heavyweights,” and the post-bop intricacies of “Inner City Boundaries.” Combine that with their intra-group steel-sharpens-steel sense of collective impact through artistic competition, their refusal to see any limitations around the ways they could end-run and subvert the beat for their flows, and their tendency to sound damn good on a simple group hook, and Freestyle Fellowship’s work on Innercity Griots does more than just about any rap album of its time to show off rapping as a form capable of the improvisational rapport and rhythm-defying fluidity of jazz. Innercity Griots carries that versatility through to its beats, a samples-and-live-band mixture that sits somewhere between Stetsasonic and The Chronic in its juxtaposition of jam-spurred spontaneity and rhythmic monomania — though it’s no slight to the production braintrust to credit the most arresting instrumentation to the artists holding the mics.