CORNELIUS

Long before Cornelius had a studio, he had a basement. Growing up in Glenarden, Maryland, he would sit downstairs while his older brother rehearsed with his band, putting his hands on the Hammond organ and listening as the Leslie speaker filled the room. His brother introduced him to the popular music of the day, but what captured Cornelius was bigger than any particular artist or genre. He became fascinated by sound itself, by what happened when rhythm, melody, voices, instruments, texture and silence were put together in just the right way.

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He began writing songs as a child. Even then, he rarely heard them as melody and lyrics alone. He heard bass lines, drums, harmonies, vocal parts, instrumentation, movement and complete arrangements. Music arrived in pieces and layers, and in his imagination those pieces could come from anywhere. Funk and rhythm provided the launching point, but there were no walls around where a composition could go.

The song gets what the song needs.

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By high school, Cornelius was writing, performing and beginning to find his way into Washington's music scene. While attending Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Maryland, he and classmate Kenny Lattimore were asked to join the band The Boys. As hip-hop emerged during the 1980s, Cornelius moved toward rap, first performing as Doc D and later developing the more conscious, Afrocentric Pharoah Black.

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In 1992, he released The Arrival of a Prophet. He was young, ambitious and beginning to imagine where music might take him.

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Then cancer changed the story.