Freedom is Adam Hamze’s North Star. So much so, the Lebanese American multi-hyphenate combined his government surname with “free” to form his stage name.
A slam poet at heart, he recites a couplet: “First name Free because I named myself what I chose to be/ Last name Hamze because you’re still your people even if you leave.”
“When I took the name Free, it was like if you’re ever caging yourself in or denying yourself the opportunity to be a liberated spirit, you are in direct violation of your namesake,” the two-time Austin Music Awards Best Rap nominee says in the backyard of his Sahar Studios. In addition to an Eastside recording studio that’s afforded artists free engineering, Sahar Studios is a community organization that’s hosted writing workshops to help artists receive city-issued grants; an event promoter; and, as offshoot Sahar Sounds, an archival page on SoundCloud.
“If Free is the name that you put on all your music, then you better make music freely and not let people stop you,” says the UT-Austin grad. “I wanted to name myself what I chose to be as a contract with myself.”
Now energized with a heightened sense of responsibility after the ongoing Gaza War erupted in October 2023, the rapper/producer/audio engineer/promoter has transformed into an assured lyricist whose music unabashedly spotlights the subjugation of Arab people, alongside his hustle-oriented raps. Though some in the Western world only started paying attention to the occupation of Palestine once the Gaza War began, that plight – and others shared by Arabs from the Levant region of West Asia – has informed the first-generation American’s principles since birth. Hamze sat down with the Chronicle for nearly four hours to comprehensively discuss his backstory, September’s culture-fusing debut album Asabiyyah, upcoming jazz and hip-hop showcase Razzfest, and enduring intent to build bridges between different worlds.
“Big Pimpin’ flipped the Khosara, hip-hop my only source of pride”
The youngest of three sons, Hamze was born in Corvallis, Oregon, to immigrants from Bekaa Valley who came to the United States during the Lebanon Civil War of 1975-1990. They soon moved to Portland before relocating to South Austin when he was 9. Save for a recent three-year period when he primarily lived in Los Angeles, the 31-year-old has resided in Austin since the early Aughts.
For the first eight years of his life, Hamze spent each summer in Lebanon. Those formative trips gave him a firsthand account of the war his parents were raised through. “They saw people die in front of them,” he says. “They saw bombs go off, buildings collapse. I would see bullet holes in the walls. When I say that in my music, this is not just imagery. These are true stories.”
On “i. New Ending,” from 2025 release FREETAPE 5: the Shadow & the Self, he reveals a bold promise to visit his ailing grandma in Lebanon: “On god, I’ll make it home to hold my dying granny’s hand/ They bombed the hospital, she cannot get her medicine.” He made good on that pledge earlier this year, despite an ongoing war in the nation between militant group Hezbollah and Israel. Fellow rapper/poet Chucky Blk first befriended Hamze when they met at Austin Poetry Slam around 2013. He couldn’t fathom one of his closest friends making such a dangerous trip – until he realized its inevitability.
“I remember him months before telling me he was planning a trip and I’m like, that’s crazy,” he says. “That’s an active warzone, especially where his family lives. And he still did it. Thinking about it now, of course he would! That’s just who Free is.”
Hamze’s recent visit to Lebanon probably didn’t phase him because he felt more at ease as a kid in the post-war country than in rural Austin. “In America, it’s a cultural war happening at all times, so it didn’t feel much safer to me,” he says. “I felt safer in the place with the bullet holes than I felt here in the manicured suburbs. I felt safer in the warzone – or the calm between the wars, because [in] Lebanon, when it’s not a war, it’s just the time between the next one.”
So why did he come back to Austin? The James Bowie High School alum credits Austin for helping him develop a deep appreciation for concerts as a “collective experience.” Sneaking into ACL Fest, free shows at South by Southwest, and his first concert properly shared with friends – Mac Miller’s Nov. 16, 2011 show at Stubb’s – were all possible due to Bat City’s abundance of accessible live music options for youth. Now, he wants to take what he learned in Los Angeles and bring it back home. Hamze points out the idea of home is fluid for those in a diaspora, so he views both Lebanon and Austin as core pieces of his identity.
Initially raised on Arabic music icons such as Lebanese singer Fairuz and Egyptian musician Umm Kulthum, his middle brother introduced him to poetry and hip-hop. Muslim conscious rappers Lupe Fiasco and Yasiin Bey (fka Mos Def) deeply resonated with him. Through hip-hop, he was able to reconnect with his Arab identity – especially after being bullied in sixth grade. Slivers of hope, like hearing the Chicago wordsmith speak Arabic on the Food & Liquor intro and later challenge conventional thought on “American Terrorist,” proved to him he didn’t have to conform or hide to thrive in the States.
“I was really stripped of my identity, stripped of my culture,” he says. “I was made to think in this country [that] to be Arab was [putting] a target on my back.
“If I didn’t have Food & Liquor as my scripture, as my soundtrack, then I could’ve just never found my way back to being somebody who embraces my Arab identity.”
He then mentions Ye (fka Kanye West) referencing the Islamic expression “Allahu Akbar” on the Late Registration cut “Heard ‘Em Say.”
“That was like a drop of holy water in a pool of blood,” he says before cheerily repeating the verse. “That’s what I meant with [Asabiyyah track] ‘Stars&Stripes.’ Without hip-hop, I would’ve lost myself. I would’ve never understood the redeeming qualities of my culture in the American context. I had pride in my culture, but it was foreign.”
“Product of the Global South, Still tippin’ out in Texas Towns”
As he attempted to hone his sound, Free Hamze tackled miles of sonic terrain on the six mixtapes preceding his maiden album. Early works Green Alchemy and FREETAPE 1: Friends With Bugs puff out hazy pluggnb, while FREETAPE 5: the Shadow & the Self presents a complete 180 with its employment of ambient jazz and pitched-down vocals. Named after the concept of social solidarity popularized by 14th century Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun, this year’s Asabiyyah paints a clear, self-produced, and self-engineered portrait of Free Hamze. The album’s 10 tracks fuse mostly old-school Arabic music samples – some of which he procured in Cairo and Beirut – with Southern hip-hop drums. Lyrically, it’s a striking confluence of fiery, politically charged rap and his usual rhymes about hustling that makes “conscious rapper” a misnomer for him. Across the album, he questions the idea of the American Dream (“al-Shamis,” which features the last voicemail his grandmother sent him before her passing), pens a mini-autobiography of how hip-hop soundtracked his adolescence and empowered him (“Stars&Stripes”), and writes some of his boldest lyrics yet.
“Gibran Hashish Gibran” presents Free Hamze’s duality: The album’s ridiculously named third cut juxtaposes a colloquial Arabic term for marijuana with famous Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran. On the record, Hamze rattles off various lyrics about hustling over a loop of elegant strings, sampled from the opening of Moroccan singer Nouhma’s Eighties album Habiby Man Ana, that weave around trap snares.
He says he always intended for his first full-length to be a fusion of the two worlds that raised him, but lacked the skill to flip samples off cassettes and engineer them properly. He credits FreeBloo&theFreak partner/rapper-producer wunderkind Locuust for helping him learn how to use Ableton, just by watching her process when they recorded together. Inspired by Yasiin Bey’s “borderless” album The Ecstatic, Hamze views Asabiyyah as a Pan-Arab album and hopes to inspire those in a diaspora to connect with their roots if they haven’t already.
“This really feels like my voice,” he says, wearing an Egypt national soccer team jersey. “I like every FREETAPE and I think they’re all great. I don’t look back at any of them and don’t respect the work that I did. But this really feels like what I was working towards. This feels like something that means something to my people and to me. [Something] that aligns with who I am, my musical lineage, and the traditions that I’m trying to merge.”
“I fuck with everybody whose freedom is a struggle”
Pro-armed resistance track “Keffiyeh Boyz” plants a towering flag toward the album’s end: “Let’s get one thing straight/ The terror is the state/ Sure ain’t the militia, Sure ain’t the displaced/ Sure ain’t all these orphans or the dads who lost kids.” There’s also a slew of self-censored phrases throughout the song that are loudly beeped out. On why he didn’t explicitly state those phrases, Hamze suggests, “sometimes you need people to read between the lines to protect yourself and others in the long run.”
The incendiary track’s latter portion features a repeated plea for listeners to look into various moments and figures involved in the longstanding Palestine-Israel conflict, which has been identified as a genocide by the United Nations: the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, Six-Day War, Balfour Declaration, slain Palestinian novelist/militant Ghassan Kanafani, and more. “Keffiyeh Boyz” polarizes and strikes a stark contrast to what one may expect from a UT graduate who’s articulate, measured, and usually radiates warmth off wax. But in terms of delivery, it’s some of Hamze’s best and most confident rapping. In conversation, the conviction cast by his pupils pierces through his trademark dark Prada shades. “Global Souf” is his favorite song on the album, but he believes “Keffiyeh Boyz” has the best message.
“I stand 10 toes on that 100%,” he says. “That song is the most important song because it’s the most honest. It’s the realest one. It’s the most fearless one. And it’s hard, too.”
Another element of his typical look is a black-and-white keffiyeh, a traditional Arab headdress which has become a symbol of solidarity for some non-Palestinians the last few years. You’ll struggle to see him without one nowadays. “I feel like I need to wear the keffiyeh because I need people to know at all times that I have not forgotten about my people or where I come from,” he says.
“I will not forget about them and when I express myself and share my art with the world, I’m doing it through the lens of a radical, liberation-forward expression in solidarity with the Palestinians, Lebanese people, [and] Arabs all across the world that couldn’t be there with me. And the people that I almost had to leave behind in order to spread my message here. I don’t like to touch the stage without it.”
“When I express myself and share my art with the world, I’m doing it through the lens of a radical, liberation-forward expression in solidarity with the Palestinians, Lebanese people, [and] Arabs all across the world.”
Free hamze
Rap + Jazz = Razz
While living in Los Angeles, Hamze would often attend events hosted by independent jazz label Minaret Records. Those shows injected him with a boundless love for jazz that courses through his music (FREETAPE 4: Renegade Rap) and continuous practice of alto saxophone. After one of those Minaret events, he asked Egyptian trombonist Zekkereya El-Magharbel for advice on how to pursue jazz musicianship. El-Magharbel told him to first study the genre’s history, which led him to piece together a definitive conclusion: Jazz and hip-hop’s histories actually share more in common beyond the latter’s extensive sampling of the former. Rather than just telling people about these similarities, Hamze – who now takes jazz courses at Austin Community College – wants to show these similarities with his Razzfest event. From there, he hopes to spark “new synapses in the brain of Austin” amongst musicians as well.
“I just saw a Venn diagram overlap and that’s why ‘razz’ came to mind,” he says. “I don’t think many people realize that this story has been told before. And instead of just getting on my soap box and trying to tell people that, let me just show them how these things really come together. That’s why I started [Razzfest]: I wanted to put them in the same house and let people draw these connections themselves.
“Razzfest is meant to be an intentional bridge between rap and jazz. Not a passive one, not an aesthetic one, but an actual bridge that gets people who love jazz music and people who love rap music in the same room. I could write a book about it if I wanted to, but nothing’s going to hit the same as the transcendent music that we experience at some of these shows.”
Razzfest’s Austin Music Award-nominated premiere took place at the now-shuttered Empire Control Room & Garage in May 2025. The event featured performances from Austin rap staples Blakchyl and J Soulja on the same bill as jazz/hip-hop fusion drummer Kassa Overall, local jazz-fusion quartet Mockjaw, and idiosyncratic Detroit rhymer Quelle Chris. It’s also the first, and surely only, place where I’ve seen an interview clip of influential Houston producer DJ Screw in the same playlist as a performance from Cuban pianist Chucho Valdés. Performances flowed seamlessly into one another in front of a thoroughly engaged crowd and Hamze showed off his charisma as a host. He completed a live music triple-double when he backed Blakchyl as a saxophonist after opening the show with his jazzy rap trio FreeBloo&theFreak.
Razzfest’s all-ages second edition will emanate from the Far Out Lounge & Stage, Nov. 15, headlined by experimental jazz/avant-garde New York City collective Standing On the Corner. Like last year, rap sets will alternate with jazz sets on the South Austin venue’s main stage. The bill’s meaty undercard includes versatile artist Pink Siifu as the rap headliner, as well as local breakout Lynn, ascending Austin conscious rapper Soto the Activist, and saxophonist Paulo “Good Call Paulo” Santos. Hamze will once again kick things off alongside FB&F partners Kardinal Bloo and Locuust. Inside, beatmakers including Ben Buck and the Deli will conduct sets, while the venue’s green room will run a playlist of clips highlighting rap and jazz luminaries.
Despite first only attending the inaugural Razzfest to support Blakchyl, Lynn says she stayed for most of the show because the event was well structured and drew a crowd of people who seemed genuinely interested in the performances. “When he introduced people and talked about everything that led to him throwing the show, it just felt really authentic,” the Birmingham transplant says. “It felt like his love and heart was in the show. [Performing] was a no-brainer for me.”
“So much light on my tongue, I spit the spirit of suns”
Toward the end of our interview, I begin to wonder if someone as inherently polarizing as Free Hamze can be a unifier. He clarifies his intention is to build avenues that unlock new ideas and overcome obstacles, but he won’t force anyone to follow his lead.
“I think I naturally have become a unifier, but I don’t think I ever strove out to be that,” he says. “To build a bridge is more about allowing people freedom of movement than it is about saying I want to unify you and unify you. It’s more like, ‘Hey, there’s an obstacle here. We should be allowed to cross this obstacle. I’m Free Hamze, this is what I believe in.’ So I build this bridge so we can cross it. Not because I think that we need this unity. I built it because we should have a right to cross the path if we so desire.
“Between jazz and rap, I saw the water and I built the bridge across it,” he continues. “With Sahar Studios to all these different people, I’ve built the bridges between making music and performing it – between somebody who is a great rapper and now they have a great album. Going from Cairo to a record shop and bringing it to Sahar Studios and making an album, I’ve built a bridge. That is my secret power: building bridges. That is my talent.”
Chucky Blk acknowledges his friend’s directness may upset some, but credits him for being someone he can count on to dish out real advice in a non-preachy way when he’s feeling down. Even though he’s traded eyeglasses for sunglasses, he thinks Free Hamze is still the same freedom-driven person from the poetry slams all those years ago. “It’s always been, Free looks at the world and just finds executable tasks to get from Point A to Point B very efficiently,” he says. “That’s something I’ve always admired about him. … The way he’s able to take an idea and make reality out of it is kind of astounding.”
Hamze believes freedom itself is polarizing and “requires upsetting people.” Freedom itself is a deeply complex concept that’s responsible for eternal human conflict – both internal and external. And how can you live freely if you’re constantly trying to appease both sides of every situation?
Speaking of upsetting people, FreeBloo&theFreak went viral locally in September when their one-hour set at the Pecan Street Festival was abruptly cut short. Festival CEO Luis Zapata cited profanity as the reason, but Hamze believes someone with authority out in rural Bee Cave felt terror at the sight of an Arab in a keffiyeh, a Mexican in a luchador mask, and Black dude with blue bird wings jointly spitting conscious-leaning rap. He says “it was the most affirming thing that could’ve happened” and reminded him that someone can simply cut the mic if they dislike what they’re hearing, so the onus is on you to decide how you’ll respond. The trio chose to continue rapping and address the crowd after their mics were silenced. That moment was arguably the best thing that could’ve happened to FreeBloo&theFreak as local news stations that normally wouldn’t even sniff in the direction of Austin rap interviewed them. It’s the type of daring risk that ultimately can net a reward.
“I’m just trying to show people that there’s nothing scary about making an attempt to connect with people,” he says. “There’s nothing scary about taking a risk with your art [and] with your music. What’s scary is being isolated, being alone, missing out on opportunities and resources you could’ve had if you just followed your heart. That’s the type of shit I’m scared of.”
Razzfest takes place this Sunday, November 15, at the Far Out Lounge.
