A Solo Quest

"Clive asked me to come with him to J Records," Q-Tip recalled. "But I stayed with L.A. Reid at Arista and finished the album. He loved it, sent it out, it got great reviews. But he got cold feet because he didn't hear a single. So I asked for a release."

Rather than put the CD out on an independent label, Q-Tip decided to sit on it; the album achieved cult status after it was widely bootlegged. From there, the rapper-producer signed a deal with DreamWorks Records only to see the imprint absorbed by Geffen Records just months later. He never stopped creatively striving, studying piano, taking tutorials in bel canto singing technique and performing DJ sets throughout New York. After a year of neglect on the Geffen affiliate Interscope, Q-Tip asked for and was granted another release.

In 2004, he inked a contract with Universal Motown and self-produced another solo album, "Open." Its spacey avant jazz grooves and psychedelic guitars (not to mention the vocal contributions on two songs from Andre 3000) won critical raves but failed to live up to Q-Tip's sky-high standards. And again, "Open" never saw the light of commercial day.

Sylvia Rhone, president of Universal Motown, oversaw that CD's slow metamorphosis from a dark, jazzy exercise in intellectual hip-hop into the accessible, sparkling pop of "The Renaissance" after a series of creative detours.

"He had failure to launch, that's what it was," Rhone said. "Over the four years, trust me, he's been working on this. It's been a constant work in progress. The tone has changed so much. But I think we have something that's going to go down in the record books."

The time is right

PILOTING HIS SUV through midtown Manhattan's glittering night scape, the rapper-producer appeared quiet and a tad sentimental. He pointed out the theater that functioned as Studio 54 in the '70s and signaled toward where the seminal New York night spot Latin Quarter used to be, the place where a young MC from Queens (Q-Tip: Get it?) established his rap bona fides.

Soon, however, conversation turned away from hip-hop's past and toward his future output -- specifically why the time is right now for him to release "The Renaissance."