Radical poet who ‘put the hip in hip-hop’

Jalal Mansur Nuriddin, who has died aged 73, stood out as he stepped off the train in London during a visit to Britain in 2014. In aviator shades and head-to-toe black leather, his silver-grey afro barely contained beneath a woollen ski hat, he did not look like a man of 69 who had arrived on the 11.25 from Weston-super-Mare.

He extended his arm and kicked his leg up to touch it in a demonstration of his agedefying sprightliness. ‘‘I’m now known as the grandfather of rap,’’ he chuckled.

Nuriddin was the leader of the second incarnation of the radical New York act the Last Poets who, with their politically provocative rhymes laid over

African and funk rhythms, built the foundations for rap music.

Miles Davis and

Quincy Jones were fans, while Marvin Gaye was politicised by their lyrics.

He joined the band after its original lineup, founded in 1968, had split after a violent episode involving chairs and a hammer. The revised lineup consisted of Abiodun Oyewole, whom Nuriddin had met in prison, fellow poet Umar Bin Hassan and conga player Nilaja Obabi. It was this incarnation that Alan Douglas, who produced Jimi Hendrix, saw on an outdoor basketball court in New York.

‘‘They were four guys and a conga,’’ Douglas recalled, ‘‘and they performed the whole first album.’’ He offered them a recording session. ‘‘They jumped in the car and we were done in an hour. Cheapest record I ever made.’’

Released in April 1970, The Last Poets was neither advertised nor reviewed, and yet sold

700,000 copies, reaching No 29 on the Billboard album chart. One track, Wake Up, N...ers, appeared on the soundtrack of the Mick Jagger film Performance.

Still known as Lightnin’ Rod, he recorded his best-known album, Hustlers Convention, which chronicled the exploits of two fictional young rebels on the streets of New York to a jazz-funk backing by Kool and the Gang, in

1973. The record began to be played at the ‘‘block parties’’ out of which rap blossomed, and has been sampled by seminal acts WuTang Clan and the Beastie Boys.

Nuriddin was born Lawrence Padilla in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. His mother was a gospel-loving housewife, his father a shellshocked World War II veteran who turned to poker to support his family. Lawrence ran with a gang, who warred with their rivals. ‘‘There was a code of honour,’’ he recalled. ‘‘No guns allowed. Either hand-to-hand or baseball bats, or chains or car aerials, were the weapons of choice.’’

Padilla was jailed for assault and battery. After a while he was given a choice: he could stay in jail or, with war in Vietnam looming, register for the draft. He signed up for the paratroopers, but after refusing to salute the American flag found himself in the army brig in a straitjacket. Faking insanity, he was relieved of duty in 1965. He worked as a stenographer on Wall Street, absorbing all he could about the banking system. In his poem, E

Pluribus Unum, he noted that ‘‘the real hustlers were rippin’ off billions/ From the unsuspecting millions’’.

He had written poetry from an early age. ‘‘I could rhyme before I could write. I then learnt how to ‘jail toast’ in prison, which was a combination of fable, fact, fiction, sex and violence . . . Poetry was the way I expressed all these bottled-up emotions about being an Afro-American.’’

By 1968, having changed his name to Alafia Pudim, he was drawing inspiration from the Black Power movement, and joined the Last Poets. He converted to Islam and changed his name again, to Jalaluddin Mansur Nuriddin. ‘‘I chose Islam because it was not a philosophy of turning the other cheek,’’ he said. ‘‘No cheek. Just heat and seek . . . The Christianity that other slaves were taught made them docile. Islam is hostile if it’s attacked.’’

The Last Poets’ second album, This Is Madness, with tracks such as Nuriddin’s White Man’s Got A God Complex, was even more politically contentious than the first and attracted the attentions of the FBI, who put them under surveillance. Jalal went into hiding in New York’s Chinatown, where he studied Bak Mei kung fu, acupuncture and Chinese astrology. He loved Chinese culture and said he would happily live on noodles.

In 1991 he moved to Liverpool, then Paris, and later travelled to Mecca. His private life was complex. He had 10 children and a stepdaughter from various relationships.

When Barack Obama became president, he returned to the US, where he wrote an as-yetunpublished verse memoir. ‘‘I grew up in music,’’ he said. ‘‘I was born in bebop, raised on doo-wop, and I put the hip in hip-hop.’’

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‘‘I chose Islam because it was not a philosophy of turning the other cheek.’’