Chicago Grammy-winning trumpeter and producer Nico Segal will reunite with the Social Experiment Saturday at Metro, celebrating a decade since the release of the group’s debut album “Surf.”
Highly anticipated prior to its release, the album made a splash in 2015 with a sound that ignored genre barriers to fuse jazz, hip-hop and soul. It also produced the smash hit “Sunday Candy” and landed on year-end best album lists from Pitchfork and Stereogum. Led by Segal, formerly known as Donnie Trumpet, the Social Experiment is Chicago’s Chance the Rapper, composer and producer Peter CottonTale, drummer Greg Landfair Jr. and songwriter-producer Nate Fox. Today, “Sunday Candy” has more than 218 million streams on Spotify, with the least-played track from the album at nearly 2 million.
In another novel move, “Surf” didn’t list any of the myriad contributors featured on tracks, even though they included Jamila Woods, BJ The Chicago Kid, J. Cole, Big Sean, Noname, Erykah Badu, Jeremih, J. Cole, Janelle Monáe and KYLE. Segal said leaving the appearances of famous artists uncredited was intentional.
“I thought that was indicative of what we were bringing to the entire ethos of ‘Surf,’” Segal said. “You can’t let a celebrity name outshine the actual physical work that they did.”
Segal, 32, has made a name for himself in the city’s music scene with involvement in Kids These Days, Savemoney and The JuJu Exchange, plus touring with artists like Frank Ocean and producing for Chance the Rapper and J. Cole, among others. He also performed at Lollapalooza for the seventh time this August, hopping onstage for a trumpet solo during Djo’s set.
The artist sat down with Vocalo host Nudia Hernandez to look back on the album.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Nudia Hernandez: Has it felt like 10 years?
Nico Segal: Sometimes when I’m listening to that music or working on the show, it can feel like it was just yesterday I was in the studio. Then sometimes I’m like, “Dang, 10 years? I’m old.”
When you were making [“Surf”], was there ever that thought of, “Do we just think it’s cool?”
I feel like you have an instinct. You have a certain amount of believing in what you’re doing, and a certain amount of intuition, but at the end of the day, you don’t really know how people are going to receive it.
When we went into the final mixing stages of the entire project, “Sunday Candy” was really low on my list of priorities to finish. To his credit, it was actually Chance that was like, “No, that’s the one. We’ve got to work on that, we’ve got to finish that.”
Chance and Peter CottonTale are heavily on “Surf.” For a friendship to maintain 10 years, but also a musical relationship — what do you credit that to?
My mom actually always told me, “You can’t be a better musician than you are a person.” It’s something we’ve shared with each other about keeping the person first, checking in on people and caring about them as people first. Then, you get in the room together and create music, and you’re kind of on the same page. If you forget the person, then the music is not going to reach the … creative sort of cosmos, the spiritual sort of place. I think it’s most important that we remain friends first, and then musical collaborators, and the music will always follow behind the person.