Name: Digable Planets: Celebrating 30 years of Blow Out Comb
Start: 2026-08-05T20:00:00-04:00
Location: Maryland Hall

DIGABLE PLANETS
Celebrating 30 years of Blow Out Comb
Maryland Hall
Wed, August 5th
Doors: 7 PM
Show: 8 PM
Digable Planets burst onto the music scene in 1993 with their Grammy-winning single, “Rebirth Of Slick (Cool Like Dat).” Made up of Ishmael "Butterfly" Butler, Craig “Doodlebug” Irving, and Mary Ann “Ladybug Mecca” Vieira, the pioneering trio carved out a uniquely appealing style of jazz-informed hip hop that catapulted their first single to the 15th spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Shortly after, Digable Planets followed up with their debut album, Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time And Space), an ambitious offering that Pitchfork praised as “a world within a world, complete with its own language and monuments.” Melding jazz samples, and complex rhymes that touched on everything from the nuances of city life ("Where I’m From") to abortion rights ("La Femme Fetal"), Reachin’ was a rich and vibrant artistic statement as well as a huge commercial success (RIAA certified gold). The group celebrated the 30th anniversary of Reachin’ in 2023.
Digable Planets quickly followed up in 1994 with Blowout Comb, a bold and colorful meditation on Black liberation. While the album did not initially attain the immediate commercial successes of Reachin’, the 13-track sophomore opus has gone on to age beautifully, influencing future generations of hip hop heads, young jazz musicians, and Afrofuturists. In celebration of the three decades passed since the release of the landmark second album, Digable Planets, once again, takes their full five-piece band on the road for the Blowout Comb 30th Anniversary Tour, now touching North American cities from coast to coast. "Together, we're able to take all of the music, which is, you know, a bunch of disparate samples from here and there, and really represent that era of music in an updated way with one foot in the past, but another foot firmly with a sneaker on sprinting into the future with a lot of new sounds and a lot of new concepts," said Digable Planets founder Butterfly.