All of the Above’s latest remix

Four years after moving to Lansing with his wife in 2006 to start a family, Seattle native and musician Ozay Moore, 42, founded All of the Above Hip Hop Academy, a nonprofit that offers hip-hop-related courses and workshops to school-aged children.

“I tried to identify the custodians, places and spaces that were doing the work to protect and maintain the culture here in our city. What became clear is that we just didn’t have a mechanism to support legacy — to pass the baton on to the next generation,” Moore said. “We wanted to create an ecosystem by which artists could develop their craft, get plugged in, sharpen their skills and find camaraderie among like-minded individuals.”

Fourteen years later, the academy has grown far beyond Moore’s initial vision. While it has been “intentionally mobile” since its inception, Moore has known for several years that it needed a permanent home. He found one in a 1,900-square-foot space on Washington Square in downtown Lansing, which celebrated its grand opening on July 25.

“This is the first time that our name has been on a lease. Now that we’re in this centralized location right on the bus line, everybody knows where we’re at. We’re just imagining it continuing to grow and blossom from here,” he said.

Moore, along with three other staff members and nine contracted instructors, will continue teaching the academy’s existing courses in the new space. They’ll remain free for children and teenagers through high school, but the academy is also looking to expand its catalog by adding paid classes for adults in the near future.

However, at its core, the academy remains dedicated to youth.

“Hip-hop is a philosophy, a culture, a practice and a way of being. It’s a way of internalizing and expressing your ideas about the world,” Moore said. “We hold space for that conversation for our young people, walking them through the process of creating music with other people and learning skills in collaboration, while also showing them the importance of giving back to the community.”

When Moore was recording and performing his own music on the West Coast under the stage name “Othello,” hip-hop was still blossoming into the cultural behemoth it is today. While it’s now the No. 1 genre in the U.S., according to a January report by Billboard, Moore said his goal has always been to highlight hip-hop’s roots for the next generation. In turn, he said, the students help the academy’s instructors keep a finger on the pulse of the genre’s continued evolution.

“Hip-hop has always been about transformation and remix, and our students represent that through line to wherever hip-hop is going to go next,” Moore said. “Here, our goal is to hold space for what has been and what will be in the same place. Whatever you build on top of that, that’s the gift.”

All of the Above Hip Hop Academy

303 S. Washington Square, Lansing

See class schedule for hours

(517) 920-9274

alloftheabovehiphop.org