It's impossible to deny the niche that Blackalicious -- a.k.a. Chief Xcel and the Gift of Gab -- carved out of the hip-hop underground beginning with 1995's Melodica EP, following up with the acclaimed Nia (2000), and reaching its apex with 2002's lush, melodic, forward-thinking Blazing Arrow. The funked-up jazz-tinged music was consistently stronger than almost any in hip-hop, Gab's rhymes were as intelligent as they were rhythmic and the group became one of the primary carriers of the "positive vibe" mantle first lifted by De La Soul and brought into the new millennium by pals like Jurassic 5.

Over the course of those seven years and a few prior, the duo teamed with friends DJ Shadow, Lyrics Born and Lateef the Truth Speaker to form the SoleSides Crew at the University of California at Davis, which eventually morphed into Quannum Projects in the late-Nineties -- a bellwether company in the independent hip-hop movement that just sent its entire roster on a successful cross-country tour. So at the peak his group's success, why would Gab (nee Tim Parker) want to release a solo album? "We're both artists," Gab says. "Xcel is an extreme producer and I'm an extreme MC . . . there's a lot of things that we both want to get out. This was just a vision I had for an album that I wanted to do."

The disc, the new Fourth Dimensional Rocketships Going Up, is a brilliant solo debut from a brilliant performer. While Gab maintains that the disc is a departure from his work with Blackalicious, there's no denying that the meat of the record -- the beats and the rhymes -- come from the same intelligent place. To Gab's chagrin, the record made its way onto file-sharing services earlier this year, in part because the original release date was in February and advance copies made it out earlier. "My only request to those who downloaded it is to buy it now that it's out!" he says, laughing.

The seeds of Rocketships were sown during a Blackalicious tour in late 2001. "Since Nia, I've been thinking I want to do a solo record. There's certain ideas I had, that I would have to do on my own. It was always a matter of timing. We're trying to build our career -- we didn't want solo projects to take away from the group.

"We were on the road with Wordsayer (from Seattle underground crew Source of Labor). He shot me a beat tape to listen to. I started writing different rhymes to those beats." Wordsayer (a high school writing teacher by day) encouraged a meeting between Gab and Seattle hip-hop producers Jake One and Vitamin D.

"It was easy. Really easy," Gab continues. "We recorded the whole thing at Vitamin D's studio The Pharmacy up in Seattle. They gave me over 400 beat tracks to choose from. I wanted to make a record that sounded cohesive."

The result of those sessions, which ran for a year from June of 2002 is a moody, chilled out album infused with the sexy heart of R&B. The wordplay of "Flashback," playing off every memory a teen of the Seventies and Eighties would keep in the back of their head, is a bridge from the groove laden 2002 Blackalicious track "Make You Feel That Way" to Gab's newish sound. The disc's first single, "The Writz" takes a minimalist melody based on Irving Berlin's "Puttin' on the Ritz" and throws it far into the future, while "To Know You" and "Way of the Light," featuring Quannum teammate Vursatyl, evoke the bedroom mood of Common's work with the Soulquarians. Gab is as forceful an MC as the Notorious B.I.G., but with greater warmth and speed in his delivery.

The Oakland-based MC says that long before the public heard his music, he was sharing it with Xcel and the other members of the Quannum family. "We're continuing to try to push ourselves as artists. We definitely share our work with each other. We really have built and grown with each other so much that our opinions are important to the others. We like to keep each other's chops up."

"Hip-hop has changed over the years," he continues. "Not just with our audience. If you looked at a hip-hop audience ten, fifteen years ago, they were predominantly black. Hip-hop has spread out from the ghettos and urban America into the suburbs. Even into Australia, Japan."

Gab may be part of an independent collective, but he makes no bones of his pride for this record and his desire to have it heard. "I want to be able to speak my truths and tell my story," he says. "I'm not trying to be a preacher -- I'm just a human being. Ultimately, I want to be remembered as someone who contributed to the story."