Fantastic Negrito, courtesy.

Despite being nominated, Fantastic Negrito won’t be in attendance at the Grammys on Sunday.

Xavier Dphrepaulezz won’t even be in the country when he releases an album on Feb. 3. He’ll be playing a show in Scotland, which is appropriate considering the song for which he’s nominated in the Best American Roots Performance.

“It’s fitting because my grandmother, Elizabeth Gallimore, was Scottish,” he said. “So it’s pretty cool that I’ll be playing there when the song about her, ‘Oh Betty,’ is nominated. It’s beautiful.”

Gallimore’s relationship with an unnamed slave in the 1750s, which eventually produced Fantastic Negrito himself, is the subject of his 2022 album, White Jesus Black Problems. It’s his fourth LP since taking on the Negrito moniker in 2014. He won Grammys for Best Contemporary Blues Album for each of the first three.

Grammy nominations are one constant in Fantastic Negrito’s career, and another is reinvention. Each of his albums so far has been dissimilar from what’s come  before it. That has been and continues to be an intentional goal.

“In the spirit of some of my heroes, David Bowie and the early Prince records, I love that spirit of being transformative,” he said. “I think David Bowie said it best, ‘When you can’t really feel your feet touching the ground, that’s it.’ Kinda uncomfortable but that’s the moment you look for as an artist.”

His recently announced next album, Grandfather Courage, is a new entirely acoustic reimagining of White Jesus Black Problems. It’s named after what he decided to call his ancestor who was only listed as “Unnamed Negro Slave.”

“I thought, well, let’s give grandpa a name,” he says.

Fantastic Negrito performs at BottleRock Napa Valley at the Napa Valley Expo on May 27, 2022. Sean Liming/STAFF.

The album is acoustic right down to the stand-up bass. Negrito’s band recorded it together playing at the same time; a rarity these days. It begins with “Drifting Away,” called “Venomous Dogma” on the prior album; this time accentuated with xylophone rather than Southern guitar noodling. The following track, “Locked Up,” is… also a continuation of “Venomous Dogma.”

But nowhere on the album is the change more noticeable than on fourth track “They Go Low,” which has been transformed from a three-and-a-half-minute mid-tempo and sing-song blues-rock tune to a noir-ish and funereal 11-minute orchestral and jazz mutation punctuated by trumpet blasts.

“This new reimagined version of it, in honor of my grandfather; they’re two different trips,” he says of the albums as a whole. “But I like both the trips. This one is cool because it’s upright bass, no electric guitar. It’s very different. Different than I’ve ever done before for sure.”

White Jesus Black Problems, and by extension Grandfather Courage, are inherently political. Any story about an interracial love affair in the mid-16th century will make a statement, and the songs include one about a trial for “unlawfully cohabiting with a negro slave” and an interlude called “You Don’t Belong Here.”

Fantastic Negrito, however, doesn’t see himself as an activist musician. He has a point of view, and he describes the world around him, or in this case his family history, from that perspective. But he doesn’t think of his most recent albums, or any of them, as protest albums. And that balance has made everyone angry.

“I’ve got people on the left disappointed that it wasn’t a militant album and film, and the people on the right were disappointed because I’m saying white and Black and Jesus. They’re like, ‘Oh, you’re terrible—you’re the worst person in the world! Seems to be the story of my life,” he says. “I’m just in the middle. I’m not committed to the doctrines. It’s liberating and beautiful, but it can also be a lonely island.”

But don’t worry, they’re not that mad. He’s touring Europe and even has the rare honor of opening for Bruce Springsteen in northern Italy in May. And of course there’s that Grammy nomination, even if he will be in Grandma Betty’s homeland when it’s announced.

Follow publisher Daniel J. Willis at Twitter.com/BayAreaData.