From the Pulpit to the Block
Artists have drawn the cultures of hip-hop and jazz closer together, the art of freestyle and that of free improvisation. A look back at a history in words and music that keeps being written.
“Its preachers are bound to interpret the Bible and to transpose its teachings into the daily lives of their faithful, through an art of improvisation and interaction, before a highly responsive congregation. In the 1920s, the first recorded sermons began appearing in record shops, in productions that even simulated the congregation taking part. Reverend A. W. Nix alone recorded some fifty sermons for Vocalion, among them the famous Black Diamond Express to Hell, reissued many times over.” These words right there, could just as easily describe the art of the pioneers of hip-hop culture, the MCs, the rappers, who admittedly did not practice their fledgling art in church but at block parties, those neighborhood gatherings that brought together DJs, MCs and the faithful to forget, for one night, the hard daily realities of life in the Bronx, where rap was truly born, in the second half of the 1970s.
Rap is perhaps the ultimate revolutionary reincarnation, perhaps, of African-American music. Others far better than we have told this story (Jeff Chang in particular, in Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, published in France by Allia), and in the few lines that follow we will try to trace the flirtations and the successful marriages between jazz and hip-hop, between music and the word, between improvisers no doubt more curious and open than the rest and rappers ready to step outside their comfort zone.
But before we reach the early 1990s, the start of a certain golden age, we should remember that long before the first festive MCs bent on making us clap our hands and join the dance, such as Kurtis Blow (with “Christmas Rappin’” or “The Breaks”) or the Sugarhill Gang (with “Rapper’s Delight,” the first worldwide hit in the history of rap), their elders, in a sense, went by names like Cab Calloway. A flamboyant MC in his own way, an apostle of scat with an extravagant look that a Michael Jackson or a Prince would not have disowned, a first-rate hype man and a notorious party man, who from the early 1930s made the swing of jazz rhyme with the art of staging his words, loosening them up, popularizing a new form of slang and turning it into a weapon of mass seduction ready to set crowds ablaze.
In a wholly different vein, a quarter-century later, the great Langston Hughes, future inspiration to Gil Scott-Heron, recorded his poems over music composed, arranged and conducted by Leonard Feather and Charles Mingus. On “Weird Nightmare,” and across the entire second side of the original LP, his voice, underpinned by Mingus’s bass, was already connecting with the horn players: Jimmy Knepper on trombone, Shafi Hadi on tenor saxophone.
In 1992, on Hal Willner Presents Weird Nightmare: Meditations on Mingus, one of those albums that gathered musicians from every horizon (Geri Allen, Charlie Watts, Marc Ribot, Vernon Reid, Dr. John), producer Hal Willner brought together MC Chuck D of Public Enemy (a major group we’ll cross paths with again a little further into this “saga-mixtape”), Bill Frisell on guitar, Greg Cohen on bass and Michael Blair on drums for a powerful, aggressive reworking of “Gunslinging Bird,” or more precisely “Gunslinging Bird, or If Charlie Parker Were a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats.”
What a shame that Charles Mingus died in 1979: a few more years on earth, and his attention would surely have turned to hip-hop. It is not even far-fetched to think that his formidable “Scenes in the City” of 1959, a kind of film for the ears in the spoken-word-and-jazz spirit of the record with Langston Hughes (who had, incidentally, helped the actor Lonne Elder shape his text), inspired not only Branford Marsalis, who recorded a remake of “Scenes in the City” very close to the original (this time with Wendell Pierce narrating), but also the duo Gang Starr (a few spoken words, by Lonne Elder or Wendell Pierce, hard to say, are sampled in their “Jazz Thing” of 1990). Impossible not to mention, too, Charles Mingus’s “Original Faubus Fables,” set with the explicit lyrics that had been scrubbed from the instrumental version Columbia released in 1959.
Speaking, reciting, narrating, talking over jazz was already fairly common by the end of the 1950s. “Poetry and jaaaaazz!” exclaimed Lenny Bruce in Psychopathia Sexualis. “Lenny Bruce is a social commentator, like the jazz musician,” wrote critic Ralph J. Gleason, while rightly noting that Bruce had honed his craft and his not-politically-correct routines for a penny in the jazz clubs. Who plays on Psychopathia Sexualis? Which jazzmen answer him in music? A mystery... We do know, on the other hand, who trades lines with Jack Kerouac on American Haikus: none other than Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. That session, supervised by the future producer of John Coltrane and Louis Armstrong, Bob Thiele, no doubt left a bitter memory for the bard of the Beat Generation, who broke down in tears at the end of the recording. Why? Because his two idols had packed up and left without a backward glance, and worse, without bothering to listen to what they had just played alongside the poet, with no rhythm section, for ten minutes, like a subtle game of calls (in words) and responses (in notes).
That same year, 1959, one of the greatest vintages in the history of jazz, George Russell cut one of his masterpieces, New York, N.Y., with a dream big band that included, among others, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Bob Brookmeyer, Art Farmer and Milt Hinton (who had played on the first side of the Langston Hughes LP mentioned above). As an MC-narrator with staggering swing and diction, Jon Hendricks opened “Manhattan” in a duo with drummer Charli Persip. Spoken-sung words, a driving beat: tell us about the pioneers of rap! His legendary intro hails New York as so nice they named it twice. Another great figure of black talkin’, a charismatic singer and brilliant lyricist, Oscar Brown, Jr. cannot decently be overlooked. Proof of that is “But I Was Cool,” one of the gems of his first LP, from 1960 (hear in this song the seeds of the wild flights of a future Ol’ Dirty Bastard of the Wu-Tang Clan? why not), and the devastating “Driva’ Man,” same year, whose sublime lyrics, haunted by the horrors of slavery, he wrote and which Abbey Lincoln performed on the manifesto-record We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite.
In the lineage of Langston Hughes, Charles Mingus, Lenny Bruce and Jack Kerouac, the collaboration of LeRoi Jones, the future Amiri Baraka (a Muslim name for blessed Prince), with the New York Art Quartet is a great moment of interaction between poetry and (free) jazz, even if only Lewis Worrell on bass and Milford Graves on drums accompany LeRoi Jones (Roswell Rudd and John Tchicai stay silent), who with “Black Dada Nihilismus” wrote a poem whose bloody violence, between name-dropping and shock images, has lost none of its impact. They are right there, those “poems that kill” he called for.
With the jazz-soul crooner Lou Rawls, spoken word takes another form, calmer but no less engaged, which he uses to introduce, somewhere between social conscience and caustic humor, a few of his songs: thus “Southside Blues” (just before his cover of “Tobacco Road,” whose 1966 live version benefits from the audience’s participation, those “oh yeah!”s and those hand-claps that bring the whole crowd back to church); and likewise the monologue on “Dead End Street” (1967), in the same spirit. More striking still, his “Lifetime Monologue” of 1968, again produced by David Axelrod, where his deep, warm voice and singular phrasing settle into the drumming of the great Earl Palmer. And it’s a delight, finally, to find Lou Rawls twenty-eight years later on the soundtrack of The Great White Hype, where hip-hop held pride of place, for an unexpected version of the Cole Porter standard “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” in a duo with rapper Biz Markie, produced by Marcus Miller. It’s far from certain that the crooner and the rapper ever met in the studio, but you absolutely must hear Lou Rawls all but rapping over the bridge!
Poetry and jazz: this tradition is carried on by altoist Jackie McLean on “Soul,” where his sextet backs the poet Barbara Simmons over music by Grachan Moncur III. “Yeah man, soul is a trumpet, a trombone, a saxophone playin’, baby, eyes closed”: it was the first time the young woman, a close friend of LeRoi Jones who lived in Harlem, had found herself in a recording studio. “We’re with you, baby. Be beautiful. Don’t be afraid. Be soul,” Grachan Moncur III told her before they began to play. A blessing and a windfall for her, since she felt, rightly, that her poetry was shaped by jazz. The result: ten minutes of conversation in words-and-music mode, utterly delectable.
In 1969, the emergence of the Watts Prophets in Los Angeles, then the Last Poets in New York, is a key moment in our story. Take “Part-E, S” on the Watts Prophets’ first album: they pick things up exactly where LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka had left them five years earlier with the New York Art Quartet. Bobby Seale, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Mingus and Big Mama Thornton are all named in the same “poem that kills” by Emmery Lee Joseph Evans, Jr., who then added his flute by overdub, with Greg Edwards laying in his feverish saxophone.
Take, too, the very raw and very direct “There’s a Difference Between a Black Man and a Nigger,” delivered by Dee Dee McNeil, who accompanies herself on piano with Buddy Woodson on bass. This young woman who gives voice without restraint opened the way for many... In 1975, Quincy Jones, who saw in the Watts Prophets “essential figures of our culture, what Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were to the bebop revolution of the 1940s,” invited them for a poetry recitation in praise of the female body, “Beautiful Black Girl.” Backed by the very funky Wah Wah Watson on guitar, Louis Johnson on bass and Harvey Mason on drums, the Watts Prophets foreshadowed by fifteen years the marriage of jazz and hip-hop that “Q” would orchestrate. Then, in 1996, at the height of hip-hop’s golden age, the Watts Prophets reunited for a record, on which pianist Horace Tapscott appeared for a moving duo, this time with Anthony “Amde” Hamilton.
Three years after the release of the Last Poets’ self-titled debut LP, Jalal, still under Alan Douglas’s supervision, recorded under the pseudonym Lightnin’ Rod the now-cult Hustlers Convention. On “The Cafe Black Rose” he speak-sings, all but raps, over a funky groove laid down by an astonishing band assembled for the occasion: Buzzy Feiten on guitar, Neil Larsen on keyboards, Gene Dinwiddie on saxophone, Phillip Wilson on drums. Was Hustlers Convention a blaxploitation record? There’s no doubt a touch of that.
Just as important and probably even more decisive for our story, Gil Scott-Heron was launched in 1970 on Bob Thiele’s label (see the sessions with Jack Kerouac), Flying Dutchman. “A book of poetry he had written landed on my desk,” the great producer recalls in his autobiography, “and he turned up, as if by chance, the same day, to tell me that ‘someone who had recorded Jack Kerouac and John Coltrane couldn’t be all that bad.’ That was all I needed to hear from this authentic spokesman for his militant community.” After a first LP of poetry backed by two percussionists, in the Last Poets vein, Bob Thiele decided to add a real rhythm section to Gil Scott-Heron’s texts and songs (Ron Carter and Bernard Purdie, no less), harmonic support, and various guest soloists, including Hubert Laws on flute. Comparing the two versions of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” recorded a year apart, lets you gauge the speed with which the “new black poet” (the subtitle of his first album) shaped his style, before finding in keyboardist Brian Jackson the ideal alter ego to develop his art. A notable influence on so-called “conscious” rappers, Gil Scott-Heron tugged the ears of those who found no favor with him on “Message to the Messengers,” in 1994.
Among Gil Scott-Heron’s true disciples, the leader of the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Michael Franti, a rapper but also a singer (like his model), who on “Music and Politics” calmly set the record straight in a duo with jazz guitarist Charlie Hunter, in 1992 (he was certainly not the one Gil Scott-Heron would address two years later with his Message to the Messengers).
Let’s go back to the early 1970s and pause for a moment on a true cult record, Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse by Eugene McDaniels, a laid-back soul man of the sixties (he recorded then under the name Gene McDaniels) turned committed singer at the dawn of the seventies. The best-known song on Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse is no doubt “Jagger the Dagger,” sampled more than once by A Tribe Called Quest in 1990, but let’s confess our weakness for “Supermarket Blues,” where McDaniels’s phrasing and his subtly incantatory style throw into relief a supermarket trip gone wrong, the narrator floored and racially abused by an old woman. The whole thing carried by the groove of his rhythm section: Gary King on bass and Alphonse Mouzon on drums.
No less an agitator at heart, director and actor Melvin Van Peebles made his first film in 1971, the chaotic and provocative Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which would open the way, unintentionally, to the blaxploitation movement. On the soundtrack, one track astounds by its invention, speak-sung by Van Peebles as if in shock, propelled by members of Earth, Wind & Fire, funky, riddled with strange chords and textures, police sirens and train noises: “Come On Feet Do Your Thing,” a small masterpiece of blazing inventiveness.
The concept albums Cannonball Adderley and the sextet of his brother Nat Adderley produced with David Axelrod in the early 1970s have the merit of resembling nothing else. On Soul Zodiac, narrator Rick Holmes runs through the traits of each astrological sign, and “Aries” already “sounds” like rap; on “Psalm 54,” from Cannonball Adderley Presents Soul of the Bible, the first chorus, before Cannonball’s on alto saxophone, is a spoken-sung psalm. These records did not, in the end, find favor with David Axelrod’s ears, but you can hear in them some of the early signs of the rap that would be practiced twenty years later.
Even more than his fellow altoist Cannonball Adderley, saxophonist Gary Bartz is one of the jazz figures venerated, which often means sampled, by the hip-hop community. Four tracks in our selection sum up this fascination well: the touching “I’ve Known Rivers,” inspired by a Langston Hughes poem of the same title, captured live at Montreux in 1973 with his Ntu Troop; the astonishing, futuristic “Dozens (The Sounding Song)” of 1974, where Gary Bartz lines up rhymes like a true proto-rapper, the title itself echoing the dozens (or dirty dozens), the verbal jousts in which insults were traded in the Black communities of America’s ghettos; “Incident,” from an album that is also a sample mine, where Bartz speak-sings while “answering himself” on alto sax over a hypnotic groove James Brown would not have disowned; and, finally, “Passage, Part I,” later (1994), which seals his true encounter with rap, in the person of Ransom, whom we’ll also find around the same period on the records of Gary Thomas (in both cases, the superlative drumming of Dennis Chambers makes the difference). “Passage, Part I” appears on an unjustly overlooked concept album by the altoist, where we find, certainly not by chance, a certain Jon Hendricks.
Back to 1974 with Eddie Jefferson, one of the fathers of vocalese, the art of writing lyrics over themes and solos. The eight minutes and forty-six seconds of his formidable cover of Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew” earn their place in our selection, because they opened unheard-of perspectives for future rappers, with that way of bouncing words off the rhythm, of making them ring like notes. And that gift of gab too, that larger-than-life personality, foreshadow the patter and charisma of rap’s pioneers.
In a more intimate mode, the poet and spoken-word artist Camille Yarbrough, long forgotten, was rediscovered through the grace of sampling at the end of the 1990s, when her one and only album was reissued on CD for the first time. It closed with “All Hid,” a striking track where her words became one with her musicians (among them Cornell Dupree on guitar and Linda Twine on clavinet), where a certain frenzy vied with a held-back anger, over one of the most insistent looping basslines. In a very similar aesthetic, the writer, poet, academic and activist Nikki Giovanni made a record of poetry and jazz-funk in 1975, backed on “Seduction / Kidnap Poem” by the best New York sidemen of the moment: Cornell Dupree, Richard Tee, Steve Gadd, Gordon Edwards, that is, the legendary group Stuff at nearly full strength, plus David Newman on tenor saxophone. Another tenor titan, Benny Golson, always on the case, made “The New Killer Joe Rap” in 1977, based on his famous theme “Killer Joe.” For once he had set aside his fetish instrument. Was he rapping, though? No, but Ted Lange played the caustic narrator. Worth discovering.
To grasp the importance of speak-singing in popular culture, and even more that of the best African-American disc jockeys, listen to “The Rocketship,” recorded in 1979 by the Philadelphian Jocko, who had an enormous influence from the 1960s on Jamaican DJs, who in turn played a crucial role in the birth of rap (DJ Kool Herc, one of the pioneers of the turntables, was of Jamaican origin). Jocko, whose vocal style is very close to the first rappers’, popularized lines casting himself as the musical ace from outer space, back on the scene with his record machine. “The Rocketship” will surprise more than a few, even forty years on.
In 1978 the Brecker Brothers released their most popular album, Heavy Metal Be-Bop. Some tracks, “Inside Out” (long the theme of Jazz à FIP) or “Some Skunk Funk” (studied in every jazz school), have become so famous that they all but eclipse “East River,” the only studio track on the record, rapped, or nearly, by bassist Neil Jason with the help of the mysterious Kash Monet. Recording “East River” cost more than the Roslyn concerts that formed the basis of the album, but this funk-rock and proto-rap treat was a surprise hit in England. Proto-rapper Randy Brecker liked to play the part, perhaps without knowing it, from the early 1980s. His droll “Don’t Get Funny With My Money” brought back to fashion the unbridled style and patter of a Cab Calloway or a Louis Jordan. In 1990, by adopting the phrasing and delivery of the notorious funkster Larry Blackmon (of the group Cameo), himself influenced by rap, “It Creeps Up On You” proved that fun (humor) was a component of his world. Two years later, having reformed the Brecker Brothers with Michael, “Big Idea,” composed four-handed (plus the hands of producers Maz & Kilgore), was jubilantly anchored in the modernity of the hip-hop sound, with its funky beats and sampled voices. On the same record, “On the Backside” extended the pleasure with scratch effects and, as if in the background, all their hard-bop heritage. The same goes for “Scrunch,” from their next album, Out of the Loop (a very hip-hop title in spirit), released in 1994.
Ten years earlier, Michael Brecker had toured in Herbie Hancock’s Rockit Band, named after his worldwide hit “Rockit,” a revolutionary track that it would be quite wrong to call “commercial,” for nothing in its form could have predicted such enormous success. Future Shock, the album it came from, sold more than a million copies in the United States. As reluctant as his record company was to release the track, Herbie Hancock himself wondered who could possibly like this unclassifiable music, accompanied by a video clip whose at-once avant-garde and catchy side he had not, by his own admission, immediately appreciated. (Along with Michael Jackson and Prince, Herbie Hancock was, thanks to this clip, one of the first African-American artists to air on the music channel MTV.) Of the nascent hip-hop culture, this being 1983, he skipped over rap, dwelling only on those new rhythms and new textures, embodied by the pioneering scratcher Grand Mixer D.ST and the group Material, whose two pillars, Michael Beinhorn and Bill Laswell (also the track’s producer), appear on “Rockit.”
“Rockit” sowed confusion among the world’s jazz critics. Yet beyond its formal radicalism, it’s the melody that carries everything, and the use of scratches, which for many were unheard-of; it took a little time to understand, and above all to accept, that turntables had been turned into an instrument... Hancock followed up “Rockit” in 1984 with “Hardrock,” and you can clearly hear the influence of these two tracks on other artists, such as saxophonist Bill Evans (listen to “Let the Juice Loose!” on his lone Blue Note album). Ten years later, under the Urbanator banner, a project steered by Lenny White, Michał Urbaniak and Al MacDowell, Hancock is one of the two features, with rapper Muckhead, on a clumsy but entertaining jazz-hip-hop cover of his jazz-funk standard “Chameleon.”
Then, in 2002, nearly twenty years after his first sonic breakthroughs with Grand Mixer D.ST, Hancock teamed up again with a turntable virtuoso, Rob Swift, a member of the turntablist collective X-Ecutioners, on “This Is Rob Swift” (what a tribute!), recorded with keyboards, turntables, bass (Bill Laswell) and drums (Jack DeJohnette), proof that this eternal seeker has follow-through. That same Rob Swift invited Bob James in 2005 to lay a few Fender Rhodes notes on “Terrorism” (from an album heavily marked by the Bush years). He had also taken part in the lone album by the Aesop Quartet (the fantastic “Cuttin’-N-Scratchin’,” in osmosis with Ernest Dawkins, Jeff Parker, Rollo Radford and Hamid Drake) and pulled off an incredible exercise in style on the concept CD Bird Up: The Charlie Parker Remix Project, scratching note for note the theme and all the solos (!) of “Cheers” (X-Ecutioners style), cut in 1947 by the genius altoist, in order: Parker, Wardell Gray, Dodo Marmarosa and Barney Kessel. Breathtaking.
The year of You’re Under Arrest, on the cover of which, machine gun in hand, he plays the gangsta jazzman, Miles Davis takes part in the anti-apartheid manifesto-record supervised by the rocker Little Steven and producer Arthur Baker. His trumpet haunts “Let Me See Your I.D.,” rapped, among others, by Duke Bootee and Melle Mel of Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, so this is the first time he rubs shoulders with MCs, and crowned with spoken-word interventions from Gil Scott-Heron, a shrewd commentator on the distress of the South African people. Seven years later, Miles Davis is no longer of this world, but... patience!
In 1986, alto saxophonist Steve Coleman and his Five Elements made “Change the Guard,” a track that proves his attachment to the sounds of the street. Very funky, rapped by Coleman himself, electrifying to the hilt, “Change the Guard” opens a thrilling adventure. In 1987, the futuristic “Tydor’s Bane” drove the point home alongside Geri Allen and her keyboards: the spirit of James Brown was there, but the Coleman style was already recognizable among a thousand, with those lyrics chanted-rapped by DK Dyson, Cassandra Wilson and himself. That style would soon be labeled M-Base, and in 1990, with Rhythm People (The Resurrection of Creative Black Civilization), the questing altoist made a masterpiece on which “No Conscience,” again rapped by Coleman, was one of the high points. But the best was still to come, with one of the first real encounters between rap and jazz: Steve Coleman and Metrics. First with a mini-album where five lyricists, that’s how the altoist (the Wu-Tang cap forever screwed onto his head) referred to his rappers, alternated at the mic depending on the track: Utasi, Sub-Zero, Shahliek, Kokayi and Black Thought (of The Roots). “Be Bop” opened the festivities and, as its title suggested, mixed the old and the modern, the swing of the 1940s with the groove of the 1990s. Over a typically “M-Base” rhythm, Utasi and Sub-Zero rose to the level.
Harder to find, all but impossible in fact (but the urge to flag its existence was too strong), “Serve & Protect (Guard),” from the non-commercial single We Beez Like That!, is a breathtaking three-way conversation without a net between Steve Coleman (alto sax), Kokayi and Sub-Zero, who switch between rap and beatboxing. This out-of-the-ordinary trio foreshadowed the now-legendary concerts at the Hot Brass (today the Trabendo), in March 1995, during which Steve Coleman and Metrics swept the audience into a new dimension: “Swept away by the breathtaking utterance of an unheard-of trio, lyricists of the extreme, as one says of mountaineers or surfers. Like an endless swell, their little urban theater strikes and rebounds off the music (Kokayi’s staggering ‘chorus’ on ‘Hyped’). Here they are at last, these modern griots, admitted to the high spheres of improvisation. Musicians to the very tips of their words. ‘Off-the-top words’ that seem to spring up raw, yet so precisely that one tells oneself these men are reinventing, in their own way, a kind of automatic writing dear to the Surrealists. Give the word back to the music? Steve Coleman manages it here in the most natural way in the world,” ran the liner notes of the original effort.
Determined to fold the art of rap into his music and not merely ride the trend, Steve Coleman took the most brilliant of his lyricists, Kokayi, to record his next album in Cuba. “The Seal (Elekoto Agayu)” proved, if proof were needed, that Kokayi was also an authentic improviser, able to distill his rhymes over tempos unusual for the average rapper.
In the wake of Steve Coleman and the M-Base movement, whose contours were not so easy to define, trombonist Robin Eubanks delivered a powerful “Karma” under funk and rap influence (samples of James Brown and Public Enemy, with Marvin Smith, alias Smitone, in the role of the “Assistant Rap”), while the “post-Metrics” groups such as Opus Akoben (with Black Indian, Kokayi and Sub-Zero, the three mic-devourers of the Metrics) or Quite Sane (led by the bassist of the Five Elements, Anthony Tidd) carried on spreading the good word. Twenty-five years later, Kokayi is now an integral part of Steve Coleman’s universe: still a lyricist and more lyrical than ever, he creates the event on the recent double live project by the Five Elements, recorded at the Village Vanguard (listen to “Rumble Young Man, Rumble”).
The very year, 1994, that the Metrics’ one and only studio EP appeared was also the year of the release of the second record, an EP too, by The Roots, a group Steve Coleman held in high esteem. He played, in fact, on half the tracks, and “Mellow My Man” opened still more perspectives for the fruitful collaboration between rappers and improvisers, even if Coleman, Graham Haynes (trumpet) and Josh Roseman (trombone) only played in section, taking no solos. Likewise on “Datskat,” released a few months later, which remains one of the gems of one of the best rap records of the 1990s. In 2002, the musicians of The Roots, always ready to experiment, invited (a rare thing in hip-hop) two guitarists to open up, James Blood Ulmer and Jef Lee Johnson, who cracked open an avant-garde breach on “Water,” notwithstanding a mix that kept up a kind of joyful confusion of the senses. And as proof that their music spread across borders, you’ll find rapper Black Thought and drummer Ahmir Thompson on the very “Colemanian” “Pfat Time” by English saxophonist Steve Williamson, and on “Relax” by former Ornette Coleman bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma.
In 1989, fourteen years after inviting the Watts Prophets onto Mellow Madness, Quincy Jones with the legendary instinct was “Back on the Block,” back in the neighborhood (i.e. tuned to the street), and he rolled out a real red carpet for rappers. On “Jazz Corner of the World,” the two now-old-school virtuosos Kool Moe Dee and Big Daddy Kane traded the mic to introduce an impressive roll call of jazz superstars: James Moody, Miles Davis, George Benson, Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie (whom Big Daddy Kane pronounces “Gillepsie”), Ella Fitzgerald and Joe Zawinul, each taking a little solo. The whole thing mixed dazzlingly, with sampled voices as a bonus: Charlie Parker’s and that of the Birdland MC Pee Wee Marquette (the group US3 would lift the idea for their hit “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)” in 1993). Less well known, because it’s drawn from a minor “Q” album, the version of “Ironside” superbly rapped by Talib Kweli (who name-checks Dizzy Gillespie, applause, and Miles Davis) is worth the detour.
1989 also marked the arrival of a hip-hop duo set to change the game for good, Gang Starr: Guru on the mic, DJ Premier on the turntables and the production. From their very first album, “Jazz Music” underscores, through Guru’s words, their true passion for this music, his verse tracing jazz’s migration up the rivers and into the big cities, to Chicago and to the Apple, the scene their forefathers knew, the music with all the razzamatazz and the swing that made you tap your feet.
In 1990, a kind of remake of “Jazz Music” appeared on the soundtrack of Mo’ Better Blues, the jazz film by Spike Lee, himself the son of a jazzman. With Kenny Kirkland on piano and Robert Hurst on bass, “Jazz Thing,” peppered with clever samples (Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong...), remains to this day one of the finest tributes to jazz ever made by an MC and a DJ, among the greatest in the history of hip-hop.
From then on a new current was launched, and Guru parted ways for a time with DJ Premier to throw himself into the Jazzmatazz project, at the height of the acid jazz wave. It would yield three volumes, but the one that made the most “noise” was obviously the first. “Jazz is real, and based on reality,” he said. And on Volume I he invited Donald Byrd (on “Loungin’”) and Roy Ayers (on “Take a Look at Yourself”), two of the jazzmen most beloved, and sampled, in the hip-hop world. On the final installment of the Jazzmatazz trilogy, Guru also invited Herbie Hancock, who made his clavinet sing on “Timeless.”
The mid-1990s is also the era when jazzmen drop a solo here and there, like Grover Washington, Jr. with DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince (better known as Will Smith), who is a fish in water on “The Groove (Jazzy’s Groove) Radio Version.” Sometimes the jazzmen aren’t invited in the flesh but sampled onto wax: yes, that really is Miles Davis’s “Fat Time” inside “Nuttin’ Nis Funky” by the Oakland combo Digital Underground, very cleverly lifted and rerouted. It’s all there: Marcus Miller’s growling bass, Mike Stern’s meowing guitar and Miles’s stinging trumpet. Two years later, in 1992, Miles was no longer of this world, but his posthumous record Doo-Bop still created an event on release. For his umpteenth metamorphosis, the trumpeter had begun working with producer Easy Mo Bee, and the result, even if it disconcerted some at first (but which Miles record didn’t, etc.), has aged with a certain panache. The proof is “Blow.” Had fate granted him a little more time, not only would Doo-Bop have been more fully realized, but we would surely have seen the trumpeter onstage trading with rappers. In 2007, sixteen years after his death, an official (and rather exciting) remix of “Freedom Jazz Dance,” titled “Freedom Jazz Dance (Evolution of the Groove),” blended his trumpet and especially his raspy voice with contemporary beats, with a rap from Nas thrown in for good measure.
The 1990s thus embody a certain golden age, the decade when jazz, that timeless music, and hip-hop, then in its prime, often got along well. Sampling went on full tilt, and all these borrowings were declared to avoid resounding lawsuits. Imagine: rapping over Quincy Jones’s “Soul Bossa Nova” without asking his permission! Luckily his lawyers were in the know, and Dream Warriors’ joyful “My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style” could quietly become a hit. Great inspired jam sessions were also organized (a nod to Norman Granz’s): on the album Heavy Rhyme Experience: Vol. 1, the English combo The Brand New Heavies made jazz, funk and hip-hop rhyme, calling in The Pharcyde, Main Source, Black Sheep (hip-hop groups little known to the general public but first-rate) and Guru, his tempo as impeccable as ever and his words as honed as ever on “It’s Gettin’ Hectic.”
Oddly lumped in at the start with the acid jazz movement, Meshell Ndegeocello masterfully blurred the lines between jazz, funk and hip-hop on her first masterpiece, Plantation Lullabies, herself moving, depending on the track, from a soul-leaning, deeply sensual singing to a thoroughly convincing rap delivery. On “Step Into the Projects” she mixes the best of these worlds with Joshua Redman on tenor saxophone and Geri Allen on piano. A great classic.
If everything on Innercity Griots, Freestyle Fellowship’s second album, had been in the vein of “Inner City Boundaries,” there’s no doubt the comparison with the first Metrics EP by Steve Coleman would have been made, all the more so since this overlooked record came out a year earlier. MC Aceyalone was very promising but, like many of his peers before and after him, he quickly fell back into the ranks. 1993 was also the year of the XXL success of US3, a hip-hop combo whose Blue Note bosses had given carte blanche to lift whatever they wanted from the label’s archives. Not a single sample, except for the nasal and so-characteristic voice of Pee Wee Marquette, already mentioned above in connection with Quincy Jones’s “Jazz Corner of the World.” Which didn’t stop the funky, entertaining “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia),” based as everyone knows on Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island,” from setting radio and the clubs alight.
Still in 1993, the third volume of the excellent compilation series The Rebirth of the Cool unveiled a La Funk Mob remix of MC Solaar’s classic “Caroline,” shot through with a blazing saxophone solo by Guy Harvey, cleverly taken apart and put back together by producer Hubert “Boombass” Blanc-Francard. MC Solaar and jazz: the most attentive had already noted the connection on his first album, Qui sème le vent récolte le tempo, and even more on the CD single of “Victime de la mode,” whose track no. 4 was “Love Supreme,” a brief one-minute-twenty instrumental, a funky variation on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. It was perhaps a detail for some, but for others it meant a great deal: it meant you were free to be there, at the right time, trying to bring together two pairs of ears not always as reconcilable as one might think: those of jazz lovers and those of hip-hop fans. MC Solaar again, on the charity record Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool (proceeds went to the fight against AIDS), duetted with Ron Carter, who had just set his bass vibrating on A Tribe Called Quest’s masterpiece The Low End Theory (on the track “Verses from the Abstract”). With MC Solaar the understanding was no less perfect, and they met again in 2008 on the stage of the Théâtre du Châtelet, invited by Roy Hargrove and Hard Groove.
The compilation Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool held other great moments worth the “jazz meets hip-hop” label: “Flyin’ High in the Brooklyn Sky” by Digable Planets with Lester Bowie on trumpet and Wah Wah Watson on guitar, or “This Is Madness” by Umar Bin Hassan and Abiodun Oyewole with Pharoah Sanders. On the bonus CD of the first pressing, Branford Marsalis covered John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme in an acoustic quartet; a year later, in 1994, the year of Steve Coleman’s first Metrics, his ambitious Buckshot LeFonque project gave him the chance to collaborate with DJ Premier of Gang Starr, on a record where funk, soul, spoken word, raggamuffin and rock had as much room as rap.
On the instrumental “Some Shit @ 78 BPM (The Scratch Opera)” and on “Breakfast @ Denny’s,” DJ Premier nonetheless staked out his territory with all his virtuosity. Music Evolution, the second Buckshot LeFonque album, came out two years after the first. Hip-hop production techniques served once again to (re)showcase the musics Branford Marsalis had grown up with, like that of James Brown (“James Brown (Part I & II),” with David Sanborn and a great turn from DJ Apollo). Again at Bernard Loupias’s mic, Branford Marsalis admitted he had changed his mind about rap, which he barely took seriously at first, for one simple, good reason: “The music changed. With Public Enemy...” Very few had noticed, but Branford Marsalis had worked with Public Enemy and their producers, The Bomb Squad, in 1990, and the single of “Brothers Gonna Work It Out” contained an instrumental version of “Fight the Power” (the fantastic rap song from the credits of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing) renamed “Powersaxx,” where Marsalis, through the grace of overdubbing, unspooled the blazing spirals of his Coltranian soprano.
Because he recorded for the same label as Steve Coleman, JMT (Jazz Music Today), and because his “urban” music buzzed with jazz and funk intertwined, Gary Thomas was wrongly lumped in with the M-Base movement. A member of Jack DeJohnette’s Special Edition and, for a time, a Miles Davis sideman, this tenor saxophonist with a harsh, powerful tone made absolutely fascinating records in the 1990s, and his way of confronting the most demanding forms of jazz with the art of the MCs had no equivalent.
Between 1991 and 1997 too few of us let ourselves be swept up by his records, but thirty years on the shock is still strong when you dive back in. Before anyone else, Gary Thomas gave MCs a prime place in his music, as “First Strike” shows, where the “rap solos” of Joe “BMW” Wesson and Gary Thomas himself (both clearly under the influence of Kool Moe Dee, Rakim,Melle Mel) sit naturally alongside those of Thomas (on saxophone) and Mulgrew Miller (on piano). Dennis Chambers, freshly teleported in from the P-Funk Galaxy, is hallucinatory in his polyrhythmic madness, as he proves on “The Kold Kage,” where Gary Thomas is once again on the mic. On “The Godfather Waltz / Just a Villain,” the flow of the MCs (including Godfaddah, No Name, Jovanotti, who raps in his native Italian, Pork Chop and Ransom, found again on the Gary Bartz record mentioned above) carries the music into a gangsta-rap darkness, reinforced by the production and sound design, visibly inspired by the records of Dr. Dre and Ice Cube. In 1997 on “Treason,” the “rap artists” No Name and Pork Chop are still there, soloists as essential as organist George Colligan.
An “official” figure, this time, of the M-Base movement, alto saxophonist Greg Osby also brought a few touchstones to the jazz-and-hip-hop edifice that, by the mid-1990s, was starting to look impressive. It all began in 1991 with a 12-inch maxi-single (or CD single, take your pick), “Man-Talk (Club Mix),” which reflected his attraction to, and above all his knowledge of, the new forms of rhythmic culture in hip-hop, machine-generated but inhabited by innovative grooves (though often, early on, around the mid-1980s, sampled from James Brown’s). Over the hypnotic beat of “Man-Talk,” the precise, pointed cut of Osby’s phrasing worked wonders.
In 1993, the release of the album 3-D Lifestyles was a real shock: here at last was that end-of-century jazz record truly produced like a hip-hop opus, without concessions, without clichés, inventive, daring, that could be played between a Public Enemy and an A Tribe Called Quest (Osby was, in fact, collaborating with one of ATCQ’s members, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, on “Flow to the Underculture (Hip Hop & Jazz),” a little jewel of invention featuring Osby’s swirling alto and Geri Allen’s sparkling piano), while “Mr. Gutterman,” inspired by Marvin Gaye (“the Legend,” dixit Osby), opened the album on a subtle Crusaders sample. The five MCs unspooled their storytelling art there, giving the track the feel of a striking short film. In 1995, Greg Osby this time invited a rapper, and not just any rapper, Shä-Key, to swing “Rocking Chair” in another direction. (One would dearly love to see Greg Osby and Gary Thomas return to recording, digging, why not, new jazz-and-hip-hop furrows.)
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the English saxophonist of Jamaican origin Courtney Pine delivered a magnificently produced album, haunted by hip-hop culture. On “In the Garden of Eden (Thinking Inside of You),” his generous, lyrical and frankly Coltranian tone (today we’d say spiritual) blended to fine effect with the beat programmed by DJ Pogo, built on a sample of Stanley Clarke’s “Desert Song,” where John McLaughlin’s acoustic guitar, set on a loop, curls delicately around the eardrum. Let’s cross the Channel, heading for Uzeste. And here is the Compagnie Lubat, Bernard Lubat, André Minvielle, Patrick Auzier, true enchanters of the rap phrasing that came from America. There’s madness in Scatrap Jazzcogne, whose very title perfectly sums up their approach. (No need to attempt ugly puns to try to capture their art; the peaceful battle is lost in advance against such free inventors.) Lubat too, like Big Daddy Kane, name-checks Charlie Parker and Dizzy (but when he shoots himself, the bullet is musette). And Minvielle, for his part, scats the legacy of Jon Hendricks, Eddie Jefferson, Parker (all in our mixtape-saga) and, of course, the Double Six (American rappers don’t listen to the Double Six enough) on “Mme Mimi.” It’s dizzying. Watch out, masterpieces ahead!
Let’s cross the Atlantic again, because things are bubbling in America: Jon Hassell (with the group Bluescreen) reinvents his famous Fourth World concept, this time roaming the streets of New York in search of new sounds and rhythms. “G-Spot,” which opens on a sample of Miles Davis’s “Honky Tonk” (one of his heroes), embodies that quest: it’s radical and funky, owes a great deal to hip-hop, the groove is as if crushed, and his winged trumpet meets the (soprano) saxophone of Kenny Garrett. Another trumpeter, M-Base pioneer Graham Haynes, son of King Roy, teams with the virtuoso DJ Logic, Jean-Paul Bourelly, Steve Williamson, Lonnie Plaxico and Fred Alias to send jazz back into the street, on the corner: you’ll have guessed it, “Mars Triangle Jupiter” sounds like an unreleased cut from Miles Davis’s On the Corner (1973), without ever feeling stuck in the past. No small feat.
The Pat Metheny Group in a jazz-and-hip-hop saga-mixtape? “Are you sure?” Yes, listen to “The Girl Next Door”: that programmed beat, those catchy chords, it resembles a bit what the Brecker Brothers were doing at the same moment; it may not be quite as memorable, but it’s a real success all the same (a breathtaking solo from the boss, followed by the calm trumpet of Mark Ledford), and it proves that the native of Lee’s Summit, Missouri, has always had an ear turned toward tomorrow. That same year, his hero Ornette Coleman invited Avenda “Khadijah” Ali to recite a poem of her own on “Search of Life,” a fairly rare attempt for him to include singing in his music (one remembers Asha Puthli on Science Fiction in 1972), and even, here, rap, since an MC also steps in (is it someone else, or Avenda “Khadijah” Ali by overdub? a mystery...). A wink, in any case, is sent to the Wu-Tang Clan through an inversion of their 1993 hit “C.R.E.A.M.” (Cash Rules Everything Around Me).
A tutelary figure for many rappers, the composer, jazzman, keyboardist and singer Weldon Irvine had a gift for releasing records that quickly became impossible to find, such as Weldon & The Poets, where, on “Prankster Gangster,” he takes wild pleasure in rapping himself, urging his guest MCs to stay polite: the word “fuck” gets bleeped when one of them says it (”Not on this record!” Irvine specifies). We love the contributions of keyboardist Don Blackman and saxophonist Danny Walsh.
And here is Nas again (see above, with Miles Davis), in 1998 with his father, cornetist and singer Olu Dara. The prodigy rapper had invited him onto his first record, Illmatic, a 1994 masterpiece if ever there was one. It’s hard to resist the swaying lilt of “Life’s a Bitch,” where the paternal cornet wraps calmly around the son’s rhymes. Nas put it well: jazz, bebop to rapping, it’s all the same thing, it’s a jungle, our world. Six years later he would work again with his progenitor, who in near-rap recounts the birth of his first child on “Bridging the Gap,” a blues-jazz-rap nugget set with an obsessive guitar riff he plays himself.
Between 1999 and 2003, the Chicago trumpeter Russell Gunn made a thrilling trilogy of albums. On the first two, DJ Apollo, noticed with Buckshot LeFonque, plays an essential role, adding his scratch work to the cover (perhaps even more successful than the original) of “The Blackwidow Blues,” one of the major tracks on the first Buckshot LeFonque, or to that of Thelonious Monk’s classic “Epistrophy,” where we notice Gunn Fu, a rapper with a doctored voice (Russell Gunn himself?) whose nasal timbre is inspired by Parliament’s famous Sir Nose, one of the many characters created by George Clinton, whose influence is even more evident on “The Critic’s Song,” from the third volume of the Ethnomusicology series.
Already crossed paths with on Graham Haynes’s “Mars Triangle Jupiter,” DJ Logic, a child of the Bronx, had given us “Project Logic” in 1999. At the turntables, his virtuosity matched perfectly the eclectic style of his guests. On “Flat As Aboard,” the sound of Vernon Reid (guitar), Casey Benjamin (alto saxophone) and John Medeski (organ) was inventively altered through his remarkable post-production work. DJ Logic, seen recently onstage at the New Morning with Patrice Rushen and Christian McBride, is one of the most musicianly DJs there is.
Another Chicago native, percussionist and A.A.C.M. member Kahil El’Zabar had also explored, under the name Juba Collective, the possibilities of jazz and hip-hop on his cover of Charlie Parker’s “Now’s the Time,” transformed alongside two rapper-scatters, Tree and Simeon, a poet, Tamara Love (who recites her text in French), a saxophonist, Ari Brown, and a keyboardist, Robert Irving III, known for his records with Miles Davis. An asterisk right after the title pointed to the following little note: “Contains lyrics that may be too mature for a young audience.” Pay it no mind.
The early 2000s also marked the arrival in the jazz world of an extraordinary producer, Otis Jackson, Jr., alias Madlib, nephew of trumpeter Jon Faddis. For twenty years now we’ve been following the trail (not without difficulty at times) of this multi-instrumentalist beatmaker who likes nothing better than to muddy the waters, rolling out projects wreathed in mystery where you never really know who is who and who is playing what. The six tracks of our saga-mixtape reflect this discreet personality, who gives very few interviews: a cover of Ramsey Lewis’s “Sun Goddess” under the name Yesterdays New Quintet, another of Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew” (thirty-three years after Eddie Jefferson’s!) with the Otis Jackson, Jr. Trio (on the compilation Yesterdays Universe), his “invasion” of the Blue Note archives with a strange cover of Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints” (under the Yesterdays New Quintet name), a waltz for Woody Shaw on Miles Away, this time with The Last Electro-Acoustic Space Jazz & Percussion Ensemble, or “Etude Montrachet” in a duo with drummer-beatmaker Karriem Riggins, one of the rare jazzmen equally credible in the worlds of jazz (he accompanied Oscar Peterson and plays regularly with Diana Krall), of nu soul (Erykah Badu loves his productions) and of hip-hop (his mixtapes are a reference).
The dawn of the 21st century was also that of the advent of Roy Hargrove’s RH Factor, which delivered a first album now hailed as a classic. Two of the rappers closest to the jazzosphere contributed: Common on “Common Free Style” and Q-Tip on “Poetry,” in support of Erykah Badu, who in her early days had formed a hip-hop duo with Roy Hargrove (who handled trumpet and beatboxing). That same year, the New York “alternative” hip-hop group Antipop Consortium, today vanished from the radar, had crossed rhymes with pianist Matthew Shipp, but also bassist William Parker, vibraphonist Khan Jamal, trumpeter Daniel Carter and drummer Guillermo E. Brown. “A Knot in Your Bop” is the most emblematic track of this fruitful collaboration, released by Thirsty Ear, a label very open to experimentation (Craig Taborn, Nils Petter Molvær and Tim Berne have recorded for Thirsty Ear). But the instrumental “Free Hop” could just as easily have made our saga-mixtape, because it’s also Antipop Consortium’s gifts as producers that made the difference.
Rarely has a record so intensely sat at the crossroads of jazz, rap, rock and soul as the first Ursus Minor, overseen by Jean Rochard, a producer-catalyst, a gatherer of creative forces from every horizon. Around the quartet of François Corneloup (baritone saxophone), Jef Lee Johnson (guitar), Tony Hymas (keyboards) and Dave King (drums), several MCs, African-American and French (Boots Riley of The Coup, M-1 of Dead Prez, D’ of Kabal, Umi, Spike), a soul singer, Ada Dyer, and a very special guest, Jeff Beck on guitar. All these fine people had first given a concert that stayed in memories at the Sons d’Hiver festival in 2003, then recorded in the wake of it with a former Prince sound engineer, Chuck Zwicky. It’s hard to extract a single track from this engaged concept album, inhabited by a healthy, demanding anger (which doesn’t rule out great moments of emotion), but one will remember the furious “Square Dance Rap.”
As you can see, goodwill was not lacking at the start of the century, and one of the best MCs in the history of hip-hop, Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest, also tried his hand at a solo “jazz” album. Conceived in the very early 2000s, sent in “promo” CD form to the press, it ended up oddly being canceled, only to come out in 2009. Gary Thomas, Kurt Rosenwinkel (whose 2003 album Heartcore Q-Tip produced) and Kenny Garrett, who plays on “Abstractionisms,” were part of the adventure, which thus came to nothing. Kamaal the Abstract, Q-Tip’s jazz pseudonym, which ended up being the album’s title (a thoroughly remarkable record, to be urgently rediscovered), in fact revealed the difficulty for rappers, even the most talented, to evolve without losing their audience along the way.
Between severity and lucidity, the saxophonist pressed where it hurt. Since then, Q-Tip has put out almost nothing, apart from an A Tribe Called Quest album, whose brief reunion was nipped in the bud by the death of his partner-in-crime, Phife Dawg. A remix album of Miles Davis has also been announced for ages. After all, the most “jazz” moments of his discography rest on samples, drawn from the best records of the 1960s and 1970s, obscure and/or famous (Jack Wilkins as much as Weather Report, Billy Brooks as much as Woody Shaw), and that is surely where the creativity of Q-Tip and his cohorts expressed itself best, between appropriation and rerouting, metamorphosis and reinvention. Through samples, several generations of hip-hop fans, especially in the 1990s and 2000s, discovered jazz. The presence in the flesh of Ron Carter on “Verses from the Abstract” carried strong symbolic weight all the same in 1991.
Like many great hip-hop producers, J Dilla (1974-2006) was a jazz fanatic. He’s the one, in fact, who introduced Robert Glasper to a 1978 Herbie Hancock record. And to pay tribute to his inspiration, gone too soon, Glasper recorded one of his compositions in 2007, a moving tribute in an acoustic trio if ever there was one, “Dillalude.” (A year earlier, his colleague Eric Legnini had recorded “Funky Dilla” on Big Boogaloo, Label Bleu.) Measuring the importance of J Dilla's contribution, who also recorded under the pseudonym Jay Dee, is a treasure hunt, but three “Dillanthology” releases exist, summing up his work very well, not to mention the albums released in his lifetime. “Oblighetto (J Dilla Remix)” by Brother Jack McDuff, on the 2004 compilation Blue Note Revisited, will not leave anyone indifferent. As for Robert Glasper, his Experiment, formed in 2012, was fertile ground for yet more rapprochements between jazz and hip-hop, by musicians who grew up listening as much to John Coltrane and Miles Davis as to Public Enemy and Gang Starr. The progressive MC Yasiin Bey, formerly Mos Def, shines on “Black Radio,” and on Black Radio Recovered: The Remix, Glasper recalls everything he owes to J Dilla on “Dillalude #2,” with Casey Benjamin alongside him in a full Sunlight Herbie Hancock trip.
Over twenty years after their first historic concerts, Public Enemy returned to Paris to play their classics of the 1980s and 1990s. Surprise: at the end of the concert, Archie Shepp came onstage. In the wake of it, Chuck D, one of the group’s two MCs, who has today become to hip-hop what Archie Shepp is to jazz (a transmitter), went off to the studio to record with the saxophonist. These two “blues people,” dixit Shepp at the mic of Fara C. (in the book The Gemini), very spontaneously cut two versions of “The Reverse,” which seal the one and only encounter (alas) between these two giants.
A lot has happened overseas and the proof of it with “Mountain Sunlight” (composed by Mos Def (before Yasiin Bey), who raps on the track) by the Jazz Liberatorz; “Slow Motion (Part I/II)” by trumpeter Antoine Berjeaut, in collaboration with the talented American MC settled in France, Mike Ladd; “I Live in Fear” by Thiefs, a project co-piloted by saxophonist Christophe Panzani and bassist Keith Witty, where we find Mike Ladd, this time set against the rapper and writer Gaël Faye; “Game On” by bassist Sylvain Daniel, haunted by the memory of J Dilla; and very recently “Don’t Get Mad” by the very promising group Ultra Light Blazer, which recaptures the accents of the best jazz-and-hip-hop productions of the 1990s, thanks, among other things, to the gift of gab of their MC, Edash Quata, and the very inventive saxophone playing of Jonas Mue.
One last crossing of the Atlantic (and the Channel) to verify that the love between jazz and hip-hop is still current? “No Apologies,” by the short-lived trio August Greene (Common, Robert Glasper, Karriem Riggins), proves there are still words and notes to exchange. So does “Americana / The Garden Waits for You to Watch Her Wilderness” by Ambrose Akinmusire, even if Kool A.D. is more a sayer than a rapper (but no matter, so ambitious, demanding, sophisticated, intelligent and shaded is the music, which also draws on all the harmonic resources of a string quartet). In 2019, drummer Terri Lyne Carrington once again distinguished herself with an exceptional record, close, in a way, to the Ursus Minor one mentioned above. On “Purple Mountains” we notice, besides the presence of Kassa Overall (on whom we’re counting heavily to keep the jazz-and-hip-hop flame alive), also present on the very recent record by drummer Nate Smith: on “Square Wheel,” his phrasing contrasts with the singular voice of Michael Mayo, the singer to watch in the years to come. And if Sparkz is not a wildly original rapper, he recaptures on “Between the Lines” by English pianist Ashley Henry the lighter, more festive accents of the 1990s, when acid jazz and hip-hop drew us into the dance.
It is hard, though, not to close this saga-mixtape with the record that reshuffled all the cards in 2015, To Pimp a Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar. On “For Free? (Interlude),” his dizzying style enters into osmosis with his rhythm section (Robert Glasper on piano, Brandon Owens on bass, Robert “Sput” Searight on drums), and Terrace Martin, on alto saxophone, plants a very hot mood in a few notes, in keeping with the no-less-raw language of the star rapper. We await what comes next. And see you in thirty years for, who knows, the second chapter of this fine story, where other artists will have found their place, from Makaya McCraven to Alfa Mist by way of Theo Croker, Kassa Overall and Keyon Harrold.