Over the years, there’s been this uneasy tension between jazz and rhythmic forms of popular music. When jazz went through its depression in the Seventies, I believe that there was a longing to capture the audience back that the rock world had stolen away. In the Eighties, Public Enemy’s Media Assassin Harry Allen made the famous claim that “hip-hop is the new jazz.” This claim was and is bullshit. I guess he was making a comparison between the sampling that hip-hop utilizes and the way that jazz performers will cop melodies and riffs from other songs.
More recently, there have been tentative moves to merge jazz and hip-hop, or other forms of electronica. The results have been mixed. I feel like there’s this sliding scale, with jazz at one end and pop at the other. As you start at one end and move towards the other, it feels like most songs end up clearly in one camp or the other, but not in the middle. In other words, a lot of these attempts at creating a fusion of pop and jazz end up as pop (with jazz elements). In comparison, I’ve heard a lot of country rock that successfully straddled the line between the two genres.
Pianist Matthew Shipp has been fooling around in this area for a while, mixing some hip-hop elements with a hard bop sound. But the results are clearly jazz. If you want jazz, that’s great, but it makes you wish the results were more in the middle. Here is the title track from his 2002 album Nu-Bop with Shipp on piano, accompanied by William Parker on bass, Daniel Carter on sax, Guillermo E. Brown on drums, and FLAM on synths and providing programming. Here is a 2002 article on attempts to “Get the Jazz/Electronica Mix Right,” which mentions Shipp.
I think part of the problem is that jazz demands a certain looseness in the rhythm section. It flows, it dips, it shimmies. Hip-hop, with its foundation in the proto-funk of James Brown and others from the late Sixties, locks in on a groove and rides it mercilessly with clockwork precision. Plus, pop music is repetitive, and consists of short musical phrases and memorable melodies.
Listen to these two clips. One is a Jack DeJohnette drum solo from a Keith Jarrett recording called “Bop-Be” (You can’t really hear ‘em, but it’s Jarrett on piano and Gary Peacock on bass). The other is a short number from Breakbeat Era, featuring drummer Max Sedgeley, that’s essentially also a drum solo. Compare, contrast, discuss.
Medeski, Martin and Wood are trying to mix jazz with rock and funk elements. The results sound more like pop than jazz. There are a number of songs that I like very much: “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” by Cannonball Adderley; “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” by the Vince Guaraldi Trio; “The ‘In’ Crowd” by the Ramsey Lewis Trio; “Watermelon Man” by Mongo Santamaria. I know, in my heart of hearts, these are all far more pop than jazz.
Roni Size is someone who introduced jazz elements into his drums ‘n’ bass/jungle sound. I’m thinking in particular of Roni Size & Reprazent’s 1997 album New Forms, which featured a very pumped-up acoustic bass prominent in the mix. But the difference is that they hit that groove — what James Brown called “the one” — and then they hang in there. A jazz artist would have started with that groove and then taken off to someplace else.
In 1999, Roni Size collaborated with DJ Die and vocalist Leonie Laws to create a more traditional pop sound, with actual structured songs, under the name Breakbeat Era. I really like the results; I heard the live sound was even better. This track, “Late Morning,” is more jazzy than most of the cuts on the album Ultra-Obscene, which has a kind of punk/drums ‘n’ bass sound. Jazzy as it is, it is definitely pop. Note how the guitar is extremely loud, so that you can hear the fingers sliding along the strings.
UPDATE: Let me clarify a point I was making above. Jazz can be repetitious and melodic. But I believe that, for the most part, jazz must be improvisatory by its very nature to be jazz. So, a pop song can be repetitious; it can have a short musical hook that repeats over the course of three minutes. A jazz version would make the musical statement and then improvise — theme and variations. Pop may be merely melodic, and those melodies ought to be easy to digest and memorable (Recall the notion of the ohrwurm, which is a melody that gets stuck in your head and you can’t get rid of it). Jazz may borrow a melody or create a new melody that is pleasant and memorable, but then that melody is explored through improvisation in ways that may be more difficult to process and less easy to recall later. Hell, if the player is any good, that improvisation will probably be absolutely difficult to process on first listen, thus leading you to repeated listening.
Do I state the obvious? Yes. I often state the obvious. I have friends who are smarter about jazz than I can ever hope to be and I’m sure they would find the analysis above to be very rudimentary. But I have other friends who aren’t really into jazz at all and they might disagree violently with my premises.
Matthew Shipp – Nu-Bop — BUY
Breakbeat Era – Late Morning — BUY
One Response
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Jonathan Says:
This is so touchy because jazz enthusiasts don’t allow much in their camp. You really have to define jazz first and then find if these other musics can fit the bill. I think jazz will always have a narrow focus because many people will believe that jazz was an era, not just a style of music. How many times have you seen the phrase, Jazz Era, in history books, sociology books… and so on.
I will try and define things generally. No one ever argues with classical music, so I will start there. Classical is its own genre, but people have ballooned it to include: romanticism, neo-classical, baroque, impressionism, opera, early music, minimalism, and i can keep going. It’s funny, but “classical” actually came after baroque and romantic music, yet we use it to classify all of the above.
Now jazz includes: swing, be-bop, hard-bop, cu-bop, free-jazz, bossa nova, latin jazz, boogie woogie, cool, ragtime, dixieland, and I could go on. The funny part here is that ragtime and dixieland came before jazz.
How do we group these things? Techno music is just minimalism music. These guys do the same thing as John Cage and Steve Reich. Don’t be confused, Cage and Reich are musical wonders and creators for whom I’ve got great respect and I don’t mean to compare them to guys who got their first casio keyboard in the 80s.
The first electronic music was called Musique Concrete. This group started in the 1940s. I think most involved were German. They created the first electronic sounds and the machines able to do so. But if you hear this music, you won’t call it electronica, but it is.
Let’s start here. This will make jazzers happy because I have noticed that to create a new jazz (that’s what it would have to be, you can’t call it something else or jazzers will say it’s not jazz), you have to have a respected jazz player do it.
OK, you need a father of jazz and the father of Musique Concrete to create this music. My bet is that it would be too cerebral for the average listener.
The current problem — the reason why there is nothing in the middle of jazz and electronica or hip-hop — is simple. There has never been a collaboration, yet. Right now you have electronic musicians who feature a jazz artist or jazz riff. In hip-hop you have hip-hop artists who just throw a jazz bass line under the chorus.
I like the music examples with the drummers. I love both of those recordings. What’s similar? They both use a jazz drum set. That’s all. But when people hear that drum set sound, they think jazz. Otherwise the drummers are playing perfectly within the confines of the music style. The Breakbeat Era track – that drummer plays amazing jungle beats in that solo.
Now, if he is the drummer playing like that on the next Kenny Garrett album… I think we might start something.