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.