Genre of the Decade
(And it ain’t Rap)
It’s impossible for me to not see em.
The lists. The lists. Oh, the lists.
End of the year lists unto themselves are exhausting — but end of the decade ones? Whew.
No doubt many of these lists are simply hot takes; people writing fluff to get them some engagement — click bait to the umpth degree.
Well this ain’t that.
I’m no fan of lists and I have a hard time coming up with “favorites” as well.
So what then is this “genre of the decade” bitness, right? Right. And more importantly, you might ask, how the hell is it not Rap and what kind of music are those album covers from? Right? Right.
Well, friendly reader I’m here to answer that question and more. And it’s going to be more than just a list. Yeah, you gonna catch some history too. What kind of b-boy and Muslim would I be if I wasn’t tagging you with some historical bars? It’s gonna be a journey but a well-needed one.
So let’s get to it.
Yeah, You Bout To Catch These History of Breakbeats Bars
I know we live in a new time and I’m not about to be the old man harkening back to how great it was to operate a rotary phone. One, that shit sucked. Two, who cares.
The same thing applies here. Rap is a whole different ass category than what it once was. Rap used to be a supporting cast member to the DJ…who shaped their performance for the dancer. That’s not what Rap is now. So let’s get that out of the way.
We have to say that because without the evolution of the DJ, there is no Rap and that evolution was centered around the breakbeat.
In theory, most people have an idea what a breakbeat is. They might even give you the definition of “it’s the breakdown on the album that dancers preferred.”
Excellent. You pass Hip-Hop 101.
But for the second and third year student, they’re going to need to be able to identify a little bit more. For example, the concept of “digging in the crates” wasn’t necessarily a thing in the beginning. The songs that those early Hip-Hop producers pulled from were songs of the era.
Classic breaks like “Mardi Gras” (75) or “Impeach the President” (73) were modern songs (when DJs were spinning them).
Some of the breaks were culled from rock songs, others, funk. And then there were the ones pulled from a genre that was going through a change at the time — the music that the critics called jazz.
From big bands, to bop, from bop to modal, Jazz was a constantly changing form of expression. In the early to mid 70s, the music was in the fusion stage. We not gonna go into great detail about this, your Googles will help you just fine. Just know that fusion was a break from the acoustic, straight forward jazz and incorporated electric instruments and pulled from rock and funk sources.
Miles Davis figures all up and through this as he laid the groundwork with Bitches Brew then members of his band started or were a part of the seminal fusion groups of that era.
Early Hip-Hop DJs loved and appreciated the drummers from the fusion/funk tree. In fact, Idris Muhammad and Harvey Mason damn near could be considered the grandfathers of Hip-Hop their drums were so prevalent.
(When sampling took off, producers learned to look for musicians like the above mentioned drummers as a cheat sheet for possible breaks but more on that later)
Many of those jazz songs were a part of the musical landscape growing up. Take, Grover Washington Jr’s “Mr. Magic,” that song was every bit as popular as “Brick House” (lord knows The Blackbyrds’ “Walking in Rhythm” was in heavy rotation).
And this music was the cornerstone of early Hip-Hop.
Yeah, You Bout to Catch These Seventies Black Radio Format Bars
I almost never listen to the radio.
Not because they play the same damn seven or eight songs all day. That’s a part of it, but not all of it.
No, I don’t listen to the radio often because the formats suck.
I get it. You section people off in tiny little segments and you can advertise to em better. I get it. You turn on a station geared to Black folk and you’re gonna hear bankruptcy and car accident commercials (in Atlanta, to a trap beat). So that’s what specialization buys you. I get it.
But once upon a time in a place called here, Black radio was different. The DJs weren’t just radio personalities (or Traffic and Weather announcers as my mentor Bro Jeff would say), naw, they were actual Disc Jockeys.
The DJ of the seventies and early to mid-eighties selected music that fit whatever format they were trying to play. It didn’t matter if it were classified as rock, soul, or jazz. If it fit, they played it.
So Chuck Mangione would play next to Rufus and Chaka Khan, nestled in between Billy Joel and the Commodores…if the mix felt right.
This type of playlist expanded the palette of the listener and empowered them to take chances on their musical choices.
Producers like the Mizell Brothers flourished in this environment. Although some critics rushed to label their music jazz crossover, the Mizells just called it music. Songs like “Harlem River Drive” and “Places and Spaces” played on contemporary radio and weren’t relegated to the ghetto of jazz.
Again, Hip-Hop DJs pulled from these recordings as well, with their main innovation being that they only picked the funkiest part of the song, the break. Nonetheless, children of the 70s and 80s grew up to this music — -break or no break.
Yeah, You Bout to Catch These Dance Music Was Complex Bars
Man, even when I wrote “Just Don’t Call it House” I had no idea.
Dance music (the shit critics called disco and later boogie) was far more complicated than I thought.
At any given time, I’m investigating some thing or the other and I was putting 70s producers under the microscope and what did I find? A large majority of these producers were trained jazz musicians.
Whether you’re talking someone as famous as Nile Rodgers or someone who time may have forgotten like Reggie Lucas, these guys had serious jazz chops. And I mean, to the point where songs that I never suspected had any technical merit were actually complex.
Take dance classic, “Over Like a Fat Rat.” Leroy Burgess describes it this way:
This is a complex jazz change, right here [plays keyboard]. Those are complex chords, you know what I’m sayin’? I’ll do that one more time [plays keyboard]. Now, you wouldn’t think that this would go into a dance record.
He’s right. I would not. And that’s the thing, much of the music that we grew up listening to in the 70s and mid to late 80s was not only produced by jazz heads, most of it was PERFORMED by them as well (more on that at a later date).
So what is this music called jazz any damn way?
Yeah, You Bout to Catch These Wynton Marsalis Shaped the Modern Interpretation of Jazz Bars
This lil bit is about Wynton Marsalis but it could be a Tale of Two Brothers.
One brother maintained the status quo, experimented, and was less stoogie about what jazz should be. The other brother? The other brother pissed off the traditional jazz community, was dogmatic, uptight, and railed against modern music.
If you know this story, you know that the latter is Wynton and the former is Branford Marsalis. Separated by a year (Branford is a year and some change older), the brothers are like night and day.
Initially, Branford was down with Wynton’s program — a program to play “traditional” jazz — a program to wear suits, and hold the music and their performance to a standard that hadn’t been seen in decades.
But Branford could only tow that line for so long. Sting (yeah that Sting, Rooooooxane Sting) came calling, asking Branford to be a part of a band he was putting together, Branford agreed and Wynton put him out of his band.
Wynton trudged on.
You see, dear reader, if you were to go looking for hard bop or bop albums released in the early to mid-eighties, you would have had a hard time.
That wasn’t the status quo. The status quo was fusion albums or (GASP) smooth jazz. Young musicians weren’t entering the arena and playing the standards and things like that. They either remade or made pop songs (see: Najee).
Wynton Marsalis pissed those people off by sticking to his guns and playing what he considered to be “real jazz.” Wynton considered Miles Davis “a rock star.” Davis accused Wynton of thinking he was “the savior of jazz.”
And you know what…in hindsight…he was. Wynton Marsalis made the traditions of jazz cool again. Young artists starting coming up, emulating Wynton, playing the standards, mining old recordings for inspiration.
For a generation, Wynton was the gateway into the history and respect for jazz and its place in America (Wynton often called it “America’s classical music”).
And I hitched a ride on this bandwagon too. When Branford put out Buckshot Lefonque, I scoffed. When critics were going goo goo gaa gaa over Joshua Redman’s Freedom in the Groove, I turned a deaf ear (and we’re going to return to these recordings and this era…). And we can’t forget Greg Osby.
I only wanted to hear traditional, acoustic jazz.
And for a hot minute, that kinda jazz was cool.
Yeah, You Bout to Catch These Rap/Jazz Bars
It was Stetsa.
People always act like the first group to embrace jazz was A Tribe Called Quest when they confounded the critics with A Low End Theory but Stetsasonic’s “Talking All That Jazz” predates Tribe by three years.
I’m not the first to state that. Just had to get that out of the way.
(If we wanna get really real for real for real, it was Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s “A Touch of Jazz” on the now defunct format of the DJ track which was released in 87…they was the first)
But yeah, sampling became a thing towards the late 80s, we wrote about it here, so no need to jump into that in detail now. Suffice it to say that the source material, originally James Brown and other funk bands, slowly began to shift.
As Tribe demonstrated, pulling the bass lines from jazz recordings could really rattle your trunk, Pete Rock got everyone on the horns kick, and if you threw a filter or two on there and slowed it down, jazz could even be sinister ala Onyx y Black Moon.
For at least five years, rap coming out of New York (and places influenced by them) was jazz-based. The songs that were mentioned earlier, The Mizell Brother’s recordings, the Chuck Mangiones, the music that people of my generation grew up hearing on the radio, those were the songs that were getting sampled.
Producers seeking a competitive edge is what brought forth the whole digging in the crates ethos where folks would comb the record bins in search of that rare find that had never met a sampling machine.
It was in this environment that Branford Marsalis released Buckshot Lefonque. Shortly thereafter, this is when Joshua Redman put out Freedom in the Groove. Branford’s jawn is actually kinda good. Redman’s….eh.
Most jazz/rap collaborations seemed forced to me. They didn’t feel organic (Grover Washington Jr with Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince anyone?). But that does bring us to what you probably clicked on this article for….the past decade.
Yeah, You Bout to Catch These Last Decade Bars
Jazz.
There, I said it. Jazz is the Genre of the Decade.
Why did I have to take you from here all the way to Timbuktu to tell you that? I mean, aside from the fact that Timbuktu was a center for higher learning for four centuries…there’s no way to explain where we are without illustrating where we came from.
Jazz is usually categorized as some highfalutin music that people express interest in to show their supposed depth.
It’s rarely thought of as contemporary.
And the only way you find out about new releases is you have to be looking for them — they certainly don’t appear in the iTunes New Music (or Pre-Order) column.
Despite that, the genre continues to grow and morph into an amalgamation of music — past and present.
The modern jazz musician knows how to swing, knows the standards, but these are Hip-Hop babies. They’ve never known a world without rap and, unlike the generation that came before them, there’s no stigma attached.
Couple that with modern technology, and you have musicians who are just as comfortable on the band stand as they are with production software.
Greg Osby brought in Hip-Hop producers (Eric Sandler & Ali Shaheed Muhammad) to help him meld jazz and Rap back when he caught the world’s attention with 3-D Man, Miles Davis linked up with Easy Mo Bee(for Doo-Bop), Makaya McCraven, on the other hand, isn’t just the jazz musician, he, himself is also the Hip-Hop producer.
What Makaya McCraven has come to be known for is taking that same spirit of the early Hip Hop DJs…and applying it to jam sessions. What the listener hears when they are taking in a McCraven album is sample of a small portion of an improv — thrown in Abelton — and looped.
Marquis Hill, a close associate of McCraven takes a similar approach in blending the sounds of the time with straightforward jazz.
I want to continue to blur the genre line between quote-unquote ‘jazz’ and hip-hop, because I’m a true believer that it is the same music. Their roots come from the same tree; they just blossomed on different branches. Marquis Hill
And he’s not alone in being vocal about his interpretation of what is considered jazz. Theo Croker is also very vocal on why his music isn’t confined to the bop and swing of old.
I want to make my music relate to more than just old white people. I want it to speak to my generation. My generation’s younger. Involving funk and R&B and hip hop is simply returning all the elements borrowed from jazz back into it. Theo Croker
Christian aTunde Adjuah is of the same school (though I would argue that what he’s doing doesn’t wear the influences on the sleeve as much) and he calls his contributions “Stretch Music.”
And he means it. aTunde Adjuah doesn’t just incorporate Hip-Hop into his music, he pulls from influences all over the planet; from Polish folk songs to traditional Japanese tunes.
aTunde Adjuah, a New Orleans native, decided at a young age that he wouldn’t be stuck playing bop and styles from the 40s and 50s.
I did that stuff for a while, wearing the suit, demonstrating all that superior manual dexterity, but in the end it hurt me to be around it. You can’t grow if you’re going to say: ‘The contributions of my predecessors are greater than anything I can ever achieve.’ Each generation has to have a chance to find itself. Christian aTunde Adjuah
Meanwhile acts like the Robert Glasper Experience and the whole West Coast Get Down collective have carved out a lane where they make so-called traditional jazz records and also albums that critics struggle to define, genre-wise.
Glasper’s Black Radio, for example, didn’t fit into any box. Was it jazz? Was it R&B since it had singers on it?
That was the same conundrum that these critics faced with To Pimp a Butterfly, an album which blended regular, sample-based songs, and completely original songs composed by the West Coast Get Down massive — a crew that was just as comfortable making music for Kendrick as they were playing straightforward jazz.
We wrote about that here, and Kamasi Washington was the first to burst forth from that collective but artists like genre-bending Thundercat are just as (if not more) well known.
And where does one even begin with Esperanza Spalding? She could be a genre unto herself. She’s a marketing genius, incredibly technical musician, with an inviting personality and the catalog to back it all up.
The only reason the average reader may not understand the impact and growth of jazz over the past decade comes down to one thing — the lack of exposure.
Unlike the days of jazz/soul/fusion, you won’t hear most of these songs on the radio. There is very little discourse concerning the music. One would have to think this is intentional and we could get into the isolating of certain artists and genres from their intended audience in another piece.
But suffice it to say, the music you been told is jazz has left the building, and what’s entered is a beautiful blend of all of our experiences — similar to what artists were doing in the mid-70s — with one more genre included — Rap. That’s the jazz of the past decade and I’m here for all of it.
No. Literally, the only albums that I buy (and don’t stream) are jazz. I’m here for all of it.
I could have easily gave you an all day playlist but I wanted to show mercy on you. So here is a one hour banger — a starter course, if you will.
Remember, hyperlinks are your friends, click on them shits, tap those clapping hands, and share, share alike.
