From Sonny Rollins to Kendrick Lamar: A brief history of the jazz-rap movement
Over a career spanning seven decades, Rollins won a lifetime Grammy and was colloquially dubbed the “greatest living improviser” ever.He possessed an unparalleled ability to invent complex melodies on the spot, and was unrivalled in his ability to carve out unscripted notes without sheet music. This inherently raw unpredictability is the same lifeblood that would fuel hip-hop music.The chaos of a saxophone during a set does not differ greatly from the freestyle rap a Master of Ceremonies (MC) might lyricise. Unsurprisingly, Rollins’ melodic swing and wide-open saxophone breaks proved a natural canvas for hip-hop producers. At the dawn of the 90s, Rollins, alongside pioneers like Herbie Hancock and Donald Byrd, inadvertently laid the sonic foundations for what would become the jazz-rap movement. Fast forward to today, and this influence remains pervasive. Kendrick Lamar, arguably the most recognisable voice in the contemporary space, revived this fusion on his critically acclaimed album To Pimp A Butterfly, which featured a collective of live jazz artists like Terrace Martin, Kamasi Washington, and Thundercat. Similarly, acclaimed artists like Mac Miller, Tyler, The Creator, and producer Madlib have heavily leaned on jazz aesthetics to shape their defining sounds. What is jazz-rap? At its core, jazz-rap is a fusion genre that bridged the improvisational complexity of jazz with the rhythmic flow and lyrical potency of hip-hop. It is fundamentally built on the art of sampling. Instead of relying on aggressive synthesisers, 90s producers dug through crates of old vinyl records to isolate and loop micro-seconds of upright basslines, muted trumpets, and smooth drum patterns. This reliance on sampling dusty jazz records gave the genre its signature sophisticated, swinging, and introspective sound. MC Guru’s 1993 album Jazzmatazz, Vol. 1 brought jazz standards artists—especially Donald Byrd—into the hip-hop studio in an attempt to cement the bridge between the two styles. Hip-hop, however, remained markedly different from jazz, which had attained the status of a ‘high art’ through decades of gentrification. Gritty and unabashedly unapologetic about its street origins, the initial connection between the two was not a calculated artistic statement.Story continues below this ad “Some of the jazz borrowing was purely practical,” musicologist Justin A. Williams, author of Rhymin and Stealin: Musical Borrowing in Hip-Hop and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, told The Indian Express. “Hip-hoppers’ parents had a lot of jazz in their record collections. Nas’s dad was a jazz musician. I think DJ Premier’s dad had a lot of records. So it was what was around. To cite Joseph Schloss, people were sampling because it was beautiful rather than to make a statement or point things out.” How did the genre originate? The origins of jazz rap lie in the unprecedented success of its sister genre, gangsta rap. Gangsta rap, a rap sub-genre focused on the lived experiences, culture and values of urban gangs in the US, took off in the early 1990s. With the unprecedented success of N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton (1988)—selling three million records without relying on radio play or commercial publicity—record labels were quick to recognise the emergence of a new frontier.
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