It would be hard to find anybody who would call Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly anything but a hip hop album. Notable for its lyrical, musical, technical, and conceptual brilliance, Butterfly is a profound expression of and meditation on the African American experience in the context of a nation plagued by anti-black racism. It …
Continue reading Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly: Beyond Hip Hop, Beyond Genre
My next installment of challenging the oft-declared "jazz/hip hop intersection" takes on Flying Lotus's 2014 album You're Dead. You're Dead—which features an impressive list of musicians including Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar, Herbie Hancock, Stephen "Thundercat" Bruner, and Kamasi Washington—is the end result of Flying Lotus's seamless amalgamation of myriad stylistic influences. The album is adventurous, …
Continue reading With You’re Dead, Flying Lotus Puts a Nail in the Jazz/Hip Hop Intersection
To continue the intersection of jazz and hip hop theme I wrote about in my last post, I thought I'd take on the music of Stephen Bruner, aka Thundercat, whose 2017 album Drunk demonstrates his genius ability to make music that is "beyond category"—or rather "beyond intersection." Thundercat, who spent nearly a decade playing bass in …
A lot has been made recently of jazz artists working with rappers and hip hop producers, especially folks like Kamasi Washington and Robert Glasper's work with Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar. A key focus of jazz critics and journalists writing about these musicians is the "intersection" of jazz and hip hop as if the two …
Continue reading Karriem Riggins and the “Intersection” between Jazz and Hip Hop
I've been thinning out my L.P. collection of late, and this little beauty came up as a candidate for the great purge of 2018. I ended up deciding to part with it because it's not in great shape, the music is just kind of so so, and the cover isn't quite cheesy enough. The music …
Continue reading This Album is Brought to You By Colonialism!
Psalm 98:4 of the King James Bible reads: "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise." While I'm not a religious man, something about the words "make a joyful noise" really resonates with me. It's not "play a symphony in a black tuxedo" or …
A few weeks back I was lucky enough to find a Pepper Adams LP for a buck at my local record store. It's pretty solid. After I put it on the felt I read the liner notes, written by Fred Goodman, who wrote for Cash Box magazine, which I had never heard of. Then in …
Continue reading That time Fred Goodman likened the bari sax to the fat girl at the school dance
"There is no music without order---if that music comes from a man's innards. But that order is not necessarily related to any single criterion of what order should be as imposed from the outside. Whether that criterion is the song form or what some critic thinks jazz should be. This is not a question, then, …
I went record shopping Friday after work. It had been a really sucky week so I needed to treat myself. In the used jazz section I found a copy of Paris Concert by Circle (Anthony Braxton, Chick Corea, Dave Holland, Barry Altschul). I was stoked. I was certain I didn't own it. But I thought …
Continue reading Record Shopping at Home: Circle’s Paris-Concert
Hey all, it's been more than a hot minute since I've been blogging. Most of this is due to the fact that I've been working on my book manuscript. But now that it's temporarily out of my hands, I'm going to get back to this site. I had some domain and web hosting issues, so …
