JAZZ AND HIP HOP: MEETING THE MID-LIFE CRISIS HEAD ON | FLY

When did jazz lose touch with today’s youth, and how can it reclaim some of its glory from hip hop and its children: dancehall and reggaeton.

Ushered into the concert halls and auditoriums of academia and now deemed a higher art form, jazz has lost touch with the voice of the inner city youth. More than the price of a movie ticket, an mp3 download and that latest 50 — Jada dis tape combined, jazz has priced itself out of the pockets of today’s youth and placed itself amongst the dusty company of Beethoven and Bach, only to be passing tunes heard as ambiance in thousands of Starbucks’ across America. Relegated to be the theme music of late night quiet storms, it’s time for jazz to show off her musical children and that old dogs definitely can master new tricks.

How many times can one listen to yet another reinterpretation of John Coltrane’s Giant Steps? As revolutionary as Coltrane was to expanding jazz’s potential, I think he too would be saddened to see how stagnant the music has become. What made it unique was the music’s ability to always bring something new and its ever evolving nature allowed the youth to feel ownership of the music. To revitalize jazz, this evolution must happen again. Jazz must extend its hand out to hip hop.

Jazz needs to recapture the spirit of community that it once created. With one jazz record, you could start a party, make love, and then be inspired to revolution. Caught in the time warp of nostalgia, those who grew up along side of jazz’s heyday, have become the loudest critics of jazz’s inevitable evolution. The genius of a Charlie Parker, a Miles Davis or of a John Coltrane, meant the boundaries of what was normal had to be flung out of the window. Spitting in the face of swing music and commercial success, these artists took a risk — mixing a bit of the old school with their youthful exuberance and struck gold. These musical giants showed that going your own way could pay off. Faced with extinction, jazz must open its eyes, clean out its ears and learn from hip hop.

Hip hop is the music of the masses. Born out of the basement parties in the Bronx, it is following the path laid long ago by jazz — giving Black and Latino youths a forum to express their frustrations with the system in a creative way before suburban America got hip to it. Now embraced by mainstream pop stations as the music to know, it too has lost its substance, that special something that made it alluring as well as taboo. As hip hop reaches towards its thirtieth birthday, exchanging its baggy pants and t-shirts for button downs and slacks, sampling from songs that previously sampled from something else, hip hop seems to be at a standstill — experiencing its own mid-life crisis alongside jazz.

The answer to both genres’ woes is in collaboration. Following Jay-Z’s example of mixing it up between himself and the Roots for his unplugged album, or with Linkin Park to take The Black Album to another level, an artist can stay true to the genre that made him and attract a new audience by stepping outside of the box. As much criticism as Miles Davis received when he began incorporating funk and electronic music in jazz, straying from the tried and true, he had a goal in mind — he wanted to see more young people attend his concerts. As vain as this move seemed to his contemporaries, Miles was indeed a visionary; he knew that a new audience must be cultivated, and the best way to attract them was to incorporate a bit of their sound with his own. It was a perfect opportunity to expose these new fans to jazz without them feeling alienated.

This same action must happen again. If Roy Hargrove, a member of the Hip Hop Generation, was able to bridge the gap between jazz and hip hop by collaborating with Q-Tip and Common on his album RH Factor, What would be the impact of a living legend like Wynton Marsalis to play while Jay-Z flowed on the beat? I’d pay to see it, wouldn’t you?

Image by Damian Rafferty

I recently had the pleasure of listening to a number of high school bands from across the US, jam in New York City at the annual Essentially Ellington HS Jazz Band Competition.

I was blown away by, not only their capability but, their enthusiasm and imagination. They played Ellington flawlessly, and improvised alongside professional musicians the likes of Marsalis and a couple of his orchestra members!

They young musicians were knowledgable, well skilled, accomplished and they displayed a refreshing reverence, passion for jazz that inspired everyone within earshot.

The vocalists, though eager to share their scat skills, were a little premature with their presentations but given time and maturity, will eventually catch up to their passion and another generation of jazz singers will steal the scene.

What can Jazz learn from Hip Hop? I beg to differ; both genres are safe within their respective niches borrowing, “sampling” as needed. There is always allowance for crossover in any medium but no recognizable departure for either…and
isn’t that what generally fuels the medium!

I beg to differ. While I would not be surprised to see jazz and hip-hop feature in the obituaries column of the broadsheets, you only have to look to the last few years to realise that redemption and reincarnation are certainly not going to come from these two ailing genres joining forces. “Jay-Z’s example of mixing it up between himself and the Roots for his unplugged album, or with Linkin Park to take The Black Album to another level”. Jay-Z’s collaboration with The Roots doesn’t exactly seem like much of a departure from true hip-hop, of which The Roots have been one of the finer purveyors until recent times. And as for reaching ‘another level’ with Linkin Park, I think you must have meant ‘another market’. Hip-hop has been big business for at least a decade now and as a forum for minority youths “to express their frustrations with the system in a creative way” it is becoming an increasingly rickety soapbox to stand on. Jay-Z’s collabo with Linkin Park (who gratefully are completely forgotten on my side of the Atlantic) was the idea of an A&R executive who wanted to sell 500,000 records to more suburban pre-pubescent ‘metalheads’. This type of collaboration does nothing to expand these genres or to bridge gaps between communities.

It seems all the more strange to make the case for a fusion of jazz and Hip-Hop by referring to Linkin Park (more than one cat would be turning in his grave right about now). But unfortunately the past attempts haven’t fared much better. Guru’s Jazzmatazz albums took an intersting idea and rubbished it by showing a complete inability to think outside the often hip-hop’s often formulaic musical structures. Ron Carter was wheeled out to play a three-note bassline and let Guru and co. look good for being down with senior citizens too.

While jazz and hip-hop may have been born in the same ghettos with the same social function, their MUSICAL evolution has been vastly different. Jazz has been pushed by an attempt to take apart musical boundaries and shake the music to its foundations sometimes putting it back together in ways that would never have been thought possible. Hip-hop has been musically much slower to shift . Every era in its short history has been dominated by less than a handful of mainstream prolific producers followed by a rampant epidemic of weak impersonations. Dr Dre, Timbaland, Jay Dee, Just Blaze, The Neptunes, Kanye West are a few of the former. Once The Neptunes blew up how many times did Pharrell have to sample Space Invaders while banging on some corrugated iron with a sledgehammer, topped off with a soulful over-the-top whine, before we got the message? It is hip-hop’s nature as a business that any innovators are stopped short in their tracks so their first original can be bled dry.

There are still visionaries amongst hip-hop beatsmiths (Madlib, Jay Dee, Sa Ra, to name but a few) but they are kept on the periphery of the genre.

Genres are never safe within their niches, especially two genres such as jazz and hip-hop that have always thrived off the integration of new and different musical forms. However, trying to sell Jay-Z’s Black Album to the parents of our friends the pre-pubesccent suburban metalheads by getting Marsalis to sit in is not going to take anyone to another level except for HOVA’s bank manager.

I have outstayed my welcome before offering solutions to a n undeniable diagnosis. Maybe this can fuel that debate?

hip hop is alive and well in the underground; it in fact is a whole culture with a mission of musical progression and a protest against commercial rap music. jazz, well, hell, it just takes a lot to learn how to play it well, and how to listen to it as well. not to say that hip hop is EASY, to do that well also takes years of practice. although the energy at jazz gigs and hip hop shows is vastly different. i’d like to see jazz gigs become more exciting, with shorter skirts and more booze, perhaps

Rosa’s piece was taken to task in Slate:
“Gene Santoro was admirably blunt about this reality in his recent book Highway 61 Revisited: “The fact is, most Americans don’t like instrumental music.” It’s a crystalline insight, rendering the arguments of jazz detractors, such as Rosa Hyde, writing in the London-based online magazine Fly, quite beside the point:

[J]azz has priced itself out of the pockets of today’s youth and placed itself amongst the dusty company of Beethoven and Bach. … I think [Coltrane] too would be saddened to see how stagnant the music has become. … Faced with extinction, jazz must open its eyes, clean out its ears and learn from hip hop. … What would be the impact of a living legend like Wynton Marsalis to play while Jay-Z flowed on the beat? I’d pay to see it, wouldn’t you?

I’d pay not to see it. There’s a huge difference between the organic musical evolution I’ve tried to outline and Hyde’s hypothetical publicity stunt. (Not so hypothetical, in fact: Think Jay-Z and Linkin Park, Nelly and Tim McGraw, and the pairing that started it all, Aerosmith and Run-DMC.) Of course, Hyde is partly right: Jazz is often too expensive, too insular, too classicized. But spend a week in fairly cheap New York haunts like the 55 Bar, the Jazz Gallery, Cornelia Street Café, and Fat Cat, and see how fast the “stagnation” thesis collapses. Jazz is not “facing extinction”—this is laughable—and it has already learned from hip-hop. So, rather than hold our breath for Wynton to play music he openly and emphatically hates, why not get hip to what’s already out there?

David R. Adler writes for the New Republic Online, Jazz Times, and many other publications. “

I would say that David R. Adler has a good point and some artists like Wynton Marsalis are way beyond redemption. A recent book ‘Is Jazz Dead or has it just moved to a new address?’ offers a more compelling analysis of the effects of cultural stagnation that fell out from the neo-cons of jazz like Marsalis - review to come soon.