You probably know the breezy, vibraphone-driven title track built atop a Billy Cobham sample, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. On this cusp of an exciting era of cross-pollination, we take a look back at 10 jazz rap fusion attempts that are must-haves in your vinyl collection if you’re a fan of either hip-hop or jazz.Īnother key alt-rap fixture in mid-’90s California was the Bay Area’s Hieroglyphics collective, the high-water mark of which is Souls of Mischief’s 1993 debut. called “The Low End Theory” that’s the epicenter of a jazz/electronic/hip-hop melting pot, jazz bands cover hip-hop tracks, and mainstream rappers regularly recruit horn players for their albums. Today, there’s a weekly club night in L.A. Twenty-five years (almost to the day) after The Low End Theory’s release, jazz rap’s heyday has come and gone, but a new era seems to be dawning in all corners of the genre. Tribe’s Low End Theory kicked off a very fertile era of jazz-influenced hip-hop, with artists on both coasts coming to treat Roy Ayers and Art Blakey records with the same reverence that producers viewed James Brown and the Incredible Bongo Band’s drum breaks 10 years prior. Sure enough, jazz and hip-hop have both stood the test of time, and as is also nearly inevitable for two genres that have been around more than 20 years, commingled in extraordinary ways. But if you look at each genre as a cultural movement, paying particular attention to the backlash each initially received, hip-hop and bebop share more parallels than you’d expect.īoth genres succeeded in infuriating the majority of the preceding generation, usually a sure sign of their cultural importance. Musically, late ’80s rap and mid-’40s jazz have very little in common, the former defined by 4/4 rhythms and looped melodies, the latter by its “anything goes” approach to rhythmic structure and melodic composition. That connection, drawn in the opening seconds of Tribe’s 1991 album The Low End Theory, at first seems a little odd.
Back when A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip was a teenager, the legend goes, his father overheard him playing some hip-hop and said it reminded him of bebop.
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