A few days ago, I listened to an interview with Radiohead's Thom Yorke. It was interesting to hear not only how Yorke discovers new music (via bandmates and the Internet) but also his listening process — that is, what sounds good to him and why. One of the tracks played (a very electronic one) had Yorke remarking on the slow degrade from 'normal' to more and more 'out.' When Radiohead took their music more 'out,' there were more than a couple of fans with confused and/or annoyed looks on their faces. But Kid A and Amnesiac were not side projects. Yorke and his cohorts have no fear of musical genre "cross-trading."
I do wish that fans of music in general were more open to this sort of thing. Granted, there have been more than a few attempts that have fallen totally flat. Much of that can be blamed on record labels piling cash onto past successes: southern rock, fusion, symphonic 'art' rock. Those genres had their moments as well as their moments of excess.
So what about jazz and hip-hop? Attempts at fusing the two have been very spotty. Us3 was an interesting smashup of hip-hop and traditional jazz. Branford Marsalis' Buckshot Le Fonque put down some dangerous grooves. On the other hand, I've got a few jazz/spoken word recordings (and I'm not naming names) that just don't work. The problem is that if the touch is too light, if the beats don't push things along enough, then the jazz moved dangerously close to smooth jazz. Not good.
Leo Tardin's Grand Pianoramax makes no such errors. Not only does it make great use of hip-hop, it also successfully fuses jazz and and early art rock elements by augmenting the piano with the Minimoog synthesizer. Employing two drummers (Deontoni Parks and Adam Deitch), three American poets/MCs (Celena Glenn, Mike Ladd, Invincible), and French rapper Spleen, this group puts a very different (and crazy funky) spin on things.
Article comments
1 - Glen Boyd
You should check out Guru's Jazzmatazz records Mark.
-Glen