Playing Changes

by Nate Chinen

  Each of the principal musicians on Voodoo traces this revolution in rhythm back to J Dilla. His signature was a sampling style that sought to radically transform, rather than simply appropriate, existing musical source material. Dilla—born James Dewitt Yancey in Detroit in 1974, and also known professionally as Jay Dee—was the rare producer recognized by musicians as a guru, responsible for elevating sampling not only to the level of an art but to the threshold of some sort of black magic. Hip-hop producers had already demonstrated how effective it could be to turn a “break”—a bar or two of drumming, the merest slice of a track—into the foundation of a new song. Dilla took this practice farther, finding samples in places that few others would think to look, and remolding them like putty. The Jay Dee methodology was first articulated on a debut album by the hip-hop group Slum Village, Fan-Tas-Tic Vol 1, unofficially released in 1997. One track, “Hoc N Pucky,” rested on a two-bar vamp lifted from a recording of Bill Evans’s “T.T.T. (Twelve Tone Tune).” (The waft of Fender Rhodes arpeggios on that track, from 1971, come in the midst of a solo; Dilla slows it down so that it feels like something out of a dream.) Elsewhere on the album there are samples from Herbie Hancock, Gil Evans, and Larry Young. A track called “Things U Do (Remix)” puts a head-bobbing groove under a chiming passage from Duster, the 1967 proto-fusion album by the Gary Burton Quartet.

  But it wasn’t just a connoisseur’s taste that set Dilla’s production apart. He also resisted any movement toward rhythm quantization—the industry standard, then as now, in popular music. He preferred to dial up the variability and wobble that distinguish a groove as human, intriguing in its imperfection. His beats weren’t metronomic; they practically breathed.

  That first Slum Village album didn’t even see a proper release until late February of 2006, a few weeks after J Dilla’s tragic death of a rare blood disorder at age thirty-two. But the startling impact of his style hadn’t gone unnoticed in his time, in bohemian hip-hop circles. Questlove has recalled that when Fan-Tas-Tic Vol 1 began to make the rounds in 1997, “it was a messiah moment, in a way, for people like me and D’Angelo and Q-Tip. We had been looking for someone to lead us out of the darkness, to take us across the desert. Most of the time in those cases, you don’t know who you’re looking for until you see them.”7

  In an almost tactile way, then, Voodoo was an attempt to recapture lightning in a bottle. What’s striking is the degree to which it succeeded, and with real musicians in a room. There’s an odd sensation that you often encounter listening to the album, not unlike absentmindedly reaching the top of a staircase and being startled when there isn’t another step. On a track like “The Root,” which drapes D’Angelo’s multitracked moan and Hunter’s guitar arpeggios over a snaking backbeat, that feeling is recursive, throwing you off balance roughly every two bars.

  Today’s abnormality often becomes tomorrow’s norm, and that’s what happened with the dark rhythm science of Dilla and Voodoo—especially among the generation or two of improvising musicians who were still in training when the album dropped. But before those musicians had the opportunity to implement their lessons, a more direct adaptation of the Voodoo vibe would emerge, from a member of his touring band with unimpeachable jazz cred.

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  The iconic image from the 45th Grammys, held in 2003 at Madison Square Garden in New York, is a wire photograph from just after the ceremony, depicting newcomer Norah Jones with an armload of awards. Jones, then twenty-three, swept five categories, including Album of the Year, Best New Artist, and Record of the Year. She had trained as a jazz pianist—at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas, and then at the University of North Texas—before finding a niche in the roots-minded but nonpurist singer-songwriter hub on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. But it took a few years before her identity was firmly in place. (The first time I heard her, in 2001, it was as a soul-styled guest on a Charlie Hunter gig.) Her debut album, Come Away with Me, was released on Blue Note, to the consternation of some jazz partisans who augured the early stirrings of a more crossover-minded direction for the label. This wasn’t an unreasonable takeaway. To some degree it was even true.

  As it happened, another jazz-rooted Booker T. Washington alum won a Grammy in 2003, without making a splash on the red carpet or in the entertainment press. This was Roy Hargrove, who received an award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album—sharing the honor with Herbie Hancock and Michael Brecker, his co-headliners in a postbop dream team called Directions in Music. (The album was Directions in Music: Live at Massey Hall—Celebrating Miles Davis & John Coltrane.) Hargrove’s win was consistent with his profile: he was a former Young Lion with a proven track record of boppish expression, and he made perfect sense in a V.S.O.P.-like touring package.

  But Hargrove had been branching out from this baseline. In addition to D’Angelo’s Voodoo, he’d contributed to two other notable albums from the Soulquarians’ Electric Lady takeover: Like Water for Chocolate, by the rapper Common, and Mama’s Gun, by the soul singer Erykah Badu (yet another product of Booker T. Washington High). Each of these releases was a critical and commercial success; together with Things Fall Apart, a 1999 album by the Roots, they formed the basis for the emergent subgenre of neo soul.

  Hargrove’s stature as the most prominent jazz ambassador in these ranks was only bolstered when he joined D’Angelo on a world tour, playing to capacity crowds in cavernous rooms including Radio City Music Hall. The band, a millennial R&B wrecking crew dubbed the Soultronics, augmented core Voodoo personnel with a passel of equally heavy musicians. The level of intensity was high, and D’Angelo reliably took it higher—like Sly Stone, like James Brown. A groove might grow hypnotic in its repetition, and then turn on a dime. The horn section could duck into a boppish tangent, intricate and furious, before just as suddenly dropping back. Among musicians, word spread: the Voodoo Tour was hailed as a historic tour even as it was still under way.

  Speaking in 2003, Hargrove recalled the tour as a spiritual experience. He went on:

  The level of talent that was in the band was crazy. I mean, as far as the singers went, each one of them had their own individual vibe. You know, that lent itself to what D’ was doing just perfectly. That all fit in together like a glove. Like a well-fitted suit—you know, tailored and whatnot. And the rhythm section was ridiculous. And then the horn section was all the jazz guys: me and Frank Lacy, Jacques Schwarz-Bart, Russell Gunn. And so, man, you could imagine what was going on behind the scenes when we weren’t playing—the kind of interaction because of all the different worlds. You had, like, straight-up church cats. And then you had some guys that were more pop. And then you had jazz. And it was all mixed together, the different vibes. I don’t think everybody really realized what it was when it was going on. But I could see that it was very, very special. It was like a revival.8

  The reverberations of Voodoo—and the Voodoo Tour—were still being felt in the music industry at this time, several years later. Along with a Norah Jones sweep, the 2003 Grammys featured the Roots backing Eminem. If you watched the telecast, you saw Badu, in a Dead Prez T-shirt, accepting Best R&B Song for “Love of My Life (An Ode to Hip Hop),” which featured Common and Raphael Saadiq as guests. More to the point, those Grammys included, for the first time, a category titled Urban/Alternative Performance. If it wasn’t obvious enough that the nomenclature was code for “neo soul,” the list of nominees made it so. Badu and Common were there. So were Saadiq with D’Angelo; Floetry; CeeLo Green; and India.Arie.

  A few hours after the ceremony, nearly everyone in that roll call turned up at B.B. King Blues Club & Grill in Times Square. The occasion was an after-party “Grammy jam” hosted by Common and Badu. The house band included Questlove, Poyser, and Meshell Ndegeocello on electric bass. They kept the groove going without pause for several hours, making effortless segues as guests hopped on and off the stage: Musiq Soulchild and Jag
uar Wright; Mos Def and Talib Kweli; Jill Scott and Anthony Hamilton; Q-Tip and Bilal; and of course the evening’s hosts, a picture-perfect hip-hop couple at the time. Also making a cameo, on just one tune, was Hargrove. He stepped out of the wings looking almost diffident in the spotlight, and soloed for two tantalizing choruses. The crowd, packed tight on the dance floor, literally hollered and screamed for more. He never returned to the stage, though the music kept going past four a.m.

  Several days later I met with Hargrove at the Jazz Gallery, the nonprofit performance space in lower Manhattan that he’d helped establish in the mid-nineties. We mostly we talked about his forthcoming album, Hard Groove, credited to a new entity he called the RH Factor. Inspired in large part by Hargrove’s experience helping to create Voodoo, it was similarly recorded at Electric Lady, with Elevado and assistant engineer Steve Mandel at the boards.

  There had been little structure imposed on the session, which began with Hargrove and a small coterie of associates, including Ndegeocello, keyboardist Marc Cary, and drummer Gene Lake. From this baseline, the project expanded to accommodate dozens of other musicians and countless surprises. Although he had notated some songs on sheet music, and arranged certain ideas in preproduction, Hargrove left ample space for his cohorts to fill. Among them were two Soulquarians, Palladino and Poyser. To preserve a spontaneous mood, Hargrove insisted on cutting only first and second takes. And the foundation of almost every track, featuring two drummers and an array of other sonic layers, was recorded with live instruments in real time.

  “The whole thing was just one creative night after another,” Hargrove recalled. “The entourage started growing, ’cause people were hearing about us down in the studio. Guys were just dropping by.” One such drop-in was Anthony Hamilton, whom Hargrove knew from the Voodoo Tour; he delivered an imploring two-part ballad called “Kwah/Home.” Another D’Angelo backup singer, Shelby Johnson, applied her luxurious alto to a soul number titled “How I Know.” (She wrote lyrics in a studio hallway.) Jacques Schwarz-Bart played tenor saxophone on a number of tracks and contributed an R&B ballad called “Forget Regret,” with vocals by Stephanie McKay. Even Steve Coleman, apprised of the session by bassist Reggie Washington, popped in to record an M-Base-inspired funk workout called “Out of Town.”

  Other visits had been planned in advance. Several days in, Hargrove welcomed a cadre of “Texas cats,” who came to the studio straight from the airport, bags in hand. Among them were the funk-fusion pianist Bernard Wright, the rhythm-and-blues guitar veteran Chalmers “Spanky” Alford, and the session-guitar ace Cornell Dupree. This crowd also included the Keith Anderson Trio, whose other members were drummer Jason Thomas and the keyboardist Bobby Sparks.

  Anderson, a tenor saxophonist whose relationship with Hargrove dates back to junior high, framed their contribution in regional terms rather than the language of genre. “Texas musicians have a different approach to playing,” he said. “It’s not from a mechanical standpoint.” Sparks, then a musical director for the contemporary gospel star Kirk Franklin, put it this way: “The way we play is not based upon what we see on paper. It’s based all on feeling and listening. And that’s how Roy plays.” The deep and unforced groove of these Dallas-based musicians, until that point an undocumented strand in Hargrove’s musical DNA, would come to define much of the album.

  But the most eye-catching contributions on Hard Groove were cameos by the marquee names of neo soul. On a track called “Poetry,” Q-Tip’s rapping, sinewy and self-referential, leads to a smartly realized trumpet dialogue (Hargrove, overdubbed), which in turn leads to the gently beat-tripping final section, featuring a lovely metaphysical hook by Badu.

  It so happened that Common was upstairs at Electric Lady’s Studio B, mixing his album Electric Circus, while Hargrove and crew were downstairs in Studio A. The rapper was lured into a recording booth at around five one morning, and he improvised a nimble freestyle, in one take. (It appears on the album as “Common Free Style.”)

  D’Angelo’s cameo vibrates with a different sort of energy. He entered Studio A after midnight one Sunday, as saxophonist Karl Denson was leading about fifteen musicians in an Afrobeat jam. “He comes in and just starts dancing in the control room, ’cause the energy is so happening,” recalled Jason Olaine, a coproducer of the album, who was then an A&R executive for Verve. “Then once the cut’s done, he goes in and says hi to everybody. It kind of disintegrates into this hang for the next two hours, where everybody’s kicking it on couches and kind of discussing what it is they’re going to do.” Although Hargrove had prepared a Bill Henderson tune for D’Angelo, they ended up playing an impromptu cover of Funkadelic’s “I’ll Stay.” Cut to tape in a couple of takes, it simmers with late-night sensuality and mystique.

  While the improvisational spirit of these sessions was familiar to its jazz participants, the logistics were often foreign. “The whole project was very challenging for me,” Hargrove admitted. “Usually when we make jazz records I just go in with the cats and we hit. And play like we’re playing a set, and then it’s done in a couple of days. But this was a lot more involved.”

  Olaine, who had produced his share of jazz albums, described the looseness of the project in more harrowing terms. “Honestly, I didn’t know what Roy was doing half the time,” he said. “I was getting gray hair, seeing days tick by and studio hours getting racked up and tape being rolled, and thinking: ‘What are we going to get out of this?’ ”

  Hard Groove was an encouraging answer to that question, if not quite a triumphant one. Neither a neo-soul classic nor a new-school fusion gem, it staked out a hybrid middle ground. The undeniable thing about it was its conviction. Hargrove had set out with something other than a commercial motive, and he put an enormous amount of effort into making it come together—to capture a sound, a social energy, a moment in time.

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  He wasn’t alone, within his cohort, in seeking to reconcile his image with his interests. Christian McBride, a lifelong James Brown fanatic, had flirted with funk on his first two albums. His third, A Family Affair, released on Verve in 1998, tilted decisively in that direction, with heavy backbeats and wah-wah electric bass solos. (The title track was a Sly Stone anthem.) McBride then lunged toward fusion, full stop, on his 2000 album Sci-Fi, and teamed up with Questlove and the keyboardist Uri Caine for an expressly groove-centric project called the Philadelphia Experiment, which released a self-titled album in 2001. By the time the Christian McBride Band recorded a three-CD set called Live at Tonic early in 2005, with guests like Charlie Hunter and DJ Logic, the group’s explosive mix of jazz-funk and electronic breakbeats felt reasonable. Few questioned the gall of a former Jazz Future evoking actual jazz futurism.

  This scenario repeated itself, with variations, across the former Young Lion spectrum. A gifted generation once defined by dutiful conformity was now coming into its own, intent on renegotiating the terms. Nicholas Payton, a New Orleans trumpeter of spectacular instrumental prowess, followed up an album titled Dear Louis (Verve, 2001) with another called Sonic Trance (Warner Bros., 2003); his band of the same name, infused with electronics and hip-hop swagger, toured widely, working beyond a jazz-club orbit. The saxophonist James Carter, who’d been hailed as a prodigy in the early nineties, formed a group inspired by Ornette Coleman’s harmolodic funk bands of the seventies. And Joshua Redman made Elastic, a kind of funk-forward organ trio album. He took the trio on tour, making inroads with a thriving jam-band scene.

  The gold standard in that circuit was Medeski Martin & Wood, an endlessly resourceful rhythm team with an equal investment in New Orleans funk, à la the Meters; 1960s soul jazz, like Eddie Harris; and farther-out vibrations, via Sun Ra. Formed in the early nineties, driven by an ethos of spontaneous discovery, and beloved by some of the same hippie-groove fanatics who followed Phish and the Grateful Dead, MM&W had shifted well into a jazz-world orbit by the turn of the century
: in 1998 it not only signed to Blue Note Records but also made an album on Verve with the guitarist John Scofield, kicking off an association that would yield several more albums and a succession of popular tours.

  So there was a ready appetite for the RH Factor when Hargrove turned it into a touring concern. More and more, it resembled an upgraded fusion band, frenetic but tight, with brand-compatible guests. Verve released an EP, Strength (2004), and a follow-up album, Distractions (2006). What got lost along the way, probably because it was never Hargrove’s mission to begin with, was the specific rhythm magic that had coalesced on Voodoo.

  The Dilla thing, in other words. It would fall to somebody else to carry that forward.

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  “J Dillalude” is a four-and-a-half-minute collage of chiming harmony and loopy rhythm that can be found on In My Element, a 2007 album by pianist Robert Glasper. The track opens with a voice-mail message from Q-Tip. “Yo, you know what I was thinking?” he says. “You guys should play some Dilla joints, like, trio-style. I think it’d be fresh.”

  The next voice on the track belongs to Glasper, at a club date introducing his trio mates, bassist Vicente Archer and drummer Damion Reid. He’s talking while the trio plays a cooled-out, incantatory vamp, piano chords feathered on the upbeat. The listener is trusted to know the allusion: it’s the sonic bed of “Thelonious,” a track from Common’s Like Water for Chocolate. J Dilla had produced “Thelonious” by sampling and slowing down a couple of bars from a vintage fusion track by George Duke. Glasper’s trio effortlessly re-creates the loop, and then moves on to other millennial touchstones, like De La Soul’s “Stakes Is High” (which Dilla built on a sample of “Swahililand,” by Ahmad Jamal) and Slum Village’s “Fall in Love” (for which he sampled “Diana in the Autumn Wind,” by Gap Mangione).