by Nate Chinen
A separate but related movement was taking shape during the early 2000s at the 55 Bar, a narrow, garden-level Prohibition-era dive in Greenwich Village, next door to the Stonewall Inn. The signature vibe in the room was an aggressive but consonant progressivism, often but not always rock-infused. The Robert Glasper Experiment played some of its early, freewheeling shows at the 55 Bar. The jazz-rock guitarists Mike Stern, Leni Stern, and Wayne Krantz held regular court there, packing the place with awestruck young admirers. So did David Binney, an alto saxophonist and composer with a taste for incendiary catharsis and a working quartet featuring Jacob Sacks on keyboards, Thomas Morgan on bass, and Dan Weiss on drums.
Chris Potter, the dauntingly proficient saxophonist, had been drawing closer to rock and funk since the early 2000s, when he established an affiliation with Steely Dan. The band’s first studio album in two decades, Two Against Nature, featured him knocking out the sort of tersely bracketed eight-bar solos that were commonplace in the big-band era but had all but disappeared in modern jazz. (It won Album of the Year at the Grammys in 2001.) Potter had begun thinking about how to apply postbop flexibilities to a fusion setting, and to that end he formed a band with Craig Taborn on Fender Rhodes piano, Adam Rogers on electric guitar, and Nate Smith on drums.
Potter called this band Underground, a nod to the 55 Bar, where it found its purpose and its audience. (The cover of its first, self-titled album, released in 2006, features a photograph of Potter sitting in a corner of the club, his tenor saxophone on the tabletop beside him.) While the rhythmic drive of this music relied on a straight eighth-note cadence, like a rock band, the internal dynamics reflected a state-of-the-art jazz sensibility. The band put equal weight on power and precision, with each member of the group making constant micro-adjustments to the output of the others. In its ability to work up a rhythmic vamp to heroic scale, the band was working with strategies epitomized not by fusion groups so much as by the John Coltrane Quartet.
There were, of course, more direct and recent influences on the band’s style. David Binney’s storm-surge aesthetic was one. Another was an experimental unit led for the previous several years by Tim Berne—a brilliant, bass-less foursome called Science Friction, which also relied on the slashing interplay between Taborn’s electric keyboards, an assertive drummer (Tom Rainey), and a fiery electric guitarist (Marc Ducret). When I first heard Underground, it struck me that Potter had adapted Berne’s formula to a situation with more science and less friction. But these emulative aspects of the band wore off, as Underground came into its own.
Potter wasn’t the only postbop tenor terror pivoting toward backbeats and distortion. Donny McCaslin, who had replaced Potter in the Dave Douglas Quintet, was beginning to develop his own music in this vein. McCaslin was no stranger to fusion, having toured for several years with Steps Ahead. But it was the exhortation of Binney, a close collaborator, that tilted McCaslin’s hand. He formed a group with Lindner, Guiliana, and the electric bassist Tim Lefebvre, whose many sideman appointments included a spot in Wayne Krantz’s trio. The Donny McCaslin Quartet joined the David Binney Quartet and Chris Potter’s Underground as defining forces in a tightly knit jazz-rock boomlet in New York.
The sound of this scene was carried far and wide by a fortuitous association. One night in 2014, David Bowie, acting on a tip from Maria Schneider, went to the 55 Bar to hear the Donny McCaslin Quartet. Bowie, the chameleonic rock legend, was so impressed by the vaulting energy of the band that he designed his next album, Blackstar, around it. According to Tony Visconti, Bowie’s longtime producer, the band’s intense combustion served as an aspirational model: to prepare for the recording session, they listened to albums by the Donny McCaslin Quartet as well as Mark Guiliana’s Beat Music. (“And we watched their YouTube videos,” Visconti said. “We were spying on them. David said to me, ‘Really listen a lot to this, and get in your mind how they work.’ ”)17
Though it wasn’t obvious in the music, Bowie had also been inspired by Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly—mainly in the way that it defied the conventions of a hip-hop album, making use of a furious live energy from its musicians. Eager to capture a similar energy, he recorded Blackstar with almost the entire band playing in one room. (McCaslin tracked his solos in an isolation booth.) Bowie stood among the musicians on the studio floor, belting the songs live even though those vocal takes, riddled with sound bleed, would have to be scrapped. That commitment was striking to all of the musicians—especially after it emerged that Bowie was gravely sick during the making of the album. Released just a few days before his death of liver cancer, it was hailed as a valedictory triumph. McCaslin and his band, meanwhile, gained something deeper than notoriety: they were the handpicked acolytes, to be forever enshrined as “Bowie’s last band.”
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The new rhythm science in jazz—postfusion, post-Dilla, more or less postmodern—wasn’t just a posture to strike on the bandstand. It was also a production model. And one thing that began to change, in clear and salutary ways, was the artistic intention that jazz musicians were bringing to the sound of their recordings. At the extreme end of this spectrum sat Flying Lotus, an electronic producer, DJ, rapper, and filmmaker from Los Angeles. A linchpin and lodestar among postmillennial Afrofuturists—soul-forward, syncretic, irreverent but earnest—he emerged in the electronic-music underground, eventually breaking through to the indie mainstream. His third album, Cosmogramma, released in 2010 on the British label Warp, met with near-universal acclaim, not only for its audacious atmospheric canvas but also for its tether to an organic experimental tradition. Flying Lotus, born Steven Ellison, was in fact carrying on a supercharged family legacy: his great-aunt was Alice Coltrane, who had directly inspired Cosmogramma. Her oldest son, Ellison’s cousin Ravi Coltrane, even played tenor saxophone on a couple of tracks, including one titled “Arkestry,” a nod to the Sun Ra Arkestra.
Flying Lotus was tangentially dialed into the upstart Los Angeles jazz scene: one of his closest collaborators was Thundercat, the electric bass phenom and falsetto specialist affiliated with the West Coast Get Down. Until the Quiet Comes, the album that followed Cosmogramma, finds a place of prominence for Thundercat, along with guest spots for Erykah Badu and Thom Yorke of Radiohead. A track called “DMT Song” features Thundercat’s vocals drifting through an ethereal dreamscape. One of the song’s credited composers, along with Flying Lotus and Thundercat, was the prepossessing twenty-two-year-old jazz pianist Austin Peralta, who died two months after the album’s release in 2012, of viral pneumonia aggravated by substance abuse.
The shock of Peralta’s death forms an unspoken backdrop to You’re Dead!, which Flying Lotus released two years later. (Actually, not entirely unspoken: a track called “The Boys Who Died in Their Sleep” is offered in elegiac tribute.) A forty-minute fantasia of psychedelic fusions, You’re Dead! boldly blends programming with live musicians, producing a sensation of human convergence. Herbie Hancock turns up as a guest eminence, rippling dark arpeggios on a Fender Rhodes. And Kamasi Washington, who had yet to release The Epic, makes a strong impression: his tenor saxophone is prominent on several tracks, sonically focused and rhythmically sure.
Flying Lotus had intended You’re Dead! as a jazz statement, in a manner of speaking. This wasn’t merely a matter of surface texture, or contingent on those cameos. He saw the album as an insubordinate push against reigning orthodoxies in the music, especially those still mired in conservationism. He revered the brash mid-1970s fusion of George Duke and Miles Davis, and thought it could be brought into useful contact with contemporary forces. “Just as an outsider looking in,” he said, “I saw an opportunity to make something I hadn’t really heard before.”18
A similar motivation drove myriad other projects with a foothold in groove. The smarter of these amounted to much more than horn solos over a backbeat. For a coalition of artists—like the trumpeters Maurice Brown, Keyon
Harrold, and Takuya Kuroda; the vocalists José James and Taylor McFerrin; and the producers Raydar Ellis and BIGYUKI—contemporary hip-hop, R&B, and soul vibrated on the same cosmic frequencies as state-of-the-art jazz.
In New York City, the multifaceted organization Revive Music, founded in 2006 by an enterprising Berklee graduate named Meghan Stabile, became a vital conduit for this aesthetic. Revive Music booked and presented concerts, solidifying the center of a scene that could otherwise feel slippery and diffuse. The organization also generated its own enthusiastic coverage in an online zine, at revive-music.com. There was something insular and boosterish about the whole Revive Music circle, but it established a crucial bond with young crossover audiences, and formalized a genuine convergence between various strains of black music. The Revive Big Band, led by the trumpeter Igmar Thomas, served as a house exemplar for the cause. And while Stabile’s organization operated on a modest scale, its reach was resounding: in 2015, a compilation album called Revive Music Presents: Supreme Sonacy Vol. 1 was released in partnership with Blue Note Records.
There were analogous stirrings in other scenes. Across the Atlantic, an organization called Jazz Re:freshed, which began as a live weekly series in London’s Notting Hill neighborhood, suggested something like a UK answer to Revive Music. (Its stable of artists included stylish hybridists like the saxophonist Nubya Garcia and the keyboardist and producer Kaidi Tatham.) And more than a few American musicians outside the New York circuit worked in this mode, on record and in performance. Sometimes they worked in stages: recording an improvised jam, splicing the results into a coherent track, and then re-creating the edit on the bandstand.
Two of the best jazz albums of 2016 made use of this recursive funhouse logic, both released on the Chicago label International Anthem. One was In the Moment, which the drummer Makaya McCraven had stitched together from some fifty hours of tape, gathered over the course of a yearlong club residency. The music on the album is groove-forward and humid, with an almost tactile sound mix. Discrete compositional elements burble up and fade out, one into the next: what feels like an ambient hip-hop track might take an unexpected turn into a postbop side alley. The core musicians on the album are McCraven’s bandmates in the Marquis Hill Blacktet, whose leader, an incisive trumpeter, had won first prize in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition. One track, “Lonely,” uses Hill’s boppish phraseology as a head fake, moving on to a bobbing vamp over which Jeff Parker etches a cool, contrarian guitar solo.
Parker, a longtime member of the influential Chicago postrock band Tortoise, made the other standout album in this vein, The New Breed. It came from a small trove of old home recordings and beat-centric tracks that he’d rediscovered after moving to Los Angeles. He fleshed out some of these scraps into compositions, and then convened a band: the multireedist Josh Johnson, the drummer Jamire Williams, and the bassist Paul Bryan, who also engineered, mixed, and helped produce the sessions. The result is a sort of farm-to-table instrumental hip-hop album—reminiscent of a producer sampling 1970s soul-jazz, but with a live band playing the samples while keeping a boom-bap idea in mind. In addition to electric guitar, Parker is credited as playing Wurlitzer electric piano, Mellotron, Korg synthesizer, and assorted samplers on the album, along with drum programming. But the results are soulful and seamless.
These albums—and their successors, like Highly Rare, which McCraven released on limited-edition cassette and vinyl in 2017—threw open a door that had first been unlocked in the original J Dilla era. And no one was more ahead of that curve than Karriem Riggins, who wasn’t just a friend of Dilla’s but also perhaps his rightful heir.
I first noticed Riggins’s producer credit on Like Water for Chocolate, from the Electric Lady sessions around the turn of the century. But I took proper measure of his prowess only when Common released his follow-up, Electric Circus, in 2002. One of the best tracks is a Riggins production, “The Hustle,” which manages to be both woozy and rock-solid in its approach to groove. The album’s cover illustration is a Sgt. Pepper–style collage featuring a crowd of contributors and patron saints; Riggins is in the lower-right corner, above the black-and-white Parental Advisory logo.
If it was difficult to reconcile this renegade as the same person who apprenticed with Ray Brown, the giant redwood of postwar jazz bassists, Riggins didn’t ease the cognitive dissonance. When we spoke in 2012, he had recently logged a sideman credit on Kisses on the Bottom, the gold-plated standards album by Sir Paul McCartney. He was also fresh off a three-month stretch on the road with Diana Krall, whom he had originally met through Brown.
What we talked about was his impressive solo debut, Alone Together, an instrumental hip-hop album that he produced entirely himself. Riggins had created many of the album’s tracks on Krall’s tour bus, using portable sampling and sequencing workstations like Akai’s MPC 5000 and Native Instruments’ Maschine. When I asked, half-joking, whether the music on Krall’s tour had influenced his beats, he was quick with a surprising reply: “Most definitely.”19 Many of the ideas on the album, he said, had originated onstage with Krall and her band. One track, “Alto Flute,” includes a sample of a wicked bass ostinato by Robert Hurst, tossed off during a sound check and recorded with Riggins’s iPhone.
There’s no overt trace of swing on Alone Together, but that’s not to say it isn’t swinging. The tracks, which average two minutes but flow seamlessly one into the next, represent a series of meditations on groove. “Esperanza” features an array of twinkling timbres—pizzicato strings, tongue-slurred flute, what sounds like sitar—that come together like delicate clockwork. “A7 Mix” has the annunciatory energy of an early fusion overture. “Double Trouble” layers vibraphone, bass, flutes, and percussion in an ascending array that suggests Tortoise.
What’s striking throughout is the human feel behind the mechanized detail, and the surprising amount of melody that slips into the picture. The only moment when Riggins cuts loose on drums is the closer, “J Dilla the Greatest,” with polyrhythmic snare and cymbal work that strongly evokes his Detroit drumming lodestar, Elvin Jones.
Riggins released a follow-up to Alone Together in 2017, calling it Headnod Suite. This album edges more into straight hip-hop, with an hour’s worth of beats that feel like readymades for ambitious rappers. Some tracks chirp, while others ooze; the sonic impression is trippy and fluid. At the center of the album is a succession of four tracks identified as Cheap Suite, with samples lifted from eight-bit video games. A track called “Yes Yes Y’all” features a gummy, slowed-down sample of the title phrase over a disjointed beat; it ends with a snippet of Common scatting over a walking bass line, recorded with Riggins’s band at the Detroit Jazz Festival.
Riggins re-created those conditions at the 2017 edition of the festival, anchoring a band with Glasper on keyboards and Burniss Earl Travis on bass. Common rapped throughout the set, at one point devising a rousing and site-specific freestyle; in a sense, this was a premonition of August Greene, the hip-hop supergroup that Riggins, Glasper, and Common would unveil early the following year. Still, the high point of the set came in a delirious throwback vein—when Common dug into “The Light,” a single from Like Water for Chocolate, with Riggins and company expertly nailing the slanted grace, and extending the implications, of a J Dilla groove.
Flying Lotus, You’re Dead! (Warp)
Robert Glasper Experiment, Black Radio (Blue Note)
Roy Hargrove Presents the RH Factor, Hard Groove (Verve)
Jeff Parker, The New Breed (International Anthem)
REVIVE Music Presents: Supreme Sonacy (Vol. 1) (Blue Note)
10
Exposures
By eleven a.m. Thursday she was writing lyrics on the wall. Slanted blocks of text, all caps, some phrases already crossed out or circled. A wide scroll of butcher paper had been taped to the wall, and the felt tip of her black marker made soft scratch
y noises as she scribbled, hurriedly, as if taking notation from an unheard voice.
This was Esperanza Spalding—the irrepressible bassist, singer-songwriter, and composer-bandleader—making her fifth album, Exposure, in a Los Angeles recording studio. The entire session was streaming live online, in a multicam feed viewed by as many as a few thousand people at a time; while Spalding wrote her lyrics, a chyron at the bottom of the browser window read 50 HOURS IN. What this meant was that she hadn’t left the studio compound in more than two full days, and still had about a day to go. This, of course, was all by purposeful design.
Few jazz musicians have ever been more comfortable in the spotlight than Spalding, and the creation of Exposure, in mid-September of 2017, showed how deftly she bends that spotlight to her uses. The project—part marathon recording session, part performance-art Happening, part Truman Show–style surveillance ploy—put her in the studio for an uninterrupted seventy-seven hours, ostensibly without so much as a scrap of premeditated material. Spalding’s only advance preparation had been to schedule time with her bandmates, along with some featured guests, like the powerhouse vocalist Lalah Hathaway, the keyboardist Robert Glasper, and the violinist and singer-songwriter Andrew Bird. They came and went while Spalding stayed put, musing or tinkering in those ample moments when she wasn’t tracking parts.
The unusual constraints of the project led her to approach things differently. She began the recording session not at her bass, laying the foundation of a song, but rather on the microphone, inventing top-line flourishes. She was seated on a greenroom couch, singing wordless hooks and phrases that she then fastidiously multitracked into the contours of a song, like a spider weaving filaments into a web.
