Anti-Pop Consortium

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Twenty years ago legendary jazz drummer Max Roach declared that hip-hop artists such as Public Enemy and Rakim were "the beboppers of their day". Max was collaborating with rapper Fab Five Freddie on music for a ballet, and the possibility of a genuine blend of these two great American musics seemed imminent.

Since then, however, the possibility of an authentic jazz/hip-hop hybrid has become the musical equivalent of quantum physicists' search for a "Theory of Everything" bridging quantum mechanics and relativity. The best musical minds in both camps have tried to find ways to do it. Mostly, they have failed, miserably and publicly.

Maybe it's just a romantic notion: hip-hop, a hard-edged street kid with both flash and grit, hanging out with his sophisticated, older cousin. Maybe jazz and hip-hop, while members of the same large musical family, simply don't have enough common ground. But still, it's like you could almost taste it: the two hippest American musical forms morphing into some kind of deep-down uber-music, a bold combination of reverence and defiance. Why not?

If anybody could pull the hip-hop-jazz merger off, it might have been Miles Davis, the original black musical badass who fused Sly and JB into his increasingly free jazz idiom in the late '60s. In fact, Quincy Troupe (who co-wrote Miles's autobiography) asserts that Miles' 1972 album On the Corner might be "the first hip-hop record released by a major label, with it's recurring bass and high-hat drum rhythms punctuated by snare accents, its use of electric instrumentations, and its looping use of the recording tape". But when Miles set out consciously to fuse jazz with rap, the result was an embarrassment. "Doo-Bop" (1992), released after Davis's death, featured flat rhymes by Easy Mo Bee that co-existed uneasily with Miles' muted trumpet solos over cheaply processed rhythm tracks. It failed as popular music and it was terrible jazz. If Miles can't do it, then maybe it can't be done?

What, after all, do jazz and hip-hop really have in common? They're both intensely polyrhythmic, but so is most blues-based American music. There is a playful, near-improvisatory feeling to rap that brings to mind a great jazz solo. A rapper's "flow" is something like a drummer's sense of swing. But the differences predominate. Jazz musicians spend years mastering complex harmonic sequences and brilliant melodic variations that play, essentially, no role in hip-hop. Jazz is largely obsessed with song structure and referencing (or consciously breaking from) tradition, while hip-hop fetishizes an opposite sensibility. These cousins strut with wholly different styles and character. Hip-hop has risen to become the dominant form of popular music, as hip in Utah as it is in Queens, as vital in the suburbs as it is in the projects. Most Americans, on the other hand, actively dislike jazz. We think it is intellectual or boring or, well, just plain noise.

As with Doo-Bop most early attempts to fuse jazz and hip-hop were watered-down failures, even if a few scored hits. The group US3 landed on the charts in 1993 with "Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)," but it was hard to call this track a genuine hybrid, as it was a wholesale lifting of the Herbie Hancock tune "Canteloupe Island" with a tepid rap for mass appeal. As a bad version of the Hancock tune fused with a mediocre to awful rap, the whole thing seemed like a Disneyland merger of two cool music that managed to be neither one or the other or much of anything else at all.

Some highly credible hip-hop acts were hailed as being "jazzy" in the early '90s, but rarely was jazz used as anything but a squiggle of icing on the cake. A Tribe Called Quest's brilliant The Low End Theory features acoustic bassist Ron Carter in some spots, but it is hardly different from their work without him. Digable Planets' 1993 hit "Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)" prominently samples a jazz horn lick and suggests jazz/hip-hop fusion but, in the end, merely uses jazz samples as a means of "softening" their sound as an alternative to the gansta vogue then emerging.

The most self-conscious attempt to fuse jazz and hip-hop around this time was attempted by Keith Elam a.k.a. Guru, a smart rapper from the group Gang Starr. The 1993 cover to the first of his three "Jazzamatazz" projects looks exactly like a 1950s vintage Blue Note album cover, and the liner notes announce that this is "one of the very first full-fledged attempts to fuse rap and jazz". But the tunes themselves are fairly standard funk-based hip-hop of the era, filigreed with exceptionally confined solos by Branford Marsalis, Donald Byrd, Courtney Pine and Lonnie Liston Smith. The next two Jazzamatazz projects contain even less real jazz (as opposed to the slick R&B marketed as "smooth jazz"). The lesson is clear: copping a Donald Byrd lick doesn't make these acts jazz any more than De La Soul's clever use of "Peg" makes the Long Island rappers members of Steely Dan.

On the other side, jazz musicians were having their own problems trying to add hip-hop elements to jazz. Two participants in "Jazzamatazz" made a go of it from their end. Branford Marsalis put together Buckshot LeFonque, a funk band that was brilliant at playing varied styles of music but that neither sold records nor convinced the critics. Courtney Pine, the British saxophonist who first emerged as a jazz purist dubbed the "Robo-Trane," started making albums featuring processed beats and scratching. More recently, trumpeter Roy Hargrove gave it a legitimate shot with "Hard Groove" (Verve 2002), enlisting A-level MC's and singers (Q-Tip, Common, D'Angelo and Erika Badu). The Penguin Guide astutely notes that "the record's like everything else of its type: not wholly committed to any one position, and at the mercy of its own eclecticism, it feels too transitory to have a lasting impact -- or to convince whatever new audience Hargrove's in search of". Branford, Courtney and Roy were all recording for major labels, and that was the problem: they sound like slumming jazz cats willing to place a backbeat and a "yo" behind their solos in a desperate attempt to sell some records.

So there it was, jazz/hip-hop fusion seemed to have died of embarrassment. The hep jazz sophisticate wearing some bling and putting "izzle" on the end of his sentences, or the street rapper suddenly putting on a skinny tie and chanting "A Love Supreme" but not really knowing what it meant; neither worked. It was a game of dress-up either way and, most importantly, it was being done for the wrong reason: money.

Behind the scenes, however, a real fusion was brewing.

It was deceptive, but the first sign was the smash hit of 1983, Herbie Hancock's "Rockit". Hancock was both a jazz giant and a crossover phenomenon already, but "Rockit" was a qualitatively different kind of crossover hit. For "Rockit", Hancock and producer Bill Laswell built the tune from the bottom up, assembling both sampled and synthesized sounds into beats and then into figures, with the melody and structure of the tune emerging from the collaged sounds themselves. Though it did not incorporate a rap, "Rockit" was genuine hip-hop being made by a jazz musician. It wasn't a hybrid of jazz and hip-hop, but it showed what would later be required to create one: a deep understanding of the other music rather than a desire to profit from a superficial dabbling.

Hancock, of course, had learned much of his trade in the Miles Davis band of the '60s, and it was Miles who first pushed him to play an electric instrument and to investigate the intersection of jazz and funk. Though Miles' '70s albums, including Quincy Troupe's "first hip-hop record" On the Corner, were dismissed by critics, they were simmering in the minds of musicians. While the original music labeled as "fusion" had long ago devolved into the bland instrumental pop of Spyro Gyra and the Yellowjackets, the late '80s found some jazz musicians experimenting with funk-based jazz that was complex, daring and edgy.

The saxophonist Steve Coleman has produced a series of albums with the "M-Base Collective" that explore funk-based rhythms and improvisation beyond the restrictions of "straight" time. While this material (available from RCA and then on smaller labels with the group tag "Steve Coleman and Five Elements) is emphatically not hip-hop (no samples, no rapping or scratching), it seems to rise from the same impulse to create a freewheeling street music for all the African Diaspora.

No surprise, then, that Coleman (and several M-Base comrades including vocalist Cassandra Wilson) should turn up on the second album released by the hip-hop "band" The Roots. From their start as students at Philadelphia's High School for the Creative and Performing Arts, The Roots pitched themselves as hip-hop cats who could play instruments, and so their approach always seemed more open to the natural rhythmic tension that creates "swing" in jazz. On "Datskat" and a few other tracks on Do You Want More?!!!??! (1994) Coleman improvises around and through the rap and the rhythmic track in a way that feels organic to the music rather than "tacked on" to demonstrate bogus class or "jazz" sophistication.

Similarly, it was no surprise to find Roots drummer Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson as one third of The Philadelphia Experiment, a 2001 project teaming Thompson with pianist Uri Caine and bassist Christian McBride. This disc (later subject to a hometown remix project) succeeded not as a streeter-than-thou jazz record or a smartypants rap CD but on it's own terms, as a pairing of a hip-hop drenched rhythm team laying down live tracks for improvisers who are not afraid to make daring harmonic choices.

If relatively unknown jazz musicians like Caine have been open to hip-hop influences, it's equally true that the rap underground sees an organic link to jazz. On its 2002 "Blazing Arrow", the Bay Area hip-hop outfit Blackalicious arrays its sound options the way Ellington used his horn section. The astonishing Release is a suite in three parts that hits hard, insinuates and climaxes several times. Using elements distinct as a string section and a "slam poem" from Saul Williams, this composition does not incorporate a single "jazz" cliché yet feels like the kind of music Don Redman or Sun Ra would have made if they had come of age to Parliament Funkadelic.

By far the most exciting hip-hop jazz fusion, however, has taken place further out on the limb of both musics. The 2003 release The Anti-Pop Consortium vs. Matthew Shipp is the boldest attempt yet to forge something new. Rather than avoid the elements of each music that make it difficult to blend, this disc faces the problem squarely. The hip-hop tendency to fragment the music is indulged so that the improvisations of the jazz musicians are often torn off in mid thought. The jazz musician's impulse to whirl the music into complex melodic forms is also let loose. Not for the effect of embroidering the rap with tasty Kenny G-style licks but in the direction of avant-garde ecstasy.

On this record, Shipp's longstanding trio (with William Parker on bass and Guillermo Brown on drums) is treated both as a source for sampling and collaging and as a vivid central voice to be augmented by programming and synthesized sounds. If the disc is not perfect (and it's not, with the "vs." of the title accurately describing the ways in which the two sounds sometimes clash rather than complement), then its future prospects are deliriously high. Shipp has gone on to forge his own hip-hop hybrid sound on various recordings for Thirsty Ear records, which employs him as the director of its "Blue Series". Blithely busting down walls between electronica, hip-hop, jazz, classical minimalism and other forms, Shipp is taking "the music", whatever that may mean today, into tomorrow.