A generation of jazz musicians has grown up with hip-hop in its blood. The result is the thrilling reinvention of a genre that has been guilty of fixating on its past To the outsider,jazz can seem less like a living form of music than a set of signifiers: music played to an older audience, aware of its own history, or redolent of the cool of a half-remembered,semi-fictionalised past. Dig a little further, and a different set of signifiers emerge: “difficult” music, and often improvised,played in small clubs, to audiences of chin-stroking beardies. What the word “jazz” rarely summons is the conception of music that isnt just perfectly of the moment, and but helping to shape and influence groundbreaking artists in other genres. But that’s what it has become,thanks to a modern generation of jazz musicians for whom working across disciplines is as natural as improvising in front of hardcore fans.
As the Los Angeles saxophonist Kamasi Washington puts it: “We’ve now got a whole generation of jazz musicians who beget been brought up with hip-hop. We’ve grown up alongside rappers and DJs, we’ve heard this music all our life. We are as fluent in J Dilla and Dr Dre as we are in Mingus and Coltrane. Related: Is jazz entering a modern golden age? Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com