Can anyone remember a time when conversations about jazz and improvised music weren't preoccupied with newness? Certainly our contemporary moment exemplifies this concern, and happily there is plenty of genuine risk and chance-taking around in various idioms. But of all the multiple forms of expression that have emerged in a saturated marketplace during the last twenty years, perhaps none has attracted more attention than the possibility of fusing hip-hop with improvised or experimental music. Hip-hop is widely, and in many ways rightly, celebrated as one of the only genuine innovations in popular music since punk in the 1970’s. And while it's a long way from "Rapper's Delight" or Cannibal Ox, I think the genre is still vital. Vital or not, though, the question remains as to how hip-hop - some of whose most audible and recognizable features include lock-tight beats and dense lyrics - might merge with or influence the seemingly open-ended styles often lumped under "experimental" and "improvised" music.
Hip-hop's roots lie - like those of all truly vernacular musics, certainly not a pejorative term here - in highly specific socio-historical circumstances (i.e. the Bronx, circa the mid-1970s). And the evolution of this music has been linked, even through its manifold proliferation, to specifically African-American expressions of identity (Chuck D famously referred to rap music as "Black people's CNN"). Now it's obvious that hip-hop is far too broad a genre to be limited by these kinds of musicological generalizations; and, for that matter, so too is improvised/experimental music. But it seems equally apparent that, while hip-hop has become one of the defining musical idioms to (now) a couple of generations of musicians and listeners, most of its influence on improvised and/or experimental music to this point has become detached from the specificity of its origins. In other words, paradoxically this influence has been lyric-less.
Early efforts to fuse improvisation and hip-hop tended to graft instrumental solos - sometimes very creative ones - onto fairly conventional hip-hip forms. Examples of this include the early Guru (whose Jazzmatazz release, along with similar forays by Us3, provided a template for dozens of hip-hop artists who would sample jazz records, all the way from Miles Davis' lonely trumpet fire to the hyper-obscure referencing of, e.g., Mike Ladd, whose wonderful Welcome to the Afterfuture contains the memorable line, "I want to fuck like Cecil McBee plays bass") and the raft of M-BASE artists like Steve Coleman and Greg Osby. Coleman's and Osby's dense, polyrhythmic concept was for a time quite influential, and even went so far as to include actual rappers (usually bad ones, though). As enjoyable as M-BASE records were, and as suited as jazz samples occasionally have been to the creation of great hip-hop, these are both mostly mainstream approaches which don't really experiment or push boundaries too much. More recently, this kind of combinative approach has been tried by a bevy of artists ranging from the Thirsty Ear crowd (including the collective Spring Heel Jack, Craig Taborn, and others) to the venerable Derek Bailey (okay, he didn't try hip-hop, but his drum n' bass record is a clear example of genre-crossing influence). I tend to be pretty underwhelmed by the majority of what I've heard from this crowd, but the desire to foreground this combination of musics seems significant.
But overall it seems to me that these kinds of projects - whatever their merits or deficiencies - don't really represent the key point at which hip-hop has influenced experimental music. For that you have to search for what Greil Marcus calls a "lipstick trace," a significant detail or hidden connection between disparate objects or forms. If we draw a line between Stockhausen and musique concrète composers like Pierre Henry all the way to electric Miles, extending the link from there in two directions - one to hip-hop, the other to improv - then we begin to trace the outlines of an influence. Clearly it's not the case that all practitioners of these various idioms acknowledge one another; but nor is that the point. They drink from the same sonic waters. Most important here is the common presence of layered sound, fragments of concrete noise, and the predominance of texture. Strip away the breakbeats and the vocals, and this combination is what's made hip-hop so vital: gathering up sonic detritus, abandoned parts, and "background" noise, and fashioning from them something new and, in its very resistance to conventional modes of expression, meaningful.
The obviousness of the technology used in hip-hop - its "artificial" nature, if you will - calls attention to the process of music making and also creates a context of undermined expectations. I'd venture the same about a lot of the finest improvised music, whether it problematizes conventional instrumental techniques or radically restructures musical form in the way of post-AMM improvising. In hip-hop, both sound and method are templates for experimentation and there is also an emphasis on dialogism; these are the same kinds of things I look for, and delight in, in improvised and/or experimental music. As Tricia Rose wrote in Black Noise, hip-hop's most radical musical innovations "create and sustain rhythmic motion, continuity, and circularity via flow; accumulate, reinforce, and embellish this continuity through layering; and manage threats to these narratives by building in ruptures that highlight the continuity as it momentarily challenges it."
What I'm saying is that aside from the most obvious influences and overlaps - the block-rocking beats of, say, Jim Black and Martin Brandlmayr, or the continuous attempts to blend genres - hip-hop and its aesthetics of sound are quite simply in the blood of young musicians, especially evident in the "downtown" NYC musicians coming up since the 1980’s and, even more so to my ears, in contemporary electroacoustic playing. Goodness knows what fruit the influence will bear in the future. But I'd guess that it's less likely to consist of the obvious pastiches or awkward combinations of the Thirsty Ear crowd than of a slow merging of approaches to sound construction itself. I'll be listening.
~Jason Bivins
Posted by al on March 12, 2004 11:46 AMone important chain that gets ignored a lot is the direct influence of hip-hop on now abstract turntablists like Otomo, Dieb13, and ErikM. on the seminal Les Sculpteurs de Vinyl disc:
http://www.japanimprov.com/yotomo/disco/memorymoney.html
you can hear Beastie Boys samples, and I believe there are similar references in Otomo's work with Eye around the same time (under the names DJ Carhouse/MC Hellshit).
Posted by: Jon Abbey at March 12, 2004 12:31 PMI haven't listened to it in a while, but I quite liked the rappers on Coleman's "The Way of the Cipher" (from the live at the Hot Brass recordings).
What do you see as dialogism (which I am told measn the competition of several voices within a literary text) in hip-hop?
Posted by: mwanji at March 13, 2004 5:22 AMJon, good call with the turntablist references.
Mwanji, I think are innumerable references to polyphony of voices, call and response, and so forth within hip-hop, all of which would fit the definition you mention (Dre and Snoop, Busta and Mos Def, Mr. Lif and Aesop Rock, Chuck D and Flava Flav, Wu Tang, etc., etc.). I think the overlaying of different "narratives," if you will, is a device commonly explored in all these idioms.
Posted by: Jason at March 13, 2004 5:55 AM"I quite liked the rappers on Coleman's "The Way of the Cipher" (from the live at the Hot Brass recordings)."
the ones he used at Victoriaville a few years ago were laughably bad, really dreadful.
Posted by: Jon Abbey at March 13, 2004 7:58 AMjason, have you tried the latest techno animal (brotherhood of the bomb)?
Posted by: tomas at March 13, 2004 8:33 AMWhat would be improv examples of the links between hip-hop and eai? At the moment, I can't really see much connectedness to substantiate Jason's abstract postulate.
Maybe what bothers me is "Strip away the breakbeats and the vocals." Take away the voice and the drums and it seems to me that you've taken away the essence of the music. Maybe my vision is simplistic.
Posted by: mwanji at March 13, 2004 11:22 AMTomas, haven't heard that. Any good?
Mwanji, I think you're missing the point of what I wrote, which in any case was just speculative riffing. The overlaps that exists, several of which I name, aren't necessarily with "eai" in particular. A lot of the post-AMM improvisers "drink from the same sonic waters" as do hip-hop artists, as I wrote. And the waters are constituted in part by the shared affinity for layering, ruptured narratives, etc. It's a "lipstick trace"; in other words, it's a thought problem or a suggestive area of musicological guessing. The influences are audible to me, but certainly not at the formal level.
Posted by: Jason at March 13, 2004 1:31 PMthere's a great proto-trip-hop record from 1992 by Aki Onda's Audio Sports project, titled Era of Glitterring Gas (no typo). it has Nobukazu Takemura doing the beats and Yamatsuka Eye rapping, great stuff. all three of these musicians have obviously moved on to much more abstract territory.
I also heard that on the Beastie Boys tour bus a while back, Money Mark played Martin Tetreault recordings for Kid Koala. I tried really hard to do a CD pairing Koala and Tetreault a few years ago, KK was interested, but then Radiohead invited him to open for them on tour, and that was that, we let it go.
Dalek has some interesting crossover connections also, I believe they're the rappers on the Techno Animal record Tomas refers to. they've also played the prestigious Nickelsdorf festival in Austria once or twice, and Werner Dafeldecker's wife directed the video from their last record.
one last one: after I released Schnee from the duo of Burkhard Stangl/Christof Kurzmann, they asked me if I could put them in touch with Ursula Rucker, because they wanted to work with her. that never worked out, but still interesting, I think.
anyway, to me, there are tons of these "lipstick traces", but there are also plenty of pretty straightforward connections through turntablists. if I had started Erstwhile a few years earlier, I would have tried to document guys like Q-Bert and DJ Disk, but they seemed to run out of creative steam pretty quickly after both releasing superb initial solo records.
Posted by: Jon Abbey at March 13, 2004 2:27 PMdalek kick ass. i've seen them live last summer and they were even better than on record. the "brotherhood of the bomb" album (yes, jason, i think it's very good and pretty radical, too) features plenty of guest rappers, amongst those the guy from dalek (as jon already mentioned) but also people from the def.jux label, notably el-p and one guy from cannibal ox as well as some really freaked-out ragga vocalists, turning the album almost into an all-star "underground" (how odd to say that) thing. i think there's plenty of innovation in hiphop right now. have you heard el-p's "fantastic damage"? another great record...
Posted by: tomas at March 13, 2004 3:19 PMAll good stuff, Tomas. And I'll keep a look out for that album. I like that Dalek record on Ipecac a lot too.
Posted by: Jason at March 13, 2004 3:34 PMyeah, Jason and I are both fans of Def Jux, Tomas, although Fantastic Damage isn't coherent enough for me. I'm listening to the new Clouddead as I type...
Jason, look for the first Dalek EP, Negro Necro Nekros, it's decidedly better than the Ipecac CD.
Posted by: Jon Abbey at March 13, 2004 4:01 PMI didn't like Brotherhood Of The Bomb much; I guess I just missed the style Techno Animal had on Re-Entry. I thought Ice's Bad Blood was okay, though (lots of the same people worked on both).
I don't think the Thirsty Ear albums are awkward; I really like all three of the Spring Heel Jack discs, for example. Has anybody besides me heard El-P's contribution to the Blue Series? I think it's a little timid in parts, but there are some good tracks, and it shows a willingness to stretch on El-P's part—it's not just jazz players meeting him on his turf, he tries to connect to their working methods as well, and that's important. DJ Spooky's Thirsty Ear album Optometry is the best thing he's ever done, as far as I'm concerned.
I'd really like to hear an album pairing Charles Gayle and Schoolly D, but that'll never happen.
Posted by: Phil Freeman at March 14, 2004 6:42 AMSchooly D's still alive? is he still active?
Posted by: Jon Abbey at March 14, 2004 8:47 AMPhil, I hated that El-P album, thought it really sucked. I reviewed it for Dusted if you're interested in seeing what I wrote.
Posted by: Jason at March 14, 2004 11:24 AMSchoolly's still around; he did the theme for Cartoon Network's show Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
Got a link to the Dusted review, Jason? I reviewed the album for the Wire, and did a piece on Shipp and El-P for Jazzi. I thought the record was pretty good, and the collaboration was a positive development.
Posted by: Phil at March 14, 2004 12:12 PMPhil, here you go:
http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/1321
Posted by: Jason at March 14, 2004 12:58 PMRoyalty Free Beats For One Dollar
At
Posted by: Royalty Free Beats For One Dollar at July 25, 2006 1:18 PMWell, OK, it took a spammer to exhume this thread for me, but I'm glad he/she did, as I hadn't seen it before. I know a few improvisers who are into hip-hop, and I think there are unquestionably shared aesthetics – a great deal of focuus on the space between noises, the placement of sound and probably above all serious attention to the timbre of a sound. In terms of crossover, I dunno though... not convinced by any of the Thirsty Ear stuffin that regard... Killer Kela with Ami Yoshida, maybe? Han Bennink and Biz Markie?
Or a Kool Keith Rowe album?! That'd be something.
Anyone here heard any dubstep? Only checked it out very recentl – Kode9 and Mark One, for instance? Anyone into DJ Premier, or DJ Vadim, or Photek's production, would almost certainly dig it.
Posted by: matt at July 25, 2006 2:27 PMWell, OK, it took a spammer to exhume this thread for me, but I'm glad he/she did, as I hadn't seen it before. I know a few improvisers who are into hip-hop, and I think there are unquestionably shared aesthetics – a great deal of focuus on the space between noises, the placement of sound and probably above all serious attention to the timbre of a sound. In terms of crossover, I dunno though... not convinced by any of the Thirsty Ear stuffin that regard... Killer Kela with Ami Yoshida, maybe? Han Bennink and Biz Markie?
Or a Kool Keith Rowe album?! That'd be something.
Anyone here heard any dubstep? Only checked it out very recentl – Kode9 and Mark One, for instance? Anyone into DJ Premier, or DJ Vadim, or Photek's production, would almost certainly dig it.
Posted by: matt at July 25, 2006 2:28 PMcame to this while googling for info about tetreault/kid koala at victo...and i've found a lot of interesting comments.
for me kode 9 is a genius and his vocalist (SpaceApe) is also great - that is a splendid duo.
can't wait for their full-lenght album.
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