Black Music Sunday: When jazz met rap and hip-hop

 Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 270 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.

I have covered multiple genres of Black music here over the years, but I have to admit that I have rarely touched upon rap and hip-hop. This is probably due to my age and generation, since I was born in 1947. 

That generational point-of-view gets a very thorough examination in this 2023 interview conducted by Guy Emerson Mount, at Black Perspectives.

“The Hip-Hop Generation”: An Interview with Bakari Kitwana 

This is an interview with Guy Emerson Mount, Assistant Professor of History and African American Studies at Wake Forest University, and Bakari Kitwana, the internationally known cultural critic, journalist, activist, and thought leader in the area of hip-hop, youth culture, and Black political engagement. Kitwana is the Executive Director of Rap Sessions, which for the last fourteen years has conducted over 150 townhall meetings around the nation on difficult dialogues facing the hip-hop and millennial generations. His most recent book is the co-edited volume, Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government for the People (The New Press, 2020).

Guy Emerson Mount (GEM): As we reflect on the last fifty years of what we now call Hip Hop, I was hoping we might begin with your take on how the history of Hip Hop is currently being narrated both within popular culture as well as within scholarly discourses. What do we get right and what do we get wrong about the origin story of Hip Hop?

Bakari Kitwana (BK): Hip-hop as a musical expression is relatively young. Its creation story and mythologies are routinely challenged, as its perceptions in popular culture meet the scrutiny of an emerging hip-hop scholarship. Some argue that the birth date is arbitrary. Others suggest that there are iterations of hip-hop that predate August 1973, including other musical forms and practices that hinted at hip-hop before hip-hop. All that aside, what the current Hip-Hop 50 celebrations across the country revel is that there are lots of takeaways from what has been achieved in this brief half century. The countless signed and unsigned artists, the many innovations and disruptions, the cross fertilization of Black diasporic youth cultures as they meet new technologies. There is lots to agree on and lots to debate fare beyond the origin story that answers the question, “What has 50 years of hip-hop history meant to the world?” Who is the greatest emcee of all time? Who’s on your top 10 list? What have different regions beyond the East and West coasts contributed to the hip-hop story? So, there is the debatable but there is also the indisputable: that hip-hop music emerged out of a cross cultural fertilization that impacted the American and world music scenes, that Black American vernacular was and remains central in its verbal expression; that DJ Kool Herc who hailed from Jamaica was one of its early innovators, that many emcees and djs came after, looked back at these earlier innovators and pioneers and attempted to build on their practices with varying degrees of success and depending on exposure captured the imagination of millions. And all of it has given us countless hours of music to listen to and lots of hip-hop history to reflect on. What we get wrong in the origin story, as is true of any history are the unsung. Let’s make sure we lift them up.

GEM: How do you conceptualize Hip-Hop? What does it mean to you?

BK: First and foremost, I think of hip-hop as a Black generational phenomenon. It was a theoretical framework that placed our generation in conversation with others most seamlessly. This was particularly essential for a generation coming of age in the aftermath of the civil rights and Black Power movements. In my earlier years as a hip-hop writer, I sought out the pioneering practitioners who I also deemed theorists because of their careful thinking about what is hip-hop. It’s important to understand that not every practitioner makes a worthy theorist. However, there are important exceptions. DJ Kool Herc. Africa Bambaataa. KRS-One, Chuck D, Popmaster Fabel were among the voices that not only gave a great deal of thought to what they were doing and where it was coming from, but also carefully articulated what they saw. Of course, there were others, but in my mind, they were among the dominant theoreticians whose thinking about the question “what is hip-hop” created a knowledge center that spread out from there and was adopted as the gospel by many. Countless hip-hop fans to this day cite their theories about hip-hop, many without realizing their origin. Scholars like Tricia Rose, Mark Anthony Neal, Joan Morgan, Marcyliena Morgan, Dawn-Elissa Fischer, James Peterson, Raquel Rivera, among others, have documented some of these theories and solidified their preservation with the study of hip-hop in the academy and in their books and scholarly essays. Equally important are hip-hop arts practitioners who sit at intersection of art and academia. 9th Wonder, Bun B, Lupe Fiasco, Akua Naru immediately come to mind. But of course, there are others.

What hip-hop means to me? As someone preoccupied with the way American society and white supremacy suppresses Black folks as a general practice, hip-hop for me has always pointed to possibility within a specific generational moment for how we get free. Its emergence from and continued rootedness in the Black grassroots gives it special appeal and power to transform the world as we know it. We see hints of that as hip-hop meets high school education, academia, politics, entrepreneurship, etc, but in my estimation, despite hip-hop’s commercialization, to a large degree much of its revolutionary and transformative potential in this regard, remains off the radar. To that end, we are just getting started.  

There’s about a 20-year age difference between me and Kitwana, and as such, I can claim to have been only part of the generation that god-fathered what became rap and hip-hop. My introduction came via association with Gil Scott-Heron and The Last Poets, who also intersected with my interests in both jazz and poetry. You can get a sense of the “birthing period” via the following two films.

Don Letts’ 2003 BBC documentary, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: The Story of Gil Scott-Heron,” includes interviews with The Last Poets, Chuck D,  Mos Def, Richie Havens, and Linton Kwesi Johnson.

The second documentary, introducing The Last Poets, is Herbert Danska’s “Right On!”

Billed as “a conspiracy of ritual, street theater, soul music, and cinema,” Right On! is a pioneering performance film, a compelling record of radical Black sentiment in 1960s America, and a precursor of the hip-hop revolution in musical culture. It features the original Last Poets—Gylan Kain, David Nelson, and Felipe Luciano—performing 28 numbers adapted from their legendary appearance at New York’s Paperback Theater in 1969, shot guerilla-style on the streets and rooftops of lower Manhattan. Opening months after the better-known music documentary Woodstock and almost simultaneously with Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Right On! was described by its producer as “the first ‘totally black film,’” making “no concession in language and symbolism to white audiences.”

The full film is posted here, via The Museum of Modern Art:

Fred Wiggs at The Black Past profiled The Last Poets:

The Last Poets, a group of musicians and poet performers, originated out of the civil rights movement, with an emphasis on the black re-awakening. The original Last Poets were founded on Malcolm X’s birthday, May 19, 1968 at the former Mount Morris Park (Now Marcus Garvey Park), at 124th Street and Fifth Avenue in East Harlem, New York City. The original members, Felipe Luciano, Gylan Kain, and David Nelson took the name from a poem by South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, who believed that he was in the last era of poetry before guns would take over.  They brought together music and spoken word.

He points out that there were two groups of Last Poets:

Though the popularity of both groups declined by the late 1970s, the respect the rappers and lyricists of the post-1980s era have paid them has helped cement The Last Poets’ place in history as a major influence on the hip-hop and spoken word movements. The Last Poets influenced jazz and hip hop artists ranging from Pharaoh Sanders and Senegalese drummer Aiyb Dieng to Public Enemy.  Recently various members of the two groups have attempted to bring them together.  The Last Poets have also collaborated with contemporary artists such as Common and Wu-Tang Clan.

Here is the second group of Last Poets, blending their spoken word rapping performance with jazz in “Jazzoetry.”

For a deep dive into the origins of hip-hop, take a look at “Hip Hop History: From the Streets to the Mainstream,” from the ICON Collective.

From the street corner to the world stage, hip hop has grown into one of the world’s most prominent musical genres and cultural influences. Explore significant events in hip hop history and its explosive evolution.

[…]

Hip hop history has a fascinating story worth exploring more. This cultural movement has seen considerable change and evolution since its inception in the seventies. What began as a local movement intended to provide a haven for African-American and Puerto Rican youth in New York City, has become a global phenomenon. To this day, hip hop continues to be a dominant force influencing the culture around the world.

Once we know the history, we can also understand how hip hop and rap intersected with and borrowed from jazz, and how jazz musicians absorbed them as well. Give a listen to some of the major genre inventors and blenders. 

NPR’s Frannie Kelly wrote:

A Tribe Called Quest: The Rise And Fall Of A Legend

When A Tribe Called Quest was first getting started, straight out of high school, it was the ’80s, and hip-hop was young. Original group member Jarobi White says he was having more fun than anybody else, and his crew was firing on all cylinders.

«Being so young, I mean 19, 18, that’s young,» he says. «We had no idea. Everything was just flying by the seat of your pants. How it felt. How it felt was the only thing that matters. Am I enjoying it? Do I feel good about it? Yes? That’s what we’re doing. The money and the fame and all of that stuff, that was all secondary.»

The two predominant vocalists in the group were Phife Dawg and Q-Tip. «Me and Q-Tip were best friends from like 2 to 15,» Phife says. «Me and Jarobi became best friends from like 12 until now. Ali Shaheed went to the same high school as Q-Tip. That’s how they met.»

«We were just trying to be fly,» Jarobi says. «And make music. And be musicians. Be like Stevie and Marvin and Prince. Thelonious Monk and Mingus and Charlie Parker. We were trying to be those people.»

The British Bootstrap Channel covers their history in “A Tribe Called Quest: Pioneers of Jazz-Rap”:

Another group who would cross and blend genres was Digable Planets. They tell their story on their website:

The Story of Digable Planets

Digable Planets burst onto the music scene in 1993 with their Grammy-winning single, “Rebirth Of Slick (Cool Like Dat)”. Made up of Ishmael Butler (“Butterfly”), Craig Irving (“Doodlebug”) and Mary Ann Vieira (“Ladybug Mecca”), the trio carved out a unique style of jazz-informed Hip Hop. Shortly after, Digable Planets followed up with their debut album, Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time And Space), an ambitious offering that Pitchfork praised as “a world within a world, complete with its own language and monuments.” The group celebrates the 30th Anniversary of Reachin’ in 2023.
Melding Jazz samples, and complex rhymes that touched on everything from the nuances of city life (Where I’m From) to abortion rights (La Femme Fetal), Reachin’ was a rich and vibrant artistic statement as well as a huge commercial success (RIAA certified gold).
Digable Planets immediately followed up with Blowout Comb, a bold and colorful meditation on Black liberation. While the album did not initially reach the immediate commercial successes of Reachin’, the album has aged beautifully, influencing future generations of Hip Hop heads, young Jazz musicians and Afrofuturists. The trio spent the 2000s establishing their own individual creative voices with Butler’s Cherrywine and Shabazz Palaces projects, Mecca’s work with BROOKZILL! and Irving as “Cee Knowledge” leading Cee Knowledge & The Cosmic Funk Orchestra.

Vlogger Brandon Shaw’s “Digging The Greats” channel has their bio in this 12-minute video, “Digable Planets: When Jazz Rap Beat Snoop & Dre”:

A groundbreaker in 1993 was Guru’s album “Jazzmatazz.” Jesse Ducker at Albumism wrote in 2023 for its 30th Anniversary:

Looking at this subject in reverse, it’s important to take a look at jazz musicians who have blended rap and hip-hop into their repertoires.

Pianist Robert Glasper is one of those musicians.

Hailing from Houston, Texas, Robert Glasper is a jazz pianist with a knack for mellow, harmonically complex compositions that also reveal a subtle hip-hop influence. Inspired to play piano by his mother, a gospel pianist and vocalist, Glasper attended Houston’s High School for the Performing Arts. After graduation, he studied music at the New School University in Manhattan, where he found performance work with such luminaries as bassist Christian McBride, saxophonist Kenny Garrett, and others. After graduating college, Glasper worked with a variety of artists, including trumpeter Roy Hargrove, vocalist Carly Simon, and rapper Mos Def. The pianist released his debut album, Mood, on Fresh Sound New Talent in 2004. Canvas and In My Element followed in 2005 and 2007, respectively, on Blue Note Records.

In 2009, Glasper released the forward-thinking album Double Booked, which featured a mix of modal post-bop and funky, ’80s Herbie Hancock-inspired numbers with two separate bands. The first of these was his trio with drummer Chris Dave and upright bassist Vicente Archer; they recorded five originals and a cover of Thelonious Monk’s “Think of One.” These tracks were followed by five more originals by his electric band, dubbed the Robert Glasper Experiment, featuring Dave, electric bassist Derrick Hodge, and Casey Benjamin on saxes and vocoder.

In 2010, Patrick Jarenwattananon wrote for NPR: Listening To Rap With Robert Glasper.

Robert Glasper straddles two distinct worlds. He’s an accomplished jazz pianist, who was signed to Blue Note Records in his mid-twenties. And he works with lots of hip-hop and R&B artists, both in the studio and on the stage: Q-Tip, Mos Def and Maxwell, to name a few. Both sides are reflected on his 2009 album Double-Booked, which captures both his acoustic piano trio and his electrified Robert Glasper Experiment collective.

Most interviews I’ve read approach Glasper from a jazz angle; I wanted to talk to him about hip-hop. So in late 2009, I sat down to play him five different rap songs and talk about them. At the end, we talked further about the idea of being both in jazz and hip-hop worlds at once. I’m happy to finally present the results here.

I’m a fan of his interpretation of Mongo Santamaria’s jazz classic “Afro Blue,” with vocals from Erykah Badu.

I’ll close with an album from jazz elder statesman Miles Davis, produced in coordination with hip-hop record producer Easy Mo Bee, which was released after Davis had died.

Doo Bop

Miles’ death on September 28, 1991 came after nearly a month in a coma, a month after his last public appearance at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. The impact on the world was immediate and reached far beyond the circle of jazz. He left behind stunned friends and fans—as well as a partially finished album in the hands of a hip-hop producer named Easy Mo Bee.

“We got six songs done and I was working on them when I got the call from [Miles’ road manager and producer] Gordon Meltzer. I was like, ‘Ohhh man.’ I was thinking that he would bounce back from it. Miles seemed like a strong guy.”

Doo-Bop, the album that Easy Mo Bee would complete, adding two more tracks that used trumpet parts from the 1985 Rubber Band sessions, became Miles’ first posthumous release in 1992. It initially was intended to be a double album exploring the full breadth of Miles’ funk and hip-hop infatuations: one disc fulfilling the long-standing promise of a collaboration with Prince; the second featuring co-productions with John Bigham, Sid Reynolds, Easy Mo Bee, and perhaps others. 

Born Osten Harvey, Jr., Mo Bee was establishing himself in 1991, having produced breakout hits for rappers Big Daddy Kane and The Genius (aka GZA of Wu-Tang Clan). His first meeting with the trumpeter took place that spring in Miles’ Manhattan apartment at an audition alongside a half-dozen hip-hop producers. Mo Bee credits a perfectionist streak for helping him beat the competition.

Here’s the full album:

Join me in the comments section below for more, and I hope those of you who are more familiar with both rap and hip-hop will post some of your favorites that intersect with jazz