Jazz and other Genres

Salon On-Line Magazine:

Rock vs. Jazz

For just the second time in 50 years, the top award at the Grammys went to a jazz album. Do the two genres have anything to say to each other?

---Gary Kamiya

Excerpt:

I don't know how much my love of rock affected my relation to jazz. But a lot of the jazz I truly love, that I listen to the most, has a certain odd kinship with rock. I don't specifically mean fusion, that hybrid form in which jazz musicians play fast and loud, usually using a more limited harmonic palette than they would on jazz standards. I definitely went through a fusion phase, and the seminal albums by Weather Report, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever and Tony Williams' Lifetime still hold up. No, I mean, for the want of a better term, dramatic jazz -- jazz that explicitly foregrounds an audacious musical concept, a concept or feeling that informs both the tune itself and the soloing. It's jazz that somehow escapes the technicians-soloing-over-the-chord- changes trap that prevents so many jazz tunes, no matter how proficient, feel less autonomous, less monumental, and more like exercises...

Jazz and Hip Hop

From the WBGO Blog:

Table of contents for "DIGGIN' THE CLASSICS"

A Tribe Called Quest and "Low End Theory."  This is one of my favorite Hip Hop CD's in part because of the inclusion of Legendary Bassist, Ron Carter.  From the blog:

This is one of my all-time favorite hip-hop albums. Arguably the best album by Tribe, this project contained a very “jazzy sound” (East Coast hip-hop was James Brown sample crazy before this). This was a very different vibe from the G-Funk gangsta music made popular by Death Row Records at the time.
While I was going through the credits, I noticed that Ron Carter played the bass on track #5 “Verses from the Abstract”. Being that I said this is one of my favorite hip hop albums of all time (and I know every lyric), I never noticed that Q-Tip shouts out Ron Carter at the end of the song….