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….
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