Kamasi Washington: THE EPIC

[Steve Reynolds]

In a live setting in a small room, I've never heard anything that sounded remotely like the sound out of Darius Jones' alto saxophone.

Last time was with Nasheet Waits Equality Band and he was incredible. 

Methinks with the right band and a good sound system, he blows people away in a large room with a big crowd.

I don't know how he plays in that big room with a large crowd without selling out his soul.

Plus maybe a band with Nasheet & Ches together with Cooper-Moore and Pascal on the upright would make music that could change the world.

but I've always thought that

so have other dreamers

first time I met a 72 year old microtonal saxophonist/teacher/genius, he told me his music "was gonna be huge"

and it is and was and that night with Cecil McBee, Randy Peterson and his mercurial son, Joe Maneri's music was bigger than life itself.

 

When the Ship Goes Down

[clifford_thornton]

Yeah, I haven't always dug everything that Darius Jones has done/is doing but I think there is a trans-stylistic, populist approach within his music that, given the right kind of 'push,' could really get to more people - I'd say the same thing about Parker and Drake. 

Obviously there may have been a few hangers-on but when Ornette died, there were so many outpourings of genuine appreciation as well as a lot of people starting to check out his music for the first time. It gives me hope that the serious stuff does have a potentially sizable audience - people just have to find out about it.

[JSngry]

That Wiki page should be there (and in English). Most of my searches for new names have wiki pages, and pretty high to to top of the results.  and that's one of the first places I look to springboard out into further research.

[JSngry]

Here, I got it started. Have neither time nor inclination right now to expand it past this, but y'all go ahead on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darius_Jones_(Saxophone)

[clifford_thornton]

He's got a pretty robust website already, but in lieu of a Leonard Feather Encyclopedia I suppose the Wiki is not a bad idea. Thanks.

[Clunky]

Here, I got it started. Have neither time nor inclination right now to expand it past this, but y'all go ahead on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darius_Jones_(Saxophone)

sounds very interesting . I'll need to check him out . What. I've heard of The Epic didn't float my boat.

[colinmce]

I haven't heard enough of Darius Jones' music-- and he's been putting a LOT of it out there in the last couple years-- but I agree he's an astounding player and genuinely original.  That in an of itself is pretty exciting.

[JSngry]

People who know how to make a wiki page look good and such, please do so...it's not really something I know how to do. But geez, it seemed kinda to hear "why isn't Darius Jones" better known, and then, there not even be a wiki page for him. But what I've done is pretty basic, and not really "attractive", so, again, anybody who can fill it up and/or make it look better, have at it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darius_Jones_(Saxophone)

[sonnyhill]

 

If he wants one, coudn't/wouldn't have created one or had one created?

 

[JSngry]

Up until today, if you searched "Darius Jones" on wiki, here's where you went: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Reid_IV

Now when you type in "Darius Jones", you get an option for "Darius Jones" (Saxophone)", and if you go to the above link, there's now a link to the saxophonist which is not how I think it's supposed to look, but I'm sure can and will be corrected by the Wiki community.

Either way, fan-people gonna bitch about low-no profile without taking basic availings, not in the mood for that noise.

[ep1str0phy]

Considering starting a new topic for this, but considering the fact that this touches upon some of the discussion here, I thought I'd re-up this dead or dying horse-

I was fascinated by the Terrace Martin article linked elsewhere: http://www.npr.org/sections/microphonecheck/2015/02/11/385218373/terrace-martin-everything-got-a-little-bit-of-funk-in-it (apologies to whomever found it, I can't seem to re-find the link at this hour).

It's instructive in that it details the sort-of inner creative life of someone in Kamasi's extended community of musicians. This was pretty illuminating:

MARTIN: Oh, yeah. Easily. Because I'm from South Central LA. So jazz — although my father is a jazz musician — but when you young, you not really into hearing John Coltrane. It sounds crazy to you. Crazy. So, it's just like, the Midnight Marauders album was the closest thing that I felt kinda familiar with as a kid listening to with my father, you know what I'm saying?

As a saxophonist whose own music veers into dance music and R&B territory--and one of the more prominent among the younger set of jazz-informed LA cats to take an active role in the shaping of 21st century hip-hop--Martin is straddling multiple traditions. We often speak of the jazz tradition as something fluid but still monolithic, like a centipede in that it has a multitude of appendages but definable beginnings and ends. I know I'm preaching to the choir on the O board, but the aforementioned logic is peculiar in that it tends to ignore the idiomatic slippage and play that is in effect with regard to musicians who have come of age after the jazz "crisis" point of the 80's. A working knowledge of jazz may still be a cultural imperative for for the vast majority of young musicians working in black diasporic musics, but a practicing engagement with jazz is another story altogether.

I've been listening to a ton of hip-hop lately--in part because it's become evident that (as both an LA cat and a musician of color) this is part of my embodied cultural heritage, in part because we've now reached a point with that music where we can look at it with critical and generational distance. In a weird sense, hip-hop has had it's "bebop" moment of superlative cultural achievement, and it's arguable that that it's reached a juncture of dissipating cultural returns and diminishing scope (e.g., "hip-hop is dead" as the new "jazz is dead"). This doesn’t mean that new epochal artistic statements under the hip-hop rubric are impossible (re: To Pimp A Butterfly), only that it’s now a “post” art and needs to be understood as such. I’m (really) not pointing fingers when saying this, but it’s sort of silly to yell at kids for “that rap shit” when NWA has a canonizing biopic in theaters.

Coming back to Kamasi, we can now look at that music as not just commercial or mainstream jazz (or a facsimile of such), but rather the sound of a younger generation of musicians coming to terms with jazz as fertile--if secondary--ground for creativity. Kamasi’s links to the Tapscott ethos are as legit as it gets out on the WC, but it’s not a straight line from Tapscott to The Epic--it zips through both mainstream and alternative rap, contemporary R&B, electronic dance music, and so on. Dealing with Kamasi as jazz per se is kind of self-defeating, because this music is jazz in the same way that Jonny Greenwood’s soundtracks are Western New Music--that is, absolutely but also not really.

Looking at this a different way, I decided to listen to some Blue Series music again (after Clifford’s mention and a long time in-between). Matthew Shipp’s Equilibrium was always my favorite. In retrospect, I like it only ok. I think--especially now, in the wake of guys like J Dilla, Madlib, and Flying Lotus--it’s a little irresponsible to be dealing only with the surface mechanics of hip-hop.

Equilibrium came out the same year as Outkast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, which is mystifying to me. There is jazz all over The Love Below, but it gets at the root of that music in profound and meaningful ways. There are free jazz horns--used with effective context--on The Love Below. There is a cover of “My Favorite Things” that makes an earnest attempt at engaging with the harmonic reality of the Coltrane Quartet.

Equilibrium has vamps, some sampled beats, and some hip-hop production. There is no exigency to this process. In the best contexts, beats are simultaneously fixture and firmament--their fixity and the creative undermining of said fixity is what makes that music work. Equilibrium strains at this repetitiveness even as said constancy undercuts the improvisers’ fluidity and power. This isn’t hybrid music so much as constrained jazz that wants to get at the sound but not the procedure of hip-hop.

Some of Vijay Iyer’s (much more recent) music is like this--Steve Lehman’s too. While both of these guys have real feels for hip-hop and (I’m sure) know that music intimately, there’s something about how their musics engage with rap that feels more like NPR headline grabbing than organic musicmaking. Again, the problem isn’t with the musicianship so much as it is procedural: you can make the music using the techniques and the logics, but Wu Tang is not Coltrane and failure to bow to the nuances therein is creatively damning.

To reiterate and clarify my point after this very longwinded post, appreciate (or don’t) Kamasi’s music for what it is--jazz that tries to get back to jazz way after half a century’s worth of alternative narratives. The critical and promotional agendas are something else entirely, and they’re tied into the physics of two genres (jazz and hip-hop) in respective processes of urgent, desperate survival. The “worthy” art in and among all of this chaos is maybe good but definitely far more complex than might seem evident.

[mjazzg]

The splash so big we're getting reviews of NY gigs in the Guardian......

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/aug/26/kamasi-washington-blue-note-new-york-review

sounds like a fun evening

[jazzbo]

Considering starting a new topic for this, but considering the fact that this touches upon some of the discussion here, I thought I'd re-up this dead or dying horse-

I was fascinated by the Terrace Martin article linked elsewhere: http://www.npr.org/sections/microphonecheck/2015/02/11/385218373/terrace-martin-everything-got-a-little-bit-of-funk-in-it (apologies to whomever found it, I can't seem to re-find the link at this hour).

It's instructive in that it details the sort-of inner creative life of someone in Kamasi's extended community of musicians. This was pretty illuminating:

MARTIN: Oh, yeah. Easily. Because I'm from South Central LA. So jazz — although my father is a jazz musician — but when you young, you not really into hearing John Coltrane. It sounds crazy to you. Crazy. So, it's just like, the Midnight Marauders album was the closest thing that I felt kinda familiar with as a kid listening to with my father, you know what I'm saying?

As a saxophonist whose own music veers into dance music and R&B territory--and one of the more prominent among the younger set of jazz-informed LA cats to take an active role in the shaping of 21st century hip-hop--Martin is straddling multiple traditions. We often speak of the jazz tradition as something fluid but still monolithic, like a centipede in that it has a multitude of appendages but definable beginnings and ends. I know I'm preaching to the choir on the O board, but the aforementioned logic is peculiar in that it tends to ignore the idiomatic slippage and play that is in effect with regard to musicians who have come of age after the jazz "crisis" point of the 80's. A working knowledge of jazz may still be a cultural imperative for for the vast majority of young musicians working in black diasporic musics, but a practicing engagement with jazz is another story altogether.

I've been listening to a ton of hip-hop lately--in part because it's become evident that (as both an LA cat and a musician of color) this is part of my embodied cultural heritage, in part because we've now reached a point with that music where we can look at it with critical and generational distance. In a weird sense, hip-hop has had it's "bebop" moment of superlative cultural achievement, and it's arguable that that it's reached a juncture of dissipating cultural returns and diminishing scope (e.g., "hip-hop is dead" as the new "jazz is dead"). This doesn’t mean that new epochal artistic statements under the hip-hop rubric are impossible (re: To Pimp A Butterfly), only that it’s now a “post” art and needs to be understood as such. I’m (really) not pointing fingers when saying this, but it’s sort of silly to yell at kids for “that rap shit” when NWA has a canonizing biopic in theaters.

Coming back to Kamasi, we can now look at that music as not just commercial or mainstream jazz (or a facsimile of such), but rather the sound of a younger generation of musicians coming to terms with jazz as fertile--if secondary--ground for creativity. Kamasi’s links to the Tapscott ethos are as legit as it gets out on the WC, but it’s not a straight line from Tapscott to The Epic--it zips through both mainstream and alternative rap, contemporary R&B, electronic dance music, and so on. Dealing with Kamasi as jazz per se is kind of self-defeating, because this music is jazz in the same way that Jonny Greenwood’s soundtracks are Western New Music--that is, absolutely but also not really.

Looking at this a different way, I decided to listen to some Blue Series music again (after Clifford’s mention and a long time in-between). Matthew Shipp’s Equilibrium was always my favorite. In retrospect, I like it only ok. I think--especially now, in the wake of guys like J Dilla, Madlib, and Flying Lotus--it’s a little irresponsible to be dealing only with the surface mechanics of hip-hop.

Equilibrium came out the same year as Outkast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, which is mystifying to me. There is jazz all over The Love Below, but it gets at the root of that music in profound and meaningful ways. There are free jazz horns--used with effective context--on The Love Below. There is a cover of “My Favorite Things” that makes an earnest attempt at engaging with the harmonic reality of the Coltrane Quartet.

Equilibrium has vamps, some sampled beats, and some hip-hop production. There is no exigency to this process. In the best contexts, beats are simultaneously fixture and firmament--their fixity and the creative undermining of said fixity is what makes that music work. Equilibrium strains at this repetitiveness even as said constancy undercuts the improvisers’ fluidity and power. This isn’t hybrid music so much as constrained jazz that wants to get at the sound but not the procedure of hip-hop.

Some of Vijay Iyer’s (much more recent) music is like this--Steve Lehman’s too. While both of these guys have real feels for hip-hop and (I’m sure) know that music intimately, there’s something about how their musics engage with rap that feels more like NPR headline grabbing than organic musicmaking. Again, the problem isn’t with the musicianship so much as it is procedural: you can make the music using the techniques and the logics, but Wu Tang is not Coltrane and failure to bow to the nuances therein is creatively damning.

To reiterate and clarify my point after this very longwinded post, appreciate (or don’t) Kamasi’s music for what it is--jazz that tries to get back to jazz way after half a century’s worth of alternative narratives. The critical and promotional agendas are something else entirely, and they’re tied into the physics of two genres (jazz and hip-hop) in respective processes of urgent, desperate survival. The “worthy” art in and among all of this chaos is maybe good but definitely far more complex than might seem evident.

Thanks for this post.

[AllenLowe]

I really think that connecting Kamasi's music to Lehman and Vijay is critical smoke and mirrors; and I begin to roll my eyes when faced with this kind of silly rationale:

"...jazz that tries to get back to jazz way after half a century’s worth of alternative narratives. The critical and promotional agendas are something else entirely, and they’re tied into the physics of two genres (jazz and hip-hop) in respective processes of urgent, desperate survival. The “worthy” art in and among all of this chaos is maybe good but definitely far more complex than might seem evident."

means nothing; I've been doing the same thing as the first part of that for 25 years; give me a medal.

as for Kamasi, he's is being anointed by the likes of Greg Tate and Gary Bartz, so his means of making a living is probably very secure. Which is fine, but let us not panic at this, as though we have to be sure we are keeping up with the times by praising this new false messiah.

oi, why do I end up on this side of the argument about once  a year? Well, maybe because the desperation to be current really leaves us very far behind the art form.

Edited August 27, 2015 by AllenLowe

[.:.impossible]

Allen, I am certain that very few, if any, are going to join you in coining this guy as a messiah. He put out a record that people are identifying with, and is part of a scene of prolific and virtuosic musicians that are making music for a growing audience.

 

 

Karl, for what it's worth, Dilla was already very well-known at the time Equilibrium was released. In fact, he and Madlib released a record together that same year. I would wager that a Venn diagram of people who heard Champion Sound and Equilibrium that year has but a sliver of overlap.  

 

 

[jlhoots]

I really think that connecting Kamasi's music to Lehman and Vijay is critical smoke and mirrors; and I begin to roll my eyes when faced with this kind of silly rationale:

"...jazz that tries to get back to jazz way after half a century’s worth of alternative narratives. The critical and promotional agendas are something else entirely, and they’re tied into the physics of two genres (jazz and hip-hop) in respective processes of urgent, desperate survival. The “worthy” art in and among all of this chaos is maybe good but definitely far more complex than might seem evident."

means nothing; I've been doing the same thing as the first part of that for 25 years; give me a medal.

as for Kamasi, he's is being anointed by the likes of Greg Tate and Gary Bartz, so his means of making a living is probably very secure. Which is fine, but let us not panic at this, as though we have to be sure we are keeping up with the times by praising this new false messiah.

oi, why do I end up on this side of the argument about once  a year? Well, maybe because the desperation to be current really leaves us very far behind the art form.

Agree with Allen that Kamasi has little or nothing in common with Lehman or Iyer both of whom I much prefer.

[clifford_thornton]

Can't stand Lehman or Iyer musically, though I've never met either in person, and I agree that they ARE doing some things that probably are designed to get headlines from NPR Music and other critics. But I don't hear the comparison with Washington's music. 

The Shipp collaborations may not hold up that well - it's been ages since I heard them and probably "clunky" still holds as a descriptive term, though I maintain that the ideas themselves weren't bad. Contemporary hip hop doesn't move me in the least, though I still like a fair amount of the old-school stuff that I came up on in the late '80s. 

[ep1str0phy]

I really think that connecting Kamasi's music to Lehman and Vijay is critical smoke and mirrors; and I begin to roll my eyes when faced with this kind of silly rationale:

"...jazz that tries to get back to jazz way after half a century’s worth of alternative narratives. The critical and promotional agendas are something else entirely, and they’re tied into the physics of two genres (jazz and hip-hop) in respective processes of urgent, desperate survival. The “worthy” art in and among all of this chaos is maybe good but definitely far more complex than might seem evident."

means nothing; I've been doing the same thing as the first part of that for 25 years; give me a medal.

as for Kamasi, he's is being anointed by the likes of Greg Tate and Gary Bartz, so his means of making a living is probably very secure. Which is fine, but let us not panic at this, as though we have to be sure we are keeping up with the times by praising this new false messiah.

oi, why do I end up on this side of the argument about once  a year? Well, maybe because the desperation to be current really leaves us very far behind the art form.

Allen, maybe I wasn't very clear here, but my intention wasn't to elevate Kamasi to the level of Lehman and Iyer. Rather, my point is that listening to Kamasi as jazz in and of itself is kind of self-defeating. The music is not equipped to be evaluated in that fashion--you wind up listening for depths and narratives that are just not there.

By this point in the thread, all of that should be obvious and self-evident. OK, it's not particularly innovative or inventive music--sure. What does need to be addressed is the two-sided critical blind spot in play here.

Look at The Epic's wikipedia page--when was the last time you saw a jazz album reviewed in Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and The Guardian--and with marks that high? You want to talk about fucked up? Press, Promo, and reviews can be bought--that's been part of the business for ages. If there's a "problem" here, is has nothing to do with Kamasi getting so much playing and everything to do with how people are talking about him. Look at the reviews on the wikipedia page again--there's virtually no mention of any jazz or improvised music that emerged after 1970. Thom Jurek, of all people, is the one to mention Tapscott and Eddie Gale (who, btw, were making important music before/by 1970)--there's no talk of the AACM, BAG, and downtown NY stuff/post-Prime Time music, let alone either free improvisation or usual suspects in jazz/hip-hop hybridization. Maybe I'm wrong, please someone correct me if so-

The people who do get mentioned are the Tranes, Pharoah, Ayler, (weirdly, but props to John Fordham for not echoing the other cats) Sun Ra, and other 60's guys--plus Miles and Weather Report. This is like a weird inverse of the "jazz is back!" bullshit from the 80's. Did you miss Coltrane and Pharoah? Well they're back. You can forget about all of that fucked up stuff that happened afterward, because it's all good now. We've been through this before, and we called it historical erasure.

That's one part of the critical blind spot. The other half is, I would argue, real but harder to quantify. It has to do with the fact that most jazz criticism is just baldly under-equipped to evaluate jazz outside of the framework of jazz, its antecedents, and other art music. I wouldn't say that this is a deficiency so much as a matter of fact (i.e., why criticize a Honda Civic for not being a Dodge Challenger--they're two different things). But when we're talking about music like Kamasi's that is inextricably connected to hip-hop and modern R&B--not necessarily conceptually, but in terms of its technical choices and general direction--we have to understand that that (too) is part of the conversation. I'm not defending this music--again, just trying to articulate my feelings on it--but I will say that Greg Tate is one of the few critics who can deal with both jazz and hip-hop with real chops.

If I had to get deep into it, I'd say that this is where the frustration is coming from--we're looking at this music like it's trying to be Trane after Trane when we also live in a world that had Braxton, Roscoe, James "Blood" Ulmer, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Matthew Shipp, Robert Glasper, and so on. We're also confronted with this music that looks facile and a-historical without earnest critical appraisal of its roots in G-Funk, A Tribe Called Quest/De La Soul (and other early jazz/hip-hop pioneers), the spectrum of alternative hip-hop, and the Brainfeeder label. To paraphrase a line off of To Pimp A Butterfly, look both ways before this music crosses your mind.

As for what you say, Allen, about the desperation of being current leaving us behind the art form--yes, I agree. If anything, this is my criticism of guys like Iyer and Lehman (and again, what I was saying about Equilibrium)--there's a difference between engaging with a new art form on its own terms (he has been demolished on this board, but really--Robert Glasper) and only engaging with the surface elements. Kamasi and Iyer, for example, maybe are--maybe aren't--on the same level, but they're both asking us to take "surface work" at face value. There may be some deeper stuff in there (Shipp, for example, is way deeper on Equilibrium than the hip-hop trappings might suggest), but again--we have to get past the surface.

Here's a different and more useful question: at what point in jazz did we feel that all music had to be all things to all people? Is this not why the jazz press has championed Iyer? Because it's free jazz/mainstream/hip-hop/new music/pop/electronic/improvisation? We decry the fact that we have so few new relevant artistic statements when the critical baggage in this genre is just impossible. Oppositely--and maybe rightly--when something comes along that is oblivious in some fashion--like Kamasi, or Badbadnotgood, or whatever--we trash it. So what music is there left to make? Or should we just blow it all up and start over again?

Karl, for what it's worth, Dilla was already very well-known at the time Equilibrium was released. In fact, he and Madlib released a record together that same year. I would wager that a Venn diagram of people who heard Champion Sound and Equilibrium that year has but a sliver of overlap.  

Yeah, you're right--and though I was speaking more to the "responsibility" of musicians now (i.e., after Dilla, Madlib, and so on--in 2015--what is it that we must do or know beforehand), you do raise an interesting point about these "early" hip-hop/jazz collaborations. When your frame of reference is Low End Theory but not (yet) Madvillain or even Madlib's Shades of Blue (also released in 2003), there is some information missing that might color your perspective. These cross-genre applications are interesting in that--unlike with jazz, whose chief innovations have been historical for decades now--hip-hop has only really since the turn of the century been in the midst of its experimental explosion. History-as-moving-target has not been the purview of jazz criticism for a while now.

[xybert]

For me, Lehman is one of the few 'jazz' artists that has managed to incorporate a hip hop influence and have it come out in his music sounding organic as opposed to tacked on and contrived. At least, to my ears. He sounds like he grew up listening to hip hop and it comes through in his music naturally as opposed to some contrived mash up. Just my opinion as someone that grew up listening to and loving hip hop and absolutely loathing overt jazz/hip hop cross over projects. 

Iyer i haven't listened to as much but those first two trio records with Marcus Gilmore on drums were also very good to me in terms of having a hip hop influence without sounding like a corny, dated upon release, behind the curve hip hop-jazz thing. A lot of that is thanks to Marcus Gilmore, who manages to have a hip hop feel without sounding like he's aping hip hop beats.

A random side note, not sure if he still does it but Ken Vandermark used to post lists of what he was listening to on his website. I remember seeing Ultramagnetic MCs' Critical Beatdown listed once, and that made perfect sense to me. Again, i hear that influence come out organically in his music without him shouting  'yo yo, yes yes y'all!' in between solos.

 

[ep1str0phy]

I see what you mean, and while I'm not overly convinced by Lehman's music as more than experimental in its approach to confronting hip-hop culture and practices, it's clear that he knows that music. At the same time, I do wonder if the "great" music that can surely/hopefully be made in this vein will have to be made by someone with less institutional or conceptual baggage. In a way, I feel like Flying Lotus is this someone, but musical semantics will steer the conversation away from this so long as jazz and pop criticism continue to occupy such (seemingly) irreconcilable spaces.

And if we're going down that road, I feel like we've already seen an organic neither jazz nor hip-hop/hybrid music in starts and fits. I definitely hear it on the Neneh Cherry & The Thing collaboration. That cover of "Accordion" is on point--it's is absolutely beholden to the source material but also sounds fluid and dynamic in a definitively jazz sense. That was only one part of an entire album that wasn't entirely as innovative or thoughtful, but that one track conveys the sort of invention that should start some real conversations out progress rather than regression.

[JSngry]

I can see Lehman happening without hip-hop, but not without Steve Coleman. I don't see Steve Coleman happening without hip-hop, though, and that dude's been around long enough to have been stimulated to do more than just emulate.I might be merging memories, but I think I remember buying a Kool Moe Dee 12" and Sine Die at the same time, which really proves nothing, but, just sayin'...not 100% coincidental, nor 100% parallel universes.

What we're really talking about in all of this is Younger-ish Black Music talking amongst itself, which it seems it always has, but now, without all the filters of outside economics and institutional appeasement and, uh...the need to have Separate Conversations, if you know what I mean.

[CJ Shearn]

I still haven't heard "The Epic", would like to so I can better participate in this discussion, but epistrophy makes some very points, about the way critics in what are normally not jazz centric publications are talking about Washington.  If they are not mentioning jazz before 1970 and all the various strains have effected his thing, it's because they don't have the knowledge, or maybe not know how to access that knowledge, that all of us here have.  I doubt we were the target audience for "The  Epic" to begin with, hopefully it's a gateway for people, but as for the jazz and hip hop thing, Ben Williams, to me, is another that deals with that in a way totally organic.  He grew up on hip hop, soul and R&B and it's natural.  To me, at least before the "RH Factor" came out, not too many jazz/hip hop collaborations sounded completely organic, maybe the Jazzmatazz thing, Us3 sounded forced in an odd way.  Steve Coleman's "A Tale of Three Cities" was organic, but highly specific as far as early 90's hip hop went, to my ears.  Back to the critics and KW (I'm kinda all over the place here) I also feel as epistrophy said a lot of jazz critics are unable to deal with music with jazz blended into the mix, without the jazz blinders on, I even have them myself a bit, but trying to look at things in the wider picture.

[danasgoodstuff]

he's the Leon Bridges of sax.

[cayetano]

People who know how to make a wiki page look good and such, please do so...it's not really something I know how to do. But geez, it seemed kinda to hear "why isn't Darius Jones" better known, and then, there not even be a wiki page for him. But what I've done is pretty basic, and not really "attractive", so, again, anybody who can fill it up and/or make it look better, have at it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darius_Jones_(Saxophone)

I'm trying to improve free jazz discographies on the wikipedia and I created some musician pages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Brown_(saxophonist)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandelis_Karayorgis

Darius Jones was on my list for next updates.

In progress now.

Edited September 28, 2015 by cayetano

[sjarrell]

Listening right now, for the first time- was asked by a kid that loves it if I'd heard it, and there you go. I know a pretty young, not particularly jazz-inclined person that loves it. That's alright.