Jazz Rap
| Jazz rap | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins | |
| Cultural origins | Late 1980s, North America and United Kingdom |
| Typical instruments | |
| Derivative forms | |
Jazz rap is a fusion subgenre of hip hop music and jazz, developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. AllMusic writes that the genre "was an attempt to fuse African-American music of the past with a newly dominant form of the present, paying tribute to and reinvigorating the former while expanding the horizons of the latter". Musically, the rhythms have been typically those of hip hop rather than jazz, over which are placed repetitive phrases of jazz instrumentation: trumpet, double bass, etc. Lyrics are often based on political consciousness, Afrocentrism, and general positivism.A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Dream Warriors, and Digable Planets are pioneers of the jazz rap genre.
(2nd ed. London: Rough Guides, 2005) lists Louis Armstrong's 1925 recording of "Heebie Jeebies" in his timeline of hip hop. In the 1970s, The Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron, and The Watts Prophets placed spoken word and rhymed poetry over jazzy backing tracks. There are also parallels between jazz and the improvised phrasings of freestyle rap. Despite these disparate threads, jazz rap did not coalesce as a genre until the late 1980s.
In 1985, jazz fusion band Cargo, led by Mike Carr, released the single "Jazz Rap", appearing on the album Jazz Rap, Volume One [1]. In 1988, Gang Starr released the debut single "Words I Manifest", sampling Dizzy Gillespie's 1952 "Night in Tunisia", and Stetsasonic released "Talkin' All That Jazz", sampling Lonnie Liston Smith. Gang Starr's debut LP, No More Mr. Nice Guy (Wild Pitch, 1989), and their track "Jazz Thing" (CBS, 1990) for the soundtrack of Mo' Better Blues, further popularized the jazz rap style.
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