Clock Ticking in The Breeze of Time

“Suspense In The Grip of Suspense” is a tune off the new Damon Locks & Rob Mazurek album New Future City Radio and it’s a phrase that captures my feelings about the burgeoning modern Jazz scene blossoming around the world currently. The music is filled with excitement and suspense. You never know what’s going to happen next. Much like many styles of music that go through ebbs and flows of change and promising talent, right now is an amazing time to be a listener of these sounds as we hang on to the edge of our seat and listen intently to all the glorious sounds being produced.

Earlier this year at the Yesler Community Center in the Central District of Seattle, Washington Kassa Overall held open rehearsal sessions with his band. Preparing to unleash his Warp Records debut and grind out the rest of the year on the road, it was a beautiful way to give back to the town that raised him and simultaneously add to the rich music history of the neighborhood.

Kassa has been cultivating a fresh perspective sonically for some time now. I remember seeing him hit the Neumos stage with Jarv Dee and being slightly curious who he was. His flow wasn’t quite as dialed in as the rest of the Cloud Nice crew but he had the swagger that demanded he be taken seriously. Little did I know he was a homie doing a solid for his friends and that his talents on the stage were far more varied.

Having jettisoned Seattle after high school for NYC and music school, Kassa has been steadily cultivating a resume on the Jazz circuit, sitting in, jamming and building relationships. Forever a hiphop head at heart he wasn’t content to rehash the classic stylings. He can lay in the cut and hold a steady rhythm or get free if that’s what the bill is asking for, but with the release of Animals we are seeing a culmination of groundwork laid over the course of his previous two albums.

Damon Locks and Rob Mazurek have been friends and collaborators for the better part of three decades. Shared sonic interests, mixed medium artistry and the windy city brought them together in different orientations, with more players in the mix. As a duo on New Future City Radio they unleash upon us a maelstrom of aggressive sounds, created out of the fabric of hiphop production and improvisation, presented with a culturally adept ear. 

Designed as a mixtape, tracks feature spoken word snippets, dramatic shifts in rhythm, wandering horn riffs and tranced out ambiance, all unfolding as though you were tuned into a pirate radio station broadcasting from a hole in the wall Tokyo jazz joint if it were teleported to the Bronx in the 80s. Damon delivers his edicts with precision, speaking of a crumbling society whose only hope is art and its people. Mazurek smashes away on his samplers and blows his horn aiding in the urgency and frustration.

I was listening to The Low End Theory one evening after work recently and was reminiscing about my first time hearing the record. I was too young, my ears weren’t educated, I didn’t get what I was hearing. At that point Jazz hadn’t crossed their threshold. And while I dug De La, I was far more enthused by DMX and Jay-Z. I remember specifically shrugging my shoulders and thinking that the Tribe classic was overrated. Such is the way of a teenager learning about rap via the internet on the Oregon coast. I kept digging.

Hiphop started out with bands covering disco tunes, then samplers let kids raid their parents' record collection and soon chops, loops and reimaginings were the norm. But now, at 50 years old and a generation of kids whose parents had rap records in their iTunes mixed in with anything else that might have caught their ear, what are we getting? Records like Animals and New Future City Radio.

There are a few points of intersection prior to Low End but it’s a pretty precise moment of the two genres taking shape together. From Ron Carter’s bass lines to Tip’s diggin’ prowess, the scene is set and while the music went other ways first it’s coming full circle thanks to artists like Kassa, Damon and Rob.

Animals features gnarly hard bass and spastic sonic freakouts in line with anything you would hear on an Art Ensemble of Chicago album. It also is home to some honest and vulnerable bars from Kassa himself along with Danny Brown, Lil B, Wiki and Ish. The evolution is real and it’s being broadcast wide across any platform that can be tapped into. Just to get a rep.

Kassa’s mom sat in the audience at the Yesler Community Center, they traded some jokes and their connection felt genuine as revealed by the smile on her face watching her son share his gifts in such an intimate way. He shared some stories of his childhood that offered glimpses into how his amalgamation of musical ideas were born. He directed his band with presence, not a hard taskmaster but with enough guidance to allow his compositions to come to life. It was the first time they had, as a group, worked out these tunes for live presentation.

Live instrumentation, Jazz, beats, electronics - an auditory stew. Is this the nature of our hyper connected world and the depths of which we can explore at the tap of a screen? Maybe it’s a natural expansion of the ideas put forth by Tribe, Dilla, The Roots and many more. A new sound, that isn’t all that new. A continued merging and destruction of genre is present throughout both Animals and New Future City Radio.

When I first heard Animals I was struck by memories of when I first listened to Flying Lotus. Kassa constructs a beautiful balance of his classic skills with the boom bap energy. And then he sprinkles in healthy portions of experimentation and soul. Just as he uses his drums and electronics to cook up his audio dope, he also feels like a painter with his guest selection, sprinkling them in at just the right moments. Vjay Iyer near the end for a beautiful and melancholy track, hard hitting raps from Danny Brown and Wiki on the off kilter “Clock Ticking.” Soaring harmonies from Francis and the Lights throughout. So much to dig into here. 

New Future City Radio is noisy and invigorating. The way they jump from one idea to the next, with hard transitions, one minute it’s in your face aggressive beats and the next it’s static and wild cornet squeals. Found sounds layered underneath almost everything convey the idea that this is music from the people for the people. And through all this there is beauty and a release of energy that can’t be denied. “Droids” is a crazy example of this as it packs so much into just 138 seconds. The pulse of the album is never delayed even when things take a turn for the mellow.

I picture Ram Dass guiding us to nirvana with “Twilight Shimmer” flowing in the background. I can envision “The Sun Returns” on a volume of Special Herbs & Spices. I can see Kassa and company taking the stage with Damon & Rob as an altered Exploding Star Orchestra lineup. Neither project might be the ideal soundtrack to pending college house parties, but they both capture the spirit of youthful adventures, collaging sonic frequencies; speaking of love, political action, fearful governmental action and unity amongst like minded individuals.

The cyclical nature of life may be an easy explanation of this alignment of Jazz and hiphop. Perhaps I’m overly excited about something that was destined to happen. One could argue it’s nothing new. But there is something new in these two records. And in much of what has been dropping from around the world under the pretense of “modern jazz.” I like to call it social music. It’s music that is vast and deep. Music that can move your ass if you free your mind. Music that has depth and weight, via all the modern technology but also a comprehension of the basics, the history and the future. These albums hit with urgency and intensity. Playfulness and seriousness.