Review: Love Supreme - Is Jazz on the brink of its long awaited rebirth?
Wilf Amis · July 11 2017 · 05:00PM
Arriving home from Love Supreme last weekend, I was deeply impressed that I had seen something so vital, and so alive. After a long period of stagnation, has jazz finally reemerged as a strong force in youth culture?
Perhaps La La Land was inaccurate in the suggestion that jazz is dying, only in that jazz had already died. After the seventies’ shift into fusion and the avant garde, jazz died a death not by falling out of the public consciousness (record collectors and enthusiasts have not disappeared, I should know, my dad is one), but by hitting a dead end, wherein jazz musicians could only look backwards or go so left-field that there was little-to-no audience.
But Ryan Gosling’s desperate call that “it’s dying”, ironically, as a friend of mine pointed out, came in a film all about LA, the very city where Jazz has seen the greatest revitalisation of this century. The now two-year-old To Pimp A Butterfly, from potential GOAT candidate, Kendrick Lamar, undoubtedly became an instant Hip Hop classic; but it arguably did far more for jazz. Kendrick drafted in the brightest minds of LA’s Jazz scene –Terrace Martin, Thundercat, and Kamasi Washington – and brought them to the spotlight. Kamasi’s The Epic which followed TPAB by two months couldn’t have been better timed, and launched his name into a new echelon; The Epic was jazz’s most talked about and most critically acclaimed album of the time. The Guardian, Pitchfork and Rough Trade, all rated it in their top ten albums of 2015.
Hutchings also turns up on Black Focus, the debut album of duo Yussef Kamaal (Yussef Dayes, drums and Kamaal Williams, keys). Unfortunately, they split in May, so it was only Yussef who turned up at Love Supreme with a new keyboardist, a bassist/guitarist, and a trumpeter, none of whom older than their early twenties. It was incredible. Yussef went ham. He looked like a stocky footballer complete with Juventus away kit and the face of a player who had fought hard through a solid 70 minutes. He directed the music with erratic head movements and shouting, all whilst drumming with extraordinary energy, hitting hard and fast, but still tight and snappy, as if quantized. It was Hip Hop influenced to the core. The breakbeat drums like those sampled off funk and jazz fusion records, except ten times more badass. As their Bandcamp page explains: ‘The borders between London’s musical tribes have always been porous. For Yussef Kamaal, the sound of the capital – with its hum of jungle, grime and broken beat – has shaped a self-taught, UK-tipped approach to playing jazz. In the states, the genre’s long-running to-and-fro with hip hop – from Robert Glasper to Kamasi Washington – has reimagined it within US culture. On Black Focus, Yussef Kamaal frame jazz inside the bass-saturated, pirate radio broadcasts of London.’
It was at Love Supreme after all where, three years ago, I saw De La Soul, one of the foremost artists in the nineties trend of jazz rap; this was hip hop taking from jazz, literally sampling it. But in 2015, by getting in a live recording group, by using the current generation rather than sampling from dead people, Hip Hop – through Kendrick and others who followed his trend (Jay Z’s newly released 4:44, contains jazz influenced tracks such as “The Story of O.J.”) – gave back to Jazz.
An attempt to trace the trend would be this: we have seen nineties nostalgia grow and grow in recent years as nineties kids become the young people at the forefront of popular culture. With this came the resurge in the popularity of so-called Golden-age hip hop from the likes of J Dilla, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest which are characterised by frequent sampling from jazz. With jazz rap once more a sound in demand, and an LA jazz scene simmering close to the boil, Kendrick Lamar and his producers ignited a flame that has signalled the long awaited renaissance of Jazz.
When I went in 2013 and 2014, the crowd was that of stereotypical jazz fans - middle-aged and up (I even saw the head of maths from my old school). This year was another story: as we arrived on the train, my friends and I had turned from the youngest people there by decades, to some of the more mature faces around; there were floods of those just post A-Level and even younger. What a transition!
Arriving home from Love Supreme last weekend, I was deeply impressed that I had seen something so vital, and so alive. After a long period of stagnation, has jazz finally reemerged as a strong force in youth culture?
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| Herbie Hancock re-emerges for his encore at Love Supreme with a keytar, for his jazz-funk classic "Chameleon". |
Perhaps La La Land was inaccurate in the suggestion that jazz is dying, only in that jazz had already died. After the seventies’ shift into fusion and the avant garde, jazz died a death not by falling out of the public consciousness (record collectors and enthusiasts have not disappeared, I should know, my dad is one), but by hitting a dead end, wherein jazz musicians could only look backwards or go so left-field that there was little-to-no audience.
But Ryan Gosling’s desperate call that “it’s dying”, ironically, as a friend of mine pointed out, came in a film all about LA, the very city where Jazz has seen the greatest revitalisation of this century. The now two-year-old To Pimp A Butterfly, from potential GOAT candidate, Kendrick Lamar, undoubtedly became an instant Hip Hop classic; but it arguably did far more for jazz. Kendrick drafted in the brightest minds of LA’s Jazz scene –Terrace Martin, Thundercat, and Kamasi Washington – and brought them to the spotlight. Kamasi’s The Epic which followed TPAB by two months couldn’t have been better timed, and launched his name into a new echelon; The Epic was jazz’s most talked about and most critically acclaimed album of the time. The Guardian, Pitchfork and Rough Trade, all rated it in their top ten albums of 2015.
Kamasi Washington, then, was one of the bigger names at Love Supreme, and came through with an energetic performance from the main stage, giving his unique and almost religious sounding blend of be-bop and soulful vocals (from Patrice Quinn). Washington also brought out Miles Mosley (formerly bassist to Kendrick Lamar and Lauryn Hill), who took a solo that seemed to totally reimagine the double bass; playing whole chords with his bow, and running the mic signal through a wah-wah pedal at his foot.
Meanwhile in South London, something similar has been brewing. Mr Hutchings, the clarinet and sax teacher where I went to school (who ran a jazz band of sorts for my friends and I when I was in year 8 – it was open to everyone in the school but apparently only we were cool enough to show up) has been coming up gradually in the London jazz scene, but (arguably since TPAB) this new wave of jazz enthusiasm has meant quitting his day job to constantly tour. This is Shabaka Hutchings. Shabaka played three times on the Saturday of Love Supreme, with his three different projects: Shabaka and the Ancestors, Sons of Kemet, and The Comet is Coming. The former was my personal favourite, afro-futurism at its most alive, it was at once angry and joyous; anger directed very literally in a powerful speech by vocalist Siyabonga Mthembu at the continued celebration of imperialism, at male dominance, and at the neglect of the poor that led to the Grenfell fire, but joyous at the possibility of a future without these things, the possibility of “the burning of the republic of the mind”, meaning, I think, burning away our social conditioning (the prejudices we are taught in youth). Next we had Sons of Kemet, essentially acoustic house music, it was high energy, danceable, drum-led (there were two drummers) and powered by Theon Cross’s bunchy Tuba basslines but still laced with Hutchings’s well spun tenor sax melodies. Finally, the Mercury nominated The Comet is Coming, a trio of synth, drums, sax. This was darker, more electronic, it existed somewhere between Aphex Twin and Sun Ra, but also somewhere left of anything familiar sounding.
Houston born Robert Glasper, too, was there. Glasper, though a Jazz musician by training and trade, has worked extensively with the likes of Bilal, Mos Def, Erykah Badu, J Dilla, and upon the breakup of Destiny’s Child was called on to lead the band for Beyoncé’s new solo career as a Neo-Soul singer, though the PR people made a last minute U-turn, deciding to create the world’s biggest pop star. Recently, Glasper was yet another of the talents drafted in to the To Pimp A Butterfly team, as well as being the musical director for Miles Ahead, Don Cheadle’s Miles Davis biopic. Robert Glasper names two of his biggest influences as Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis for their willingness to go with the times. Davis began playing be-bop under Charlie Parker, before defining modal jazz, popularising fusion, and finally creating his final studio album, Doo-Bop (1992), a Hip Hop album. Hancock (one of few legends of an older generation, still alive and playing) has moved through be-bop, modal jazz, fusion, funk, and now finds himself collaborating with FlyLo and Thundercat. In fact, Hancock was headlining on the Saturday, and was one of the stand out performances of the festival. Notably his band included To Pimp A Butterfly’s Terrace Martin.
Glasper really showed his range and willingness to push jazz forwards at Love Supreme. There were moments of introspective jazz piano on its own – something that sounded dark and almost Scriabin-esque, there was a jazz cover of a J Dilla beat, and likewise of Kendrick Lamar’s “How Much A Dollar Cost” which became a returning theme central to the set – but in Glasper’s version, the drummer took an extravagant solo in the place of the usual rap, and when a sung part came in (‘I wash my hands, I said my grace/ What more do you want from me?/ Tears of a clown…’) it was truly pushing jazz towards the current Hip Hop trends; the vocals were soaked in auto-tune and reverb. Indeed, the vocals were like this throughout, with improvised lyrics quoting relevantly from Coltrane’s chant “A love supreme”, and providing a uniquely brilliant take on universal crowd pleasers “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Roxanne”.
Glasper really showed his range and willingness to push jazz forwards at Love Supreme. There were moments of introspective jazz piano on its own – something that sounded dark and almost Scriabin-esque, there was a jazz cover of a J Dilla beat, and likewise of Kendrick Lamar’s “How Much A Dollar Cost” which became a returning theme central to the set – but in Glasper’s version, the drummer took an extravagant solo in the place of the usual rap, and when a sung part came in (‘I wash my hands, I said my grace/ What more do you want from me?/ Tears of a clown…’) it was truly pushing jazz towards the current Hip Hop trends; the vocals were soaked in auto-tune and reverb. Indeed, the vocals were like this throughout, with improvised lyrics quoting relevantly from Coltrane’s chant “A love supreme”, and providing a uniquely brilliant take on universal crowd pleasers “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Roxanne”.
Meanwhile in South London, something similar has been brewing. Mr Hutchings, the clarinet and sax teacher where I went to school (who ran a jazz band of sorts for my friends and I when I was in year 8 – it was open to everyone in the school but apparently only we were cool enough to show up) has been coming up gradually in the London jazz scene, but (arguably since TPAB) this new wave of jazz enthusiasm has meant quitting his day job to constantly tour. This is Shabaka Hutchings. Shabaka played three times on the Saturday of Love Supreme, with his three different projects: Shabaka and the Ancestors, Sons of Kemet, and The Comet is Coming. The former was my personal favourite, afro-futurism at its most alive, it was at once angry and joyous; anger directed very literally in a powerful speech by vocalist Siyabonga Mthembu at the continued celebration of imperialism, at male dominance, and at the neglect of the poor that led to the Grenfell fire, but joyous at the possibility of a future without these things, the possibility of “the burning of the republic of the mind”, meaning, I think, burning away our social conditioning (the prejudices we are taught in youth). Next we had Sons of Kemet, essentially acoustic house music, it was high energy, danceable, drum-led (there were two drummers) and powered by Theon Cross’s bunchy Tuba basslines but still laced with Hutchings’s well spun tenor sax melodies. Finally, the Mercury nominated The Comet is Coming, a trio of synth, drums, sax. This was darker, more electronic, it existed somewhere between Aphex Twin and Sun Ra, but also somewhere left of anything familiar sounding.
Hutchings also turns up on Black Focus, the debut album of duo Yussef Kamaal (Yussef Dayes, drums and Kamaal Williams, keys). Unfortunately, they split in May, so it was only Yussef who turned up at Love Supreme with a new keyboardist, a bassist/guitarist, and a trumpeter, none of whom older than their early twenties. It was incredible. Yussef went ham. He looked like a stocky footballer complete with Juventus away kit and the face of a player who had fought hard through a solid 70 minutes. He directed the music with erratic head movements and shouting, all whilst drumming with extraordinary energy, hitting hard and fast, but still tight and snappy, as if quantized. It was Hip Hop influenced to the core. The breakbeat drums like those sampled off funk and jazz fusion records, except ten times more badass. As their Bandcamp page explains: ‘The borders between London’s musical tribes have always been porous. For Yussef Kamaal, the sound of the capital – with its hum of jungle, grime and broken beat – has shaped a self-taught, UK-tipped approach to playing jazz. In the states, the genre’s long-running to-and-fro with hip hop – from Robert Glasper to Kamasi Washington – has reimagined it within US culture. On Black Focus, Yussef Kamaal frame jazz inside the bass-saturated, pirate radio broadcasts of London.’It was at Love Supreme after all where, three years ago, I saw De La Soul, one of the foremost artists in the nineties trend of jazz rap; this was hip hop taking from jazz, literally sampling it. But in 2015, by getting in a live recording group, by using the current generation rather than sampling from dead people, Hip Hop – through Kendrick and others who followed his trend (Jay Z’s newly released 4:44, contains jazz influenced tracks such as “The Story of O.J.”) – gave back to Jazz.
An attempt to trace the trend would be this: we have seen nineties nostalgia grow and grow in recent years as nineties kids become the young people at the forefront of popular culture. With this came the resurge in the popularity of so-called Golden-age hip hop from the likes of J Dilla, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest which are characterised by frequent sampling from jazz. With jazz rap once more a sound in demand, and an LA jazz scene simmering close to the boil, Kendrick Lamar and his producers ignited a flame that has signalled the long awaited renaissance of Jazz.
When I went in 2013 and 2014, the crowd was that of stereotypical jazz fans - middle-aged and up (I even saw the head of maths from my old school). This year was another story: as we arrived on the train, my friends and I had turned from the youngest people there by decades, to some of the more mature faces around; there were floods of those just post A-Level and even younger. What a transition!
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