VMP Magazine

Earl Sweatshirt first emerged with Odd Future, the Los Angeles-based rap crew with dark beats and irreverent humor that spoke to the souls of maladjusted teens. Featuring would-be superstars Frank Ocean, Syd and Tyler, The Creator, Earl stood out largely because he wasn’t around. In 2010, right as Odd Future became popular, his mother learned of his music and drug use and shipped him to a boarding school in Samoa. His being out of sight made him a cult figure; messages of “FREE EARL” arose across the internet, which only heightened the pressure on him to be special. He wasn’t prepared for it. As he told me for an Entertainment Weekly profile, “Not only was I young, but I also missed the natural ascension and information that you pick up on the way up.” There wasn’t a road to greatness for Earl. He didn’t have to work out his material at open mics and clamor for notoriety. By the time he got back to L.A. a year later, he was already a superstar, but didn’t have the maturity to handle it. He had to learn on the fly, in public, with hoards of fans studying his every move.

Ornette Coleman made his intentions clear right away: The alto saxophonist wasn’t looking to just get along in jazz, he wanted to overhaul the genre, moving it from straightforward chordal progressions to a strain with a less adhered-to structure. Even as his debut album, 1958’s Something Else!!!!, harbored the tenets of bebop, Coleman’s iconoclasm was evident. Through piercing horn blasts and peculiar rhythmic arrangements, thanks in part to an all-star team of players that included Don Cherry on cornet and Billy Higgins on drums, Something Else!!!! gave rise to a dissenting voice in jazz, one who would challenge what the music could — and would — entail. 

Of all the potential knockout moments on A Tribe Called Quest’s sophomore album, The Low End Theory, the haymaker lands about 30 minutes in on “Check The Rhime,” the LP’s lead single. “Industry rule number four thousand and eighty,” the rapper Q-Tip declares, “record company people are shady.” Though Tribe had only one album to their credit, 1990’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, the group quickly became popular behind the tracks “Bonita Applebum,” “Can I Kick It?” and “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo,” which all conveyed the band’s fondness of esoteric jazz, folk and psychedelic R&B. The blend felt equally familiar and distant, a gentle mix of adolescent naivety that appealed to old souls and skater kids all the same. Still, they had already grown tired of the nonsense: the dishonest executives, the empty promises of fame and fortune, the hangers-on who get off on proximity to coolness. So when he delivers the line, with the beat dropped out for added emphasis, you feel a year’s worth of irritation coming to the surface. The line was written amid tense dealings with their label, Jive Records, and their own changes in management. Mired in roadblocks and short on money, the band channeled their anger into the music; the resulting song and album are bona fide classics.

Over the past decade, Robert Glasper has sought to defy genre through his Black Radio album series, which blurred the lines between jazz, R&B and experimental music. The blend was an immediate hit: Following his more straightforward jazz aesthetic, Black Radio was a best-of-both-worlds project on which singers like Bilal and Erykah Badu could harmonize atop Glasper’s mix of vast electronic orchestration. It wasn’t quite jazz and it wasn’t quite R&B; that you couldn’t quite describe it made it even more enticing. Black Radio won the Grammy for Best R&B Album. Its successor, Black Radio 2, won a Grammy for Best Traditional R&B Performance — for a remake of Stevie Wonder’s “Jesus Children of America” — in 2015.

Herbie Hancock was always meant to be a star. Sure that’s easy to say now, but he played Mozart’s D Major Piano Concerto—with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra—when he was just 11. He was a prodigy, partly by his mother’s doing. She “wanted to make sure that her children had ‘culture,’” Hancock once told the National Endowment for the Arts. “For her, culture in terms of music was classical music, not jazz, not rhythm-and-blues.” He became interested in jazz at the age of 14 when he saw a classmate do things on the piano he didn’t think was possible. “He improvised on my instrument,” Hancock said of the experience. “Piano was my instrument [and I saw] a guy my age doing something that I couldn’t do.” A curious soul, he started practicing with the boy, who introduced him to the music of British pianist George Shearing. Hancock was hooked. He went home and dusted off some old Shearing 78s: “I put them on and I heard that sound that my friend at school was playing. So that was the beginning.”

By the mid-1970s, disco was ubiquitous. It was on TV dance shows like Soul Train and the sweat-soaked dancefloors of Studio 54. The music seemed to touch everyone from Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder, to Earth, Wind & Fire, and Diana Ross; even the most celebrated purveyors of funk and soul experimented with disco’s four-on-the-floor beat, undulating basslines, and rhythmic guitar chords. The groove caught the pianist and bandleader Herbie Hancock as well. By the late ’70s, on Sunlight opener “I Thought It Was You,” and throughout 1979’s aptly titled Feets Don’t Fail Me Now, the jazz titan had all but given up his known genre, and walked head-on into disco and other forms of electronic dance music. For those who’d been following Herbie — from the early ’60s as a pianist in the Miles Davis Quintet, to the early ’70s as leader of The Headhunters band — the move wasn’t surprising. Some 20 records into his solo career, Herbie was still exploring, still blending genres in hopes of creating new ones. Ever the innovator, he wouldn’t stay in one place for long.