VMP Magazine

If there was ever a band that, to borrow a phrase from Walt Whitman, contained multitudes, it’s the Grateful Dead. The vast sea changes that occurred album-to-album, studio-to-concert, and even concert-to-concert make most other musical entities, and even some scenes and genres, seem stagnant, unimaginative, and overcommitted to singular ethoses. In the 30 years between the band’s first performance at one of Ken Kesey’s acid tests in 1965 to guitarist/singer Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995, they truly ran the gamut. The Dead began as a folk/blues jug band, quickly became San Francisco’s premier improvisational psychedelic rock act, then went on to incorporate elements of country, jazz, prog, and even disco into their sound over the years, giving birth to and cementing the idea of a “jam band” in the process.

Back when A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip was a teenager, the legend goes, his father overheard him playing some hip-hop and said it reminded him of bebop. That connection, drawn in the opening seconds of Tribe’s 1991 album The Low End Theory, at first seems a little odd. Musically, late ’80s rap and mid-’40s jazz have very little in common, the former defined by 4/4 rhythms and looped melodies, the latter by its “anything goes” approach to rhythmic structure and melodic composition. But if you look at each genre as a cultural movement, paying particular attention to the backlash each initially received, hip-hop and bebop share more parallels than you’d expect.

Both genres succeeded in infuriating the majority of the preceding generation, usually a sure sign of their cultural importance. Sure enough, jazz and hip-hop have both stood the test of time, and as is also nearly inevitable for two genres that have been around more than 20 years, commingled in extraordinary ways. Tribe’s Low End Theory kicked off a very fertile era of jazz-influenced hip-hop, with artists on both coasts coming to treat Roy Ayers and Art Blakey records with the same reverence that producers viewed James Brown and the Incredible Bongo Band’s drum breaks 10 years prior.

Twenty-five years (almost to the day) after The Low End Theory’s release, jazz rap’s heyday has come and gone, but a new era seems to be dawning in all corners of the genre. Today, there’s a weekly club night in L.A. called “The Low End Theory” that’s the epicenter of a jazz/electronic/hip-hop melting pot, jazz bands cover hip-hop tracks, and mainstream rappers regularly recruit horn players for their albums. On this cusp of an exciting era of cross-pollination, we take a look back at 10 jazz rap fusion attempts that are must-haves in your vinyl collection if you’re a fan of either hip-hop or jazz.

In Spring 1968, a 19-year-old Todd Rundgren wrote his first two original songs, “Hello It’s Me” and “Open My Eyes,” for his band Nazz. If he had stopped there, he would’ve already had enough material to alter the fabric of 20th Century popular music. “Hello It’s Me” has since been covered by the Isley Brothers, Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu, and John Legend, the latter of whom called it his favorite song of all time; “Open My Eyes” was far less of a commercial success, but included on the hugely influential 1972 compilation, Nuggets, it became part of punk rock’s foundational bedrock.

“As hip hop… blossomed into the radiant center of youth culture, a lot of white kids found in it a way to flee their own orderly world by discovering a sexier, more provocative one.”

If you were to play a Kevin Bacon-style five degrees of separation game with rock music in the late ’60s and early ’70s, you’d be hard-pressed to find a band that topped Crosby, Stills & Nash’s number of connections. Whether playing together in a separate band, accompanying other artists as session players or calling on others to do the same for them, these three collaborated with guitar wizards like Mike Bloomfield, Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix; iconic singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Rita Coolidge and Chris Hillman; and various members of The Grateful Dead, The Mamas & The Papas, Jefferson Airplane and The Beatles. Only The Band’s guest-heavy Last Waltz comes close to matching the sheer star power at the center of CSN’s collective Venn diagram.

The world lost Arthur Russell 25 years ago, at a time when very few outside of New York City had ever heard of him. The most revolutionary cellist of all time, Russell was a many-armed Shiva whose reach extended from avant-garde composition to disco, from new wave to folk, before he tragically lost his life to AIDS in 1992.

This was a guy who hung out with Philip Glass, provided accompaniment on Allen Ginsberg’s spoken word recordings, played cello on a B-side version of Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer,” lit up disco clubs with legendary DJ Walter Gibbons, and even produced hip hop beats for a pre-stardom Vin Diesel.

Russell’s restlessness also extended to his inability to complete songs-- despite leaving behind thousands of unreleased tapes, he only released one solo album in his lifetime. Thankfully, some of Russell’s friends founded a label, Audika Records, around 15 years ago, and ushered in a new era of notoriety for him with several posthumous compilations. Across these scattered, numerous releases, multiple versions of songs appear, making Russell’s art seem even more elusive and playful. Here, we’ve rounded up five essential releases to give a brief overview of his substantial oeuvre.