Why you Should Rethink Musical Genre

I want you to take a moment to consider- what comes to mind when you hear the word jazz?

I suspect the answer is the traditional idea of the club jazz band- a horn player, upright bass player, drummer, and pianist in a smoky club, playing difficult music for very sophisticated people drinking cocktails and murmuring “mmm, yes indeed,” while scratching their chin quizzically.

The resulting impression is that of an inaccessible style of music, meant for fancy people to feel fancy. A genre that you’re just too stupid as a regular person to ever truly understand, appreciate, or enjoy. A genre meant for musicians to pat themselves on the back, show off with 20-minute solos, and say “look how smart we are and how good we are at our instruments.”

What do you hear when you think of jazz?

Perhaps you hear something like this:

Or maybe you even hear something like this:

The latter example is grating, schizophrenic, incomprehensible, and anxiety-inducing. The former example is much more listenable, but feels dated (and rightly so because it’s from 1964), and still hard to grasp onto in any meaningful way. A mood is created, but the musicians are playing complex flurries of notes and rhythms, at times seemingly at odds with each other, utilizing melodies and harmonies that feel so foreign that they are devoid of any emotional impression aside from merely emanating the vibe of smooth jazz band.

England’s Yung Guns

But what about something like this?

Now, this is just one example I chose from the very diverse group of current young jazz musicians. If it’s still not to your liking, that’s okay, because my point is not to dictate to you that old jazz is dumb but new jazz is cool and you should like it. Even that phrase new jazz is misleading, because there are of course musicians alive today who are writing and performing music that sounds very much like the jazz of 1964. My point is moreso to encourage you to think critically about your preconceptions of musical genre, any genre. In this case I’m using jazz to illustrate the point because I believe it is a perfect example of how basic assumptions of style and genre can close doors in a listener’s mind, potentially depriving them of discovering something that could very well become their new favorite kind of music, their new favorite artist or album, etc.

How about some more examples?

Those last two examples might have sounded a bit similar, and that’s because they share a common musician- the horn player Shabaka Hutchings. Shabaka is one of the most prominent figures today in a scene that is exploding specifically around the UK in cities like London and Bristol. For whatever reason, there is a very fresh style of jazz coming from this region in droves, pioneered by talented young musicians who are forcefully reclaiming the genre and updating it for today.

Here’s a recent clip of Shabaka in action, playing with Sons of Kemet, one of his many bands:

What’s so exciting about this new scene is that they are taking the elements of traditional jazz that actually have some value- the precision, the coordination between band members, the free spirit of exploration and inventiveness- while foregoing the elements that turn off the typical listener of 2022: the pretentiousness, virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake, suits and ties and cocktails, difficult-to-parse melody and harmony, 10-minute long solos, etc. So much has happened in music since the 1950’s when traditional jazz was taking shape, and these musicians are taking advantage of that fact and borrowing influences from modern rock, hip-hop, and sample-based music. In fact, one of the drummers from Sons of Kemet recently joined with Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead to form a band called The Smile, further blurring the line between jazz, alternative rock, hip-hop, and experimental music.

Drop Anchor

Let’s listen to a few more examples from this scene, and begin to look at how exactly these styles are combined, and how the end result is music made up of a traditional jazz band lineup, but sounds nothing like a traditional jazz band. The following are all examples from the band Corto.Alto, from their album Not For Now:

So why does this music feel more modern and accessible than traditional jazz? I believe it all comes down to having anchors. What do I mean by that? Well, when listening to something, we usually like to hear something we understand and which gives our ear something to hold onto, some bit of melody or rhythm that makes sense to us, conveys emotion in a way that is at least somewhat familiar to us, and which drives the song in a way that we can easily remember.

I think this new kind of jazz employs three main anchors which set it apart from the difficulty of listening to traditional jazz, and which make it so exciting and more broadly appealing. Namely- groovy hip-hop/sampled-sounding drums, hummable melodies, and repetition.

Pa Rum Pum Pum Pum

Firstly, the drums. Now, to be clear, there is some really cool drum work going on in a lot of traditional jazz songs, but for the most part, older jazz drummers played a somewhat safe, predictable kind of shuffle meant to stay out of the way and let soloists like the horn player (typically the leader of the band) be the real center of attention. In this new style of jazz, there is no such hierarchy. The drums are aggressive and in your face and drive the whole song. They serve a purpose much like drums in a hip-hop track, to really emphasize the beat and get you grooving. Indeed many of the drum ideas from Corto.Alto sound just like the thumping breakbeats of a modern hip-hop track, such as this one from Tyler the Creator:

In much of this new jazz you can even hear moments when the drummer is imitating the sound of sampled drums. What are sampled drums? Well, a lot of hip-hop tracks with drums that sound like this were not actually recorded live in a studio by a real drummer for that given hip-hop track. They were instead bits of drum parts and drum sounds from old jazz records, which hip-hop artists ripped from their record players and chopped up and spliced together to form the beat for their hip-hop track. This allowed cool things to happen like suddenly repeating a specific beat or two, which could make these drums (which at one point in time were played by a real drummer) sound robotic and mathematic in a way that further emphasized the driving beat and/or add a fun surprising moment to the track.

In this way, these new jazz drummers are utilizing the precision and virtuosity of a traditional jazz drummer in order to play beats that at times sound unnatural, like a sampled drum part would.

Whistle While You Work

The second anchor has to do with melody. Traditional jazz songs can and often do have some recognizable and readily-understandable melody, but they are usually brief and take a back seat to long, complex improvisational solos. These new UK jazz musicians are instead creating arrangements that are more like a pop track- melodies arrive and change in familiar structures not unlike a verse, chorus, bridge, etc. from any given piece of popular music. In addition to this familiar structure, the melodies themselves are written in a way that doesn’t contradict the harmony like a traditional jazz melody might.

What do I mean by this? Well, typically a piece of popular music moves through a series of chords, and all of these chords are within a certain scale, or specific set of notes derived from the larger set of all-possible notes. Melodies in popular music will usually also adhere to the rules of which specific set of notes are used in a song, so that they do not clash in dissonant ways with the chords being played underneath. Traditional jazz melodies frequently employ the use of what are called tensions, which are simply notes that do NOT follow these rules, and which intentionally clash with the chords being played, or are not derived from the set of notes that we expect to hear. The result is often a melody that is hard to grasp onto, hard to hum, hard to remember, and which does not trigger emotion in a way that popular music melodies do.

In popular music, emotions are readily triggered in us because we have heard so much of this music that our brains associate certain chords, groups of notes, and thus melodies, with certain emotions (the whole…minor=sad, major=happy, thing). Traditional jazz often foregoes these familiar structures and groupings of notes, and thus our brains don’t know what to feel, so they feel nothing. This new jazz is more inclined to keep melodies, chords, and their relationship to each other, within a more predictable and familiar ruleset, which allows our brains to more easily connect to the music and feel some kind of way.

One Two Three Four One Two Three Four

The last anchor I want to talk about is repetition. Building off of what I just described about traditional jazz structure (brief melodies surrounded by long unpredictable solos), a lot of new jazz instead presents a melody or idea, and repeats it over and over again, or changes it very slightly, developing it over the course of an entire track. Rather than break off into unpredictable solos, we hear a melody that we can latch onto which is further anchored in our brain by way of this repetition. Many of the examples I’ve shared employ this technique, and I’ll repost the full track of one such example here:

What are we hearing? A very simple melody made up of not-too-many notes, which adheres to the rules of the associated chords, played over and over again in a structure much like a pop track, where the saxophone is acting almost exactly like a pop singer would. Various elements are changed and gradually built-up around this, which is what prevents this repetition from getting…well…repetitive. Eventually the melody shifts up to a higher octave which adds a new layer of excitement to the track, while still being familiar and something we can hum along to even if we’re hearing the track for the first time.

Ergo, Vis a Vis, Concordantly…Don’t Trust Genre

I’d like to reiterate, while I’ve just finished taking you on a bit of a deep dive into the weeds of this very specific kind of music, this kind of thing happens across all genres. Genre exists as a way for streaming services and for us as individuals to be able to organize our libraries in some way. It makes sense- of course we need some way to be able to put things into categories so that we can quickly recall them later and distinguish one song from another. But I would encourage you to think of genre as only that- an organizational tool that comes after the music rather than something which defines the music itself.

As I’ve described, new UK jazz in fact borrows major elements from many, many genres, while simultaneously being VERY different from the first things that might come up on Spotify if you just search “jazz.” Still, these things have to be put into some box within these services, and so the flawed nature of this organizational system becomes evident, and we call this new music “jazz” as well.

I don’t have a solution to this organizational problem, just a word of warning to not let it dictate your expectations or make you think about music in distinct separate boxes the way that your Spotify library does.

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