WK: When Jazz and Rap Unite #317

Twelve tracks for the moment in March 2017 when the friend group’s rotation got specifically obsessed with the jazz-and-rap intersection — the sub-genre that lives between Pete Rock’s catalog and the post-J-Dilla beat-tape tradition and the contemporary producers like Phoniks who are quietly continuing that work. The shortest Weekend Kickoff of the year and the most narrowly-genre-committed.

Denitia and Sene “casanova.” opens. The duo’s catalog isn’t strictly jazz-rap — it’s alt-R&B with a chord vocabulary that comes from jazz — but the opening track is the right tone-setter for what the rotation is committing to. Domo Genesis with Anderson .Paak “Dapper” follows. The Odd Future alumnus’s solo work has been quietly excellent and the .Paak feature is the cut where the rap-and-live-band-soul intersection lands hardest.

Dag Savage with Aloe Blacc “When It Rains” is the third cut and the structural anchor of the rotation. Dag Savage is the duo of Exile (producer) and Johaz (rapper). Exile’s catalog goes back to the mid-aughts and his production is the kind of jazz-sampling boom-bap that defines what this whole tape is about. The Aloe Blacc feature gives the track the broader-audience reach that the duo’s solo work doesn’t quite have.

RAIZA BIZA “WASSUP” — the COLORS show version — is the cross-Atlantic pull. The Berlin-based New Zealand rapper isn’t really a jazz-rap artist but the COLORS performance has that specific minimalist-jazz-club aesthetic that fits the rotation’s tone, and her vocal style sits the same way Aloe Blacc’s does on the previous track. Dizzy Wright “Killem Wit Kindness” follows — Vegas underground-rap, deliberately gentle title for a deliberately confrontational track.

Holland Tunnel Project “Mr. Jazz” is the spoken-word-and-jazz wildcard. Alan Watts’s lectures get re-edited and re-released over instrumental beds and “Mr. Jazz” is one of the better versions. The arrangement is smoky in the literal sense — drums brushed, bass walked, saxophone breath audible in the mix. Watts’s cadence carries the entire piece and the production gets out of the way.

Jazz Liberatorz with Asheru “I am hip hop” is the French jazz-rap pull. The Liberatorz are a Paris-based trio who’ve been making this specific sub-genre for fifteen years and whose catalog the American working-rotation has criminally undervalued. Asheru’s catalog is similarly underrepresented in the streaming-era’s working-rotation — the rapper’s been making thoughtful underground-rap since the late ’90s and the cross-Atlantic collaboration is the kind of cut that the playlist’s whole methodology exists to surface.

Allan Kingdom “Believe” closes. The South African-born Minneapolis rapper had a moment in the mid-2010s and the catalog has been quietly working since. “Believe” is the cut that gives the playlist’s back-half the kind of forward-looking jazz-rap-into-electronic synthesis that the sub-genre’s contemporary edge has been moving toward. The placement at the closing slot is the right move — the track signals the next phase of the genre while still earning its spot inside the tape’s existing aesthetic.

Twelve tracks. About forty-five minutes. The right length for a late-Sunday-morning kitchen tape — the exact use case this was made for. The friend in the group chat who’s been into jazz-rap since the Native Tongues era texted me on the Sunday after I sent it with the message “played this twice while cooking, will play it again.” That’s the metric. He played it three times by the end of the day.

Single play-through, no repeats, then whatever the rest of the day was supposed to be. The shorter editions reward the focus that a longer rotation can’t quite manage. Every song in here earns its slot — there’s no filler, no working-utility tracks, no songs that exist just to bridge the energy between two structural anchors. Twelve cuts, sequenced for the listener who wants to think about every song rather than letting them blur into background. The methodology is the inverse of the long-form catalog tapes. Both are valid. This is the one for the morning.

The closing block on the rotation runs through a brief Sampha track and a Robert Glasper cut — the contemporary jazz-rap producers whose catalogs the streaming-era’s working-rotation has been working to surface. The placement is doing what the rotation’s whole methodology exists to do: bridge the underground-jazz-rap tradition and the broader audience that the genre deserves but doesn’t always reach. Played twice that Sunday. Friend texted at the end of the second playback to say he was making coffee and starting it again.