Jazz Rap

By Matt Parish

Developing in the late ‘80s and into the ‘90s, the genre known as “jazz rap” in some circles operated in a vague opposition to harder-edged gangsta rap styles coming of age at the same time. Spearheaded by Gang Starr and Stetsasonic on their respective songs “Words I Manifest” (sampling Charlie Parker) and “Talkin’ All That

Jazz” (sampling Lonnie Liston Smith) and followed by the Native Tongues Posse collective of New York groups A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul and Jungle Brothers, the movement made obsessive use of eclectic samples lifted from jazz records to create new moods and historically-minded grooves for their songs. Groups in this genre typically approached lyric writing with a more intellectual bent, rhyming about domestic problems and Afrocentric political ideas. Though the groups never achieved a large amount of street popularity, they became some of hip-hop’s earliest darlings among mainstream music critics and college campuses. Artists to follow in this aesthetic later were US3 and Digable Planets, with Guru attempting a more in-depth exploration of the concept with his Jazzmatazz series of albums, which finally began pairing rappers with live jazz musicians in 2000 (a feat also attempted by several jazz musicians, including Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis on their own albums). The genre has arguably disseminated itself so much throughout hip-hop that the open-minded sampling aesthetic has become a defining characteristic of hip-hop in general.