{"id":1177,"date":"2011-07-04T01:07:18","date_gmt":"2011-07-04T01:07:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arpjournal.com\/?p=1177"},"modified":"2012-05-28T05:11:08","modified_gmt":"2012-05-28T05:11:08","slug":"jazzhip-hop-hybridities-and-the-recording-studio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.arpjournal.com\/asarpwp\/jazzhip-hop-hybridities-and-the-recording-studio\/","title":{"rendered":"Jazz\/Hip-Hop Hybridities and the Recording Studio"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In his book on the history of hipness, John Leland states that \u2018American pop culture begins in the mongrel, not the Platonic\u2019 (2005, p. 133)1<\/sup>. Jazz, broadly defined, provides one of the most fruitful case studies of this \u2018mongrelisation\u2019, creolization or hybridity of musical styles2<\/sup>. The following essay begins to address the nuances involved in popular music hybridity by looking at some of the myriad ways that we can investigate hybridty in music\u2014not only through the analysis of musical material, but also the analysis of staging through studio techniques as well as extra-musical discourses surrounding genre.<\/p>\n

Despite divergent approaches to discovering music through the internet, genre is still very much with us; it is the primary means of categorization in record stores, both physical and digital (e.g. allmusic.com). As Simon Frith once noted, genre is one of the two primary ways that the music industry keeps control of unreliable demand (creating \u2018stars\u2019 is the other; See Frith, 2001, p. 35). As Bruce Horner has observed, it is clear that music \u2018bin categories\u2019 are insufficient for describing music, yet in exercises with students, genre categories are always a substantial part of the adjectives used in music descriptions (Horner 1999, p. 23). Genre affects how we think, create, and talk about music (consciously or unconsciously), even when we use it as a site of resistance. Genre can be politicized, parodized or signified upon, for example, in the relatively recent phenomenon of \u2018mash-ups\u2019, which use pre-existing material that at once maintains a structural integrity and creates a third space greater than the sum of its two parts (and the mash-up\u2019s other name, \u2018bastard pop\u2019 is important in light of hybridity and creolization). Most importantly for this study, mash-ups \u2018work\u2019 because they often play with notions of genre in overt ways; understanding of a given mash-up hinges on either artist or group recognizability, or genre recognisability (e.g. the Nirvana and Destiny\u2019s Child mash-up \u2018Smells Like Booty\u2019, using the vocals from Destiny Child\u2019s \u2018Bootylicious\u2019 and the chord and rhythm accompaniment from \u2018Smells like Teen Spirit\u2019). This type of stylistic play is not new, and can be found in Mozart piano sonatas, Shostakovich symphonies, the works of Charles Ives, and in the earliest forms of hip-hop music as the standard two turntable set-up from disco and hip-hop demonstrates a direct lineage to the mash-up.<\/p>\n

Jazz has also had a long history of appropriation. Stuart Nicholson writes that \u2018From its very beginning jazz was a pluralistic music.\u2019 (Nicholson 2005, p. 160; see also Nicholson 2003)\u00a0 One can hear this in the Spanish tinge in \u2018St. Louis Blues\u2019, the Afro-Cuban hybridity in \u2018Manteca\u2019 or the mix of modalism, jazz, rock and avant-garde in Miles Davis\u2019 Bitches Brew<\/em> (Holt 2007, pp. 94-99; see also Pond 2005). <\/em>In fact, an entire alternative history of jazz could be written through the lens of hybridity and the authenticity debates that always seem to surround it3<\/sup>.<\/p>\n

This paper investigates the blending of two African American-based music genres: jazz and hip-hop, more specifically, two 21st<\/sup>-century jazz musicians who attempt to merge jazz and hip-hop styles in strikingly different ways: U.S. trumpeter Russell Gunn and U.K. Saxophonist Soweto Kinch. Their approach to and use of genre demonstrates that while an artist can draw from multiple genres, how <\/em>they are utilized and presented is subject to a vast spectrum of representations. Furthermore, I also compare the different ways that these artists respond to their critics and to labels given to their music, attitudes I will argue have a direct affect on the use of hybridity in their albums. Both their recordings, and their extra-musical discourses, also raise important questions surrounding new conditions of publicity, genre politics and the feasibility of the internet in facilitating or subverting post-generic spaces.<\/p>\n

Soweto Kinch<\/strong><\/h3>\n

<\/strong>Saxophonist and rapper Soweto Kinch was born in 1978 and grew up in London and Birmingham, and read history at Oxford while pursuing his music career. He was a member of Tomorrows Warriors and Jazz Jamaica All Stars before releasing his debut album Conversations with the Unseen <\/em>in 2003 which was nominated for a Mercury Music Prize4<\/sup>. The majority of the album includes straight-ahead modern jazz, along with shorter moments that display Kinch\u2019s rapping skills (the intro, intermission and last song). These hip-hop moments are reminiscent of \u2018live hip-hop\u2019 groups (as opposed to sampled or synthesized ones) such as The Roots, and his entire album carries with it an ethos of \u2018liveness\u2019, (Auslander 1999) whether when playing jazz or hip-hop. Kinch has chosen to use certain signifiers of rap music, such as the a \u2018spoken word poetry\u2019 rap style as well as some \u2018jazz codes\u2019, but has left others out such as digital sampling and turntable scratching. Just as some rap groups sampled and borrowed from jazz records in the late 1980s\/early 1990s, jazz artists have used the codes of hip-hop to suggest a level of hipness that has arguably now become overused or clich\u00e95<\/sup>. In this case, jazz is the dominant genre on the album, and \u2018liveness\u2019 is its dominant ideology overall. Rap is literally marginalized, othered or even exoticised.<\/p>\n

Kinch has described the two genres as similar in terms of the importance of skills for improvisation, and that both genres have achieved varying degrees of sophistication. Incidentally, Kinch is more inclined to call what he does \u2018Spoken word\u2019 rather than \u2018rap\u2019, and his style is reminiscent of \u2018poetry slams\u2019 rather than more mainstream rap styles. He said in one 2004 interview with Jason Caffrey of JazzNation:<\/p>\n

I describe jazz and hip-hop as if they\u2019re two different women competing for my attentions. One\u2019s rich and young and loves the fast lane, and the other is more bookish and reclusive \u2013 so you work it out! It was kind of fun and also allowed me a vehicle to explore musically where hip-hop and jazz could be taken. (Caffrey 2004)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Conversations with the Unseen <\/em>reflects this statement in that each track on the album represents jazz or hip-hop separately, rather than any hybrid within <\/em>a single song (like mashups demonstrate, for example).<\/p>\n

According to Kinch, his first album was concerned with taking hip-hop to a jazz audience. His next album A Life in the Day of B19: Tales of the Towerblock <\/em>(2006), according to him, reflected a desire to take jazz to the hip-hop audience6<\/sup>. His reputation and acclaim as a jazz musician, however, has led to the placement of the album in the \u2018jazz\u2019 section of stores rather than in the \u2018urban music\u2019 section, despite his radio play on urban music stations. Kinch\u2019s angry response to this took the form of a blog post on his MySpace<\/em> website entitled \u2018The War in a Rack\u2019 from 2006:<\/p>\n

Sunday, December 17, 2006 <\/strong><\/p>\n

THE WAR IN A RACK!! <\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>After releasing ‘A life in the day of B19’ in September, 3 months of good reviews in Hip hop magazines and radio play on urban stations, high street record stores still refuse to allow the album into the Urban music section!
\nThis is a major setback for the album and me personally. The aim of this album was to turn hip hop heads on to a new type of hip hop and jazz and break stereotypes about what British hip hop should sound like. But that’s impossible if a mainstream audience never even gets to see the album in the shops\u2026.<\/p>\n

I’m asking anyone with a moment free while Christmas\u00a0shopping to bounce into your high street music shop and\u00a0say the following:<\/p>\n

Retailer:<\/strong> Hello Sir\/Madam, can I help you? You look confused\u00a0and a bit disgruntled.<\/p>\n

You:<\/strong> Yes! I’ve been trying to find the new Soweto Kinch album,\u00a0“A Life in the day of B19.” I saw him at a show with TY\/KRS ONE.\u00a0I’ve looked in the Urban music section and I cant find it. Isn’t it\u00a0released yet?<\/p>\n

Retailer:<\/strong> Hmmm, yes\u2026 have you looked downstairs, past the\u00a0corridor and behind the pane of glass in the jazz section at the\u00a0back of the store.<\/p>\n

You:<\/strong> No! I saw a review in Hip Hop connection, and heard him on Ras Kwame’s show. On 1 Xtra.\u00a0How comes its not in the hip hop section?<\/p>\n

Retailer:<\/strong> Ummm. He plays saxophone<\/p>\n

You:<\/strong> Have you heard it?<\/p>\n

Retailer:<\/strong> Errr<\/p>\n

You:<\/strong> Then why is it only in the jazz section?<\/p>\n

If these questions come from me or Dune [Kinch\u2019s record label], we’ve been told it’s likely to provoke a very negative reaction from retailers. But if enough independent people say something, it will make a difference. \u00a0It matters beyond just me as an artist and beyond this album. Men in suits, in boardrooms are dictating to us what is or isn’t hip hop! Thousands of people are kept from seeing an alternative model of hip hop which they can identify with. To put it simply, if Nelly Fertado[sic], Justin Timberlake and Nelly are urban, why is a hip hop\/jazz album set in a UK tower block not?<\/p>\n

If this angers you as much as it does me, please walk into your high street record store and stir it up. Physically move the CDs into the right places if you’re inspired to. I’ve been left pretty much powerless in bringing the issue up with the shops or distribution company. And the threat to withdraw all support for the next album is very serious. So please message me back and let me know what happens when you confront them with the subject!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The responses in the \u2018Comments\u2019 section below the blog are generally positive and agree with what Kinch has to say. He has written further blog posts on the matter, and has since released an EP independently (called The War in a Rack<\/em>), but the actual issue of genre and double shelving has had little response, or at least no action has been taken. In short, he believes that the music industry wants to promote only certain types of \u2018urban music.\u2019 It is legally acceptable for an album to be shelved in two sections, but music stores have done little for his cause, leading to a severe delay in his next album\u2019s release.<\/p>\n

His statement regarding the placement of the jazz section in the back of the store, behind glass, is a telling one, as jazz\u2019s high cultural status has now placed it within close proximity to classical music sections; a realm that is believed to be seldom visited by mass youth culture. I have written elsewhere about the high art status of jazz in the 1980s mainstream and how the \u2018high art ideology\u2019 of jazz influenced reception of \u2018jazz rap\u2019 groups like A Tribe Called Quest and Digable Planets, putting them at the top of a subgeneric rap hierarchy (Williams, 2010). Kinch\u2019s MySpace blog post suggests that the high art status attributed to jazz has hurt his cause: thwarting his attempt to expose jazz to the \u2018hip-hop generation.\u2019<\/p>\n

The styles of jazz and hip-hop that Kinch performs are nothing new; in fact, they often suggest orthodoxy rather than innovation stylistically. But including both genres on a single album complicates the dominant structures of music promotion and advertising. Soweto Kinch, via his internet platform, provides an extra-musical dialogue regarding music genres and marketing, critiquing the music industry and expressing a desire for his own albums to reach the widest possible audience.<\/p>\n

Russell Gunn<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Trumpeter and rapper Russell Gunn was born in 1971 and hails from East St. Louis, Illinois. Gunn has had experience with musicians associated with so-called \u2018neoclassical\u2019 jazz styles (e.g. the hard bop resurgence championed by \u2018Young Lions\u2019 Wynton Marsalis, Joshua Redman, Marcus Roberts, Christian McBride and others in the 1980s), and with hip-hop artists such as Cee-Lo Green (of The Goodie Mob and Gnarls Barkley), Maxwell, Ne-Yo, and D\u2019Angelo. He also played trumpet on the 1994 Pulitzer Prize Winning oratorio Blood on the Fields <\/em>by Wynton Marsalis, and toured with Branford (Wynton\u2019s brother) Marsalis\u2019s hip-hop persona, Buckshot LeFonque, in 1995.<\/p>\n

Unlike Kinch\u2019s more \u2018suite like\u2019 presentation of the two genres on Conversations with the Unseen<\/em>, Gunn\u2019s studio albums suggest a hybridity of styles within<\/em> each track. Kinch presents one style after the other, rather than presenting a fusion\/syncretism within tracks. There exists cross-breeding of genres in Gunn\u2014hybridity or creolization in the accurate colonial\/post-colonial sense, hybridity that hinges upon miscegenation to produce hybrid or Creole peoples. Furthermore, unlike Soweto\u2019s \u2018liveness\u2019, or proclivity for the acoustic, on his first album, Gunn uses a range of effects for his trumpet solos and rapping as well as more electronic \u2018beats\u2019 from hip-hop and EDM styles. This type of phonographic staging (Lacasse 2000; Zagorski-Thomas 2010) suggests a more abstract recording space, often in opposition to the \u2018concert realism\u2019 (Krims 2006) of recordings that stage liveness. This phenomenon is something I wish to call \u2018studio consciousness\u2019\u2014elements of a recording that draw specific attention to the fact the given song was recorded in a studio. This could be verbal (\u2018turn my headphones up\u2019), timbral (use of effects), spatial (creating an artificial ambience through effects), or media-based (as Zagorski-Thomas calls effects that try to reproduce other types of playback technologies such as a tannoy address system as \u2018media-based staging\u2019; Zagorski-Thomas 2010, p. 252). This is akin to \u2018breaking the fourth wall\u2019 in film and television, as Justin Morey has written in the context of recorded music, revealing \u2018the mediation involved in a recording to the audience\u2019 (Morey 2009)7<\/sup>.<\/p>\n

The exemplary Gunn album that best demonstrates a studio conscious jazz\/hip-hop hybrid is the 2006 album with his group \u2018bionic\u2019, entitled Krunk Jazz. <\/em>The title track which opens the album features an electronic beat programmed on loop set to a four chord progression. An alto saxophone solos in the bebop idiom over the chord changes for a minute before Gunn and the saxophone play a \u2018head arrangement\u2019 consisting of bebop lines in unison over the looped chord progression. In the case of this track, the \u2018studio consciousness\u2019 lies the in programmed \u2018beat\u20198<\/sup>. Gunn often likes to use sound effects with his trumpet playing and rapping, on songs such as \u2018Bass Head Jazz\u2019 in the case of the former and on \u2018Bionic\u2019 for the latter. The track \u2018Skate King\u2019 follows a similar bebop head format as \u2018Krunk Jazz\u2019, but in this instance the beat is a stylistic allusion to Afrika Bambaataa\u2019s \u2018Planet Rock\u2019 (1982), a song credited with ushering in a phase of electro-pop music and influencing future styles of electronic dance music. Both jazz and hip-hop music have a high degree of overt intertextuality that flaunt references, influences and allusions; the mixing of the two, therefore, are aligned with the traditions and practices in their respective genre cultures.<\/p>\n

Particularly with \u2018Krunk Jazz\u2019, I would argue that the two turntable format originating in hip-hop and disco has allowed, or at least facilitated the conditions for Gunn\u2019s style of hybridity (and for the mash-up). I would argue further that it is the tonal language of bebop in jazz that has also allowed for this. One could imagine a turntable that played bebop lines around a specific tonal centre, and on the other turntable, any genre of music that was in tempo with the bebop lines and that also fostered the same tonal centre.<\/p>\n

But returning to \u2018studio consciousness\u2019, as sound signifiers can suggest certain listening spaces within particular interpretive communities, Gunn draws attention to the fact that these materials are recorded in a studio (I would go as far to say a \u2018bedroom studio\u2019, at times, demonstrated in much of the production of Krunk Jazz<\/em>) rather than stage a jazz club atmosphere which Soweto does. It is true that many of these sound effects\/techniques could <\/em>be reproduced in a live show, but there still exists a clear distinction between creating a recording that stages \u2018live performance\u2019 versus a recording that celebrates its studio origins that live performance strives to re-create9<\/sup>. In comparing Conversations with the Unseen <\/em>and Krunk Jazz, <\/em>there is a clear difference in the \u2018perceived performance environment\u2019 (Moylan 2007, p. 177) overall. Though such a comparison may not necessarily be useful in other analytical contexts, I do believe that as an \u2018ideal type\u2019, this comparison can tell us more about the relationship between extra-musical discourse on genre and the use of generic signifiers in the music, including music production10<\/sup>. And ideology, one might say, is the force that ties the two realms together.<\/p>\n

While Soweto Kinch chose to address issues of genre via the internet, Gunn often addresses these issues within the studio recordings themselves. Rap music has a tradition of \u2018metacommentary\u2019, commenting about themselves, the song, or any other issue at hand (such as genre). Gunn comments in \u2018No Separation\u2019 from his group Ethnomusicology<\/em>\u2019s third volume (2003) \u2018Don\u2019t put me in no bag.\u2019 At one point he asks, \u2018What kind of music do you play?\u2019 and answers his own question (echoing Ellington\u2019s famous comment on musical categories): \u2018The good kind.\u2019 In \u2018The Critics Song,\u2019 Gunn addresses his critics in a rap, telling them that \u2018no real<\/em> artist gives a fuck about you.\u2019 He ends the song by stating:<\/p>\n

\u2026.what the industry says jazz music is or what jazz should be, when I know for myself, that the only people that can say what jazz is or what jazz isn\u2019t are the musicians that create it. You can\u2019t tell me anything about black music at all, \u2019cause I am the one who play it. I play it I create it, I write it, I live through it, I live it. It\u2019s all mine. And I refuse to let someone tell me what I should play, or why I should play it, or why this is better than this, or what something is and what something isn\u2019t. But I know what it is because I am <\/em>that.<\/p>\n

Like Soweto\u2019s blog, these arguments are nothing new either. His comment espouses the Romantic era ideology that art is a true expression of self, and that hip-hop and jazz authenticity is often defined as those who can most successfully \u2018play themselves\u201911<\/sup>. As Hip-hop and jazz appropriate other shifting and developing styles, Gunn sees himself as being true to this tradition of change. It is safe to say that Gunn considers jazz as a verb rather than as a noun, and uses the primacy of the recorded object to state (and stage) his opinions.<\/p>\n

If we were to use studio techniques as a framework to compare the two artists, as Steven Pond finds studio techniques as the link among 1970s jazz fusion groups (Pond 2005, p. 154)12<\/sup>, then Gunn and Kinch actually represent disparate subgenres of jazz though they both use signifiers from the hip-hop genre. The two could \u2018ideal type\u2019 albums could even be placed on a spectrum where Soweto Kinch represents \u2018concert realism\u2019 at one end (to use Krims\u2019s term) and at the other we have the \u2018studio consciousness\u2019 of Russell Gunn, and this may be one yardstick with which to categorize artists, albums, or subgenres as an alternative to genre categorization.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n<\/span>Figure 1. <\/strong>Visual comparison of two albums along a two-genre y-axis and a spectrum between concert realism and studio consciousness (x-axis).<\/p>\n

For the sake of simplicity in visualising such a distinction, I have only included two albums on the graph above. From it, we can see that Gunn\u2019s album is able to straddle the two genres of rap and jazz in such a way where one would be pressed to choose which style was truly dominant. The same could be said of Gunn\u2019s Ethnomusicology Vol. 3<\/em>. Kinch\u2019s new EP, The War in a Rack, <\/em>could be placed firmly on the \u2018rap dominant\u2019 side of the y-axis and firmly within the \u2018studio consciousness\u2019 realm, a telling next step in his desire to be considered part of the rap music genre. The table below uses the two albums again to compare other parameters which include distribution outlets and realms of meta-commentary (in the case of Kinch). The implications of such comparisons for the study of genre would be applicable to other cross-genre hybrids. Although it is important in such a study to look at codes on a semiotic level within the recording (e.g. musical gestures, timbre, samples, instrumentation, lyrics, flow), it is also important to acknowledge the greater picture in the extra-musical discourse such as marketing, how the artists perceive genre as well as other elements within the music industry structure which will have an effect on genre placement and reception.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/p>\n

Figure 2. Comparison of various parameters in Kinch and Gunn\u2019s studio recordings.<\/p>\n

The Internet and Genre<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In the early twenty first century, with the internet entering a new phase dubbed Web 2.0, and as the youth market shifts to the iPod\/YouTube generation, is it now possible to envision a post-genre music future? The internet, for example, can provide what Mark Katz calls a \u2018divergent approach to discovering music\u2019 that cannot be duplicated in the physical world. Peer-to-Peer networks like Kazaa, Napster, BitTorrent, etc. allow searches with a wide range of results13<\/sup>. (Katz 2004, p. 167) Furthermore, in what Tim O\u2019Reilly and others call Web 2.0, user-generated content is crucial to the effectiveness of these systems (O\u2019Reilly 2005). The interactivity of Web 2.0 has expanded participatory cultures on the internet to be primary content creators. With platforms of this type, the more something is used, the better the application becomes (think Wikipedia or YouTube). Bloggers can write about a diverse array of musics (in the case of Kinch, including their own), and listeners can often have the opportunity to hear new music from blogs. Personal digital music libraries are ever expanding as playback equipment increases their storage capacity, and the internet can facilitate an increase in music discourse in terms of quantity, distance between communicators and the speed at which those conversations can take place.<\/p>\n

Despite this \u2018digital turn\u2019, online retail companies and music websites such as iTunes, allmusic, CD baby and Amazon behave much like a record store, in that there still exists a \u2018front of store\u2019 in the form of a home webpage. Searches are possible, though they bring up limited options, followed by further suggestions based on artist and genre post-purchase, suggesting that genre and categorization have not been eradicated by the internet\u2019s \u2018free\u2019 flow of information. I am inclined to side with Gustavo Azenha\u2019s historical perspective on the internet and the music industry\u2014that the internet ushered a period of decentralization that is currently becoming centralized again. To quote Azenha:<\/p>\n

A more nuanced understanding of the history and organisation of the music industry and its current trajectory indicates that major labels are currently repositioning themselves in ways that maintain or enhance their gate-keeping powers. The continued importance of traditional formats and media as well as the major labels\u2019 privileged ability to control, utilise and access emerging networks through preferential access to financial, technological and human resources, helps them maintain or enhance their power in the music industry and mitigate the decentralising potential of the Internet. (Azenha 2006, par. 4)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, the access to control and economic power that the music industry retains puts them in a prime position to continue in a strategic and powerful standing once they solve what needs to change and how to change it (and there is always a time lag involved). For example, Kinch has left his record label, and is now independent, but if he wants to sell units on a large scale, he may need to align with a major distributor in order for this to happen.<\/p>\n

This is a familiar story, first in the late 1910s with the first jazz recordings, and in the 1950s with rock and roll\u2014new popular music with independent support destabilizes the market until the independents merge with the powerful majors for distribution. Optimistically, echoing Azenha\u2019s views, increased centralisation does not necessarily ensure less stylistic diversity. Time will tell, but if this trend follows historical patterns, then independents will once again have to rely on the dominant structures of the major record companies despite changes in \u2018software\u2019 and hardware formats (from record to LP to cassette to .mp3\/4). The main point here is that genre remains a central feature of an industry that remains powerful and centralized14<\/sup>. Genre, part of this centralised system\/structure, affects the way we think about and make music, even when experiments in musical hybridity may try to resist such categorization.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The comparison of two contemporary jazz artists that draw from hip-hop and other styles provide a case study of 21st<\/sup> century jazz hybridity\u2014a comparison in the utilization of genre through studio recordings. To use a metaphor of ethnicity, in Kinch I hear a \u2018tossed salad\u2019 vs. the \u2018melting pot\u2019 in Gunn\u2019s cross-bred style. Soweto Kinch provided an example of an artist who wanted to use existing generic frameworks to his benefit, and distribute his album through multiple streams such as \u2018jazz\u2019 and \u2018urban\u201915<\/sup>. His attempt to use the internet as platform for activism and change was unsuccessful, in part, because of the power held by cultural intermediaries of the music industry. In contrast, Russell Gunn largely chooses to have his studio albums provide the platform for his opinions, almost as an additional style of meta-commentary in the vast network of hybrid styles he utilizes. What I wish to highlight here is that the artists\u2019 attitudes regarding music genre, and how generic hybridity occurs within their recordings, mutually inflect and shape one another. Not all jazz\/hip-hop hybrids are similar, and comparing them through \u2018ideal types\u2019 can be more enlightening than a survey treatment of them. These recent recordings, like all recordings, both encode social dynamics and mediate them, a study of which can reveal and inform us about the social conditions in which they were created and received.<\/p>\n

As everything is hybrid to a degree, I am not dealing with the issue of how hybrid something really is<\/em>, but of how hybrid it appears to be <\/em>(in socially and historically situated interpretations). <\/em>Though the history of jazz and hybridity has yet to be written, it will be defined in part by the constructing\/de-constructing (or canonizing\/de-canonizing) dialectical impulse at work\u2014the impulse to celebrate the music\u2019s hybridity while other times obscuring it by canonizing a particular subgenre as true\/authentic jazz. With the multiple subgenres that could be categorized under the ever-growing \u2018jazz\u2019 umbrella, this constructing\/deconstructing impulse is still in constant flux in the digital era.<\/p>\n

Footnotes<\/h3>\n

1 \u2018But the story of the white boy who stole the blues is never as simple as his critics would have it. American pop culture begins in the mongrel, not the Platonic. This is hip\u2019s central story. What we call black or white styles are really hopelessly hybrid. The bebop of Minton\u2019s, for example, brought African and European impulses to a music that already traced its lineage to both continents. Even in the name of purity it was impure, and richer for it. By the same token Goodman, Twain, Berlin, Elvis and Eminem all stand out more for what is uniquely theirs, not the vehicle they borrowed. In a pluralistic cultural marketplace, it makes more sense to think of pop evolution as additive rather than derivative\u2014every change adds something, even if just through the accidents of faulty copying.\u2019 (Leland 2005, p. 133)<\/p>\n

2 I am using the terms \u2018style\u2019 and \u2018genre\u2019 quite consciously, the term genre as film theorists would use it to suggest industrial macro-structures, and I am using the term style as it is often used in musicology to refer to smaller-scale gestures and images that occur within the recorded object (e.g. studio techniques, harmony, melody, cover art, font, etc.). Genre thus becomes an \u2018ideal type\u2019, though I acknowledge the two terms share a number of features and characteristics.<\/p>\n

3 The term hybridity has a certain amount of the academic baggage, in particular, from post-colonial studies, but I do not have space to summarize those arguments here. See Bhabha 1994, Young 1995, and Ashcroft\u00a0et. al.\u00a02006. Timothy Taylor discusses hybridity as a term used for authenticity in the marketing and discourse surrounding various transnational musics such as bhangra. (Taylor 2007)<\/p>\n

4 Kinch has won numerous awards including the Rising Star awards at the BBC Jazz Awards in 2002, the White Saxophone Prize at the Montreaux Jazz Festival in 2003, and in 2003 and 2007 won the MOBO (Music of Black Origin) Prize for Best Jazz Act.<\/p>\n

5 A favourable review of Kinch\u2019s first album suggests that he has used hip-hop codes, but chose codes that had not become overused \u2018hip\u2019 clich\u00e9s. Peter Marsh writes, \u2018Several other raps (all delivered with a wry, self deprecating humour) show an easy familiarity with contemporary black music that the likes of Courtney Pine haven’t really managed (and without a turntable scratch or sampled beat in earshot).\u2019 Marsh 2003.<\/p>\n

6 The album\u00a0B19: Tales of the Towerblock\u00a0is framed as a radio play, narrated by former BBC presenter Moira Stuart. The album follows a number of characters around Birmingham, and includes dialogue as well as jazz and hip-hop inflected tracks. The radio-style format of the album may have had some effect on marketing the album, though many of the tracks did receive radio play as singles.<\/p>\n

7 Though I prefer the term \u2018studio consciousness,\u2019 Morey\u2019s discussion of reflexivity and his typology of reflexive devices differs little from how I wish to use the concept. The work of Moylan, Morey, Zagorski-Thomas, Lacasse, Allan Moore and Ruth Dockwray are fundamental to an understanding of the analysis of record production.<\/p>\n

8 I use the hip-hop terminology \u2018flow\u2019 to refer to the delivery of rap lyrics and \u2018the beat\u2019 to refer to the sonic complement to that rap, not only its percussive elements, but all sounds on the recording that are not the rapper\u2019s \u2018flow\u2019, or in the case of instrumental jazz, all sounds not including the instrumental \u2018head\u2019, solos, or ensemble passages.<\/p>\n

9 Generally speaking, pop celebrates using the studio as instrument, and live performance tries to re-create the album, where in classical and acoustic jazz the studio attempts to (re)-create\/(re)-present a live performance.<\/p>\n

10 An \u2018ideal type\u2019, a concept from sociologist Max Weber, is a generalized form from social reality and is a tool used to arrive at bigger conclusions. For its use and critique in music, see Gossett 1989.<\/p>\n

11 \u2018[Charlie] Parker\u2019s dictum, \u201cif you don\u2019t live it, it won\u2019t come out of your horn,\u201d is a hip motto and a prescription for hip self-fashioning.\u2019 See Ford 2008, p. 122.<\/p>\n

12 \u2018The notion of\u00a0fusion jazz,\u00a0then, works most accurately not as a syncretic blend of parent styles, because the parentage is always slippery; and not exclusively through its personnel. Fusion jazz musicians do not cooperate with the classification, being drawn into myriad other styles. Instead, the style of production provides the most prominent unifying threat: an orientation of how to produce a recording, influenced by pop, rock, funk, and jazz recording techniques.\u2019 Pond 2004, p .\u00a0154.<\/p>\n

13 Katz\u2019s example is that one can search music on a peer-to-peer network by typing in the word \u2018cello\u2019 and find Bach cello suites, Metallica for four cellos, Nick Drake\u2019s \u2018Cello Song\u2019 and songs performed by Annette Funicello. Katz 2004, p. 167.<\/p>\n

14 If one wanted to take a more radical Marxist or Gramscian perspective, it is arguable that the \u2018freedom\u2019 provided by Web 2.0 is only distracting us from deeper social inequalities.<\/p>\n

15 Kinch\u2019s views have changed as it becomes more apparent that the physical record store is declining in number and may cease to exist.<\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, eds. 2006. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader <\/em>(London, Routledge)<\/p>\n

Auslander, Philip. 1999. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture <\/em>(London, Routledge)<\/p>\n

Azenha, Gustavo. 2006. \u2018The Internet and the decentralisation of the popular music industry: critical reflections on technology, concentration and diversification\u2019, Radical Musicology <\/em>1\/1, http:\/\/www.radical-musicology.org.uk\/<\/p>\n

Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture <\/em>(London, Routledge)<\/p>\n

Caffrey, Jason. 2004. \u2018JazzNation Talks With: Soweto Kinch\u2019, JazzNation, <\/em>October 2005, http:\/\/www.jazznation.co.uk\/interview.asp<\/p>\n

Dockwray, Ruth and Allan F. Moore. 2010. \u2018Configuring the Sound Box 1965\u20131972\u2019, Popular Music <\/em>29\/2, pp. 191\u2013197<\/p>\n

Ford, Phil. 2008. \u2018Hip Sensibility in an Age of Mass Counterculture\u2019, Jazz Perspectives <\/em>2\/2, pp. 121\u2013163<\/p>\n

Frith, Simon. 2001. \u2018The Popular Music Industry\u2019, in The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock<\/em>, eds. Simon Frith, Will Straw, John Street (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), pp. 26\u201352<\/p>\n

Gossett, Philip. 1989. \u2018Carl Dahlhaus and the \u201cIdeal Type\u201d.\u2019 Nineteenth-century Music <\/em>13\/1, pp. 49\u201356<\/p>\n

Holt, Fabian. 2007. Genre in Popular Music <\/em>(Chicago, University of Chicago Press)<\/p>\n

Horner, Bruce. 1999. \u2018Discourse\u2019 in Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture, <\/em>eds. Bruce Horner and Thomas Swiss (Oxford, Blackwell)<\/p>\n

Katz, Mark. 2004. Capturing Sound <\/em>(Berkeley, University of California Press)<\/p>\n

Kinch, Soweto. 2006. \u2018The War in a Rack\u2019 http:\/\/blogs.myspace.com\/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=60467493&blogId=206607250<\/p>\n

Krims, Adam. 2006. Music and Urban Geography <\/em>(London, Routledge)<\/p>\n

Lacasse, Serge. 2000. \u2018Listen to my voice: the evocative power of voice in recorded rock music and other forms of vocal expression\u2019. PhD Thesis, University of Liverpool. http:\/\/www.mus.ulaval.ca\/lacasse\/texts\/THESIS.pdf<\/p>\n

Leland, John. 2005. Hip: The History<\/em> (New York, HarperCollins)<\/p>\n

Marsh, Peter. 2003. \u2018Conversations with the Unseen Review.\u2019 BBC Music<\/em>, 28 April, 2003, http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/music\/reviews\/nbp2<\/p>\n

Moore, Allan F. 2001. \u2018Categorical Conventions in Music Discourse: Style and Genre\u2019, Music and Letters<\/em>, 82\/3, pp. 432\u2013442<\/p>\n

Morey, Justin. 2009. \u2018Breaking the Fourth Wall\u2019 – The Effect of Acknowledging the Studio on Staging and Perception, Proceedings of the 5th<\/sup> Annual Art of Record Production Conference, <\/em>University of Glamorgan, Cardiff. https:\/\/www.artofrecordproduction.com\/aorpjoom\/content\/view\/228\/114\/<\/p>\n

Moylan, William. 2007. Understanding and Crafting the Mix: The Art of Recording. <\/em>2nd<\/sup> Edition (Oxford, Focal Press)<\/p>\n

Negus, Keith. 1999. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures <\/em>(London, Routledge)<\/p>\n

Nicholson, Stuart. 2003. \u2018Fusions and Crossovers\u2019, in The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, <\/em>eds. Mervyn Cooke and David Horn (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), pp. 217\u2013252<\/p>\n

Nicholson, Stuart. 2005. Is Jazz Dead? (or has it moved to a new address) <\/em>(London, Routledge)<\/p>\n

O\u2019Reilly, Tim. 2005. \u2018What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software\u2019, O\u2019Reilly, <\/em>September 2005, http:\/\/oreilly.com\/web2\/archive\/what-is-web-20.html<\/p>\n

Pond, Steven F. 2005. Head Hunters: The Making of Jazz\u2019s First Platinum Album <\/em>(Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press)<\/p>\n

Taylor, Timothy. 2007. Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World <\/em>(Durham, Duke University Press)<\/p>\n

Williams, Justin. 2010. \u2018The Construction of Jazz Rap as High Art in Hip-hop Music\u2019, Journal of Musicology <\/em>27\/4: 435-459.<\/p>\n

Young, Robert J.C. 1995. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race <\/em>(Routledge, London)<\/p>\n

Zagorski-Thomas, Simon. 2010. \u2018The stadium in your bedroom: functional staging, authenticity, and the audience-led aesthetic in record production\u2019 Popular Music <\/em>29\/2, pp. 251\u2013266<\/p>\n

Discography<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Kinch, Soweto. Conversations with the Unseen<\/em>. Dune Records, DUNE CD08. 2003<\/p>\n

Kinch, Soweto. A Life in the Day of B19: Tales of the Towerblock. <\/em>Dune Records, DUNE CD14. 2006<\/p>\n

Kinch, Soweto. War in a Rack EP<\/em>. Soweto Kinch Productions, iTunes\/.mp4. 2009<\/p>\n

Gunn, Russell. Ethnomusicology Vol. 3<\/em>. Justin Time, JUST 189-2. CD album. 2003<\/p>\n

Gunn, Russell (as \u2018Russell Gunn Presents\u2026Bionic\u2019). Krunk Jazz<\/em>. Groid Music, iTunes\/.mp4. 2006<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since the first jazz\/hip-hop collaborations in the early 1980s (Max Roach w\/Fab 5 Freddy, Herbie Hancock w\/Grandmixer D.ST), and the flowering of the so-called \u2018jazz rap\u2019 subgenre in the early 1990s (A Tribe Called Quest, Digable Planets, Guru\u2019s Jazzmatazz), a new generation of young jazz musicians have responded to this unique marriage of African-based genres. My paper engages with two twenty-first century jazz musicians who attempt to merge jazz and hip-hop styles in strikingly divergent ways: U.S. trumpeter Russell Gunn and U.K. saxophonist Soweto Kinch, two contemporary artists that fuse hip-hop and jazz but contrast in terms of recording studio practices, marketing\/promotion, and their intra- and extra-musical discourses on genre. For example, Russell Gunn adopts a style of jazz that incorporates hip-hop, dance music, and overtly celebrates the recording studio as musical instrument. The use of trumpet and rap vocal effects demonstrates what I call ‘studio consciousness\u2019, aspects of a recording which draw attention to its studio source rather than stage an illusion of \u2018liveness\u2019. Kinch, in contrast, arguably does stage a form of \u2018liveness\u2019 on his first album Conversations with the Unseen (2003), whether the individual tracks reflect jazz or hip-hop. Using this particular comparative case study, I propose that an investigation of studio techniques may be an additional way to categorize and analyse genre and its fusions in popular music.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[65],"class_list":["post-1177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles-editorials-provocations","tag-conference-paper","author-dr-justin-a-williams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arpjournal.com\/asarpwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arpjournal.com\/asarpwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arpjournal.com\/asarpwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arpjournal.com\/asarpwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arpjournal.com\/asarpwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1177"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/www.arpjournal.com\/asarpwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2006,"href":"https:\/\/www.arpjournal.com\/asarpwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1177\/revisions\/2006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arpjournal.com\/asarpwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arpjournal.com\/asarpwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arpjournal.com\/asarpwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}