Jazz (We Got): The Union of Jazz and Hip Hop

by Ted Schmiedeler

The Grammy Award-winning Robert Glasper was recently the artist-inresidence at Blue Note Jazz Festival in California, in late July 2023. Being a prominent jazz artist, this selection made sense: what seemed a bit more confusing was the inclusion of Nas and Chance the Rapper alongside him. Hip hop artists joined Glasper and other jazz artists to put on a jazz festival? Yes, and that makes more sense the further one looks into it. Glasper himself is quoted as saying, “Jazz and hip hop belong together. Jazz and hip hop were born out of necessity. They both were born out of the struggle.” Festivals like this highlight the intersection of these two genres and how both hip hop and jazz in the modern era are supported by and build on each other.

First and foremost, in its infancy, hip hop drew influence from jazz. In the early days of hip hop in the 1970s, there were two people responsible for bringing the music to life. First, there was the DJ, who had two turntables with the same record playing and would isolate the percussion breaks on the record and “scratch” them, creating the distinctive record scratching noise common in early hip hop. The two turntable setup would allow this percussion break to be extended and would allow the MC, the second member of the performance, to step in and rap. In the early days of the genre, the MC (or Master of Ceremonies) would often freestyle about people or things around them in order to hype up the DJ, who was the star of the show. In the modern era, when people think of hip hop, the rapper or MC almost always comes to mind first, but in the early days it was the DJ, such as the legendary Grandmaster Flash or DJ Kool Herc, who were the ones people came to see. Additionally, much of early hip hop was unrecorded and improvised because it was performed at block parties in the South Bronx. DJs would spin funk, soul, disco, and jazz records for the crowd with the MC stepping in from time to time to rap. Like jazz music, improvisation was a key element of hip hop in its early days, and freestyling persists as a mainstay in the genre to this day.

Additionally, many rappers in the 1970s used a style similar to scatting, a vocal style in jazz that uses emotive syllables in place of words to convey a melody. Louis Armstrong popularized scatting with his song “Heebie Jeebies” in 1926 and its influences found their way into early hip hop. Along with influences from James Brown, scatting helped develop a much more popular technique in hip hop: ad libs, or the filling of gaps in songs with syllables, words, or phrases to add extra emphasis or fill a space in the beat. Ad libs rose aboveground in the late 1980s with Flava Flav of Public Enemy’s iconic “Yeah boyyyy” being thrown into the mix when Chuck D was between bars in his rap. It has since been developed by the likes of The Migos, Young Thug, and Playboi Carti to include onomatopoeias such as “wuh,” “bih,” “skrrt skrrt,” “brrrah,” “uh,” and more, alongside words such as 21 Savage’s iconic “21” or “on God.”

Moving past this early influence, hip hop drew heavily from jazz with regard to its beat making, particularly due to sampling. Sampling is the technique of taking an existing piece of music and remixing or altering it in some way to create a new piece of music, often combining it with other elements. The 1970s saw this technique done by scratching the record, but in the 1980s, entire records of percussion breaks were being produced to allow DJs to create more creative loops. Affordable samplers, such as the E-mu SP-1200 (which was the go-to for many East Coast producers), became available by the mid-1980s, allowing for up to ten seconds of a record to be recorded, remixed, and layered with other elements to create ever more creative beats. In 1996, DJ Shadow produced the first hip hop album composed entirely of samples, pushing this creative technique to its limit. Jazz samples, along with funk and soul, are among the most popular for hip hop artists. Herbie Hancock and his legendary piano skills have been sampled 282 times; Lou Donaldson and his soulful saxophone have been sampled 201 times; Donald Byrd and his trumpet have been sampled 135 times; and Bob James and his keyboard skills have been sampled an incredible 734 times. Even vocals from the likes of the legendary Nina Simone have been sampled 148 different times. In the 90s, artists like Nas, the Wu-Tang Clan, Public Enemy, Gang Starr, and Lauryn Hill, among many others, introduced a new generation to the jazz legends of the past through their use of sampling. Despite the massive rise in popularity of trap beats, the introduction and popularization of electronic-based beats involving 808s and drum machines, and the general diversification of hip hop as a genre, jazz samples continue to be used by a variety of artists like Kendrick Lamar, Westside Gunn, Mavi, Little Simz, and more.

A shining example of the crossover between jazz samples and hip hop is A Tribe Called Quest’s 1991 release The Low End Theory. Producers Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammad used samples from Grover Washington Jr., Brother Jack McDuff, Jimmy McGriff, Gary Bartz, Art Blakey, Lonnie Smith, Joe Farrell, Grant Green, and many more to create the album. The record is bass- and percussionheavy with a lyrical focus on Afrocentrism, a theme aided by using so many jazz samples, combining two distinctly African American genres. Q-Tip recognized this connection between hip hop and jazz, rapping on the album’s opener “Excursions:” “Back in the days when I was a teenager / Before I had status and before I had a pager / You could find the Abstract listenin' to hip-hop / My pops used to say, it reminded him of Bebop.” (Abstract is another name Q-Tip went by.) He raps that he has been listening to hip hop for a long time, back when the genre was in its early stages and mainly performed live, based on improvisation and freestyling. His father makes a connection between hip hop and bebop, a style of jazz known for its improvisation, drawing a connection from the hip hop of the 90s to the jazz of the 40s and 50s. Q-Tip places this bar at the beginning of the record to recognize and call attention to the stylistic roots that hip hop has in jazz. Using this comparison, hip hop is portrayed as a natural creative progression from jazz. Masterful jazz sampling can be heard on the track “Jazz (We Got)” in which the organ from the 1972 recording of Jimmy McGriff’s “Green Dolphin Street” is looped over the drum line from the soul group Five Stairsteps’ “Don’t Change Your Love.” When Q-Tip and Phife Dawg’s rhymes about “hav[ing] the jazz” are added to the mix, the result is a timeless homage to the jazz of the past, the hip hop of the present, and New York City, the place that made so much of it all happen.

However, jazz also owes much of its modern creative influences to hip hop. One of the most influential figures in modern jazz is hip hop producer J Dilla. Many people’s first introduction to the Detroit native was, indeed, through A Tribe Called Quest. J Dilla produced “Get A Hold” from Tribe’s 1996 release, Beats, Rhymes, and Life, in allegedly just 12 minutes. His prowess as a producer was made clear from this point on and J Dilla pushed the envelope on hip hop beat making until his untimely death in 2006. He is a staple in the world of abstract hip hop for his unique sampling, but what often gets overlooked is his influence on modern jazz. When making his beats, J Dilla chose to play the drums on his beats instead of “quantizing” them. Quantizing is a technique in which one can subdivide drum sounds from a drum machine perfectly into positions within a measure, eliminating the human error that would come with playing the drum machine without quantizing. This would lead to irregularities in the drum patterns, which to many sounded off but to a visionary like J Dilla brought more life to his beats. This drum style is called “Drunk Funk'' and was adopted by many modern jazz artists. Many jazz artists, such as Karriem Riggins and the aforementioned Robert Glasper, cite J Dilla as a key influential figure in their musical journeys. Instead of jazz strictly influencing hip hop, like in the early days of the genre, there is a sharing of ideas that allows for both genres to blossom. In the modern age more than ever, jazz and hip hop each rely on the other to continue to push the boundaries and innovate within each genre respectively.

Join WKCR and Ted for a Sunday Profile of A Tribe Called Quest and their jazz rap style on August 13th from 2pm-7pm.

Works Cited

Arnold, Eric. “Robert Glasper Carries Black Music Into a Post-Hip-Hop World.” KQED,14 July 1970, www.kqed.org/arts/13931600/ robert-glasper-blue-note-jazz-festival.

“How Jazz and Hip Hop Harmonize: J Dilla, Herbie Hancock, and Nas.” YouTube, 1 Feb. 2021, https://youtu.be/LBKeDBr2M3U.

Accessed 28 July 2023.

Kelley, Frannie. “A Tribe Called Quest: The Rise and Fall of a Legend.” NPR, 21 July 2011, www.npr.org/sections/ therecord/2011/07/26/138584427/a-tribecalled-quest-the-rise-and-fall-of-hip-hopsbeatles.

PQ, Rory. “Hip Hop History: From the Streets to the Mainstream.” ICON Collective Music Production School: LA & Online, 23 May

2023, www.iconcollective.edu/hip-hophistory#:~:text=Hip%20hop%20is%20 a%20subculture,we%20see%20an%20 economic%20collapse.

Russonello, Giovanni. “Why J Dilla May Be Jazz’s Latest Great Innovator.” NPR, 7 Feb. 2013, www.npr.org/sections/ ablogsupreme/2013/02/07/171349007/why-jdilla-may-be-jazzs-latest-great-innovator.

Sorcinelli, Gino. “It Took Dilla 12 Minutes to Make A Tribe Called Quest’s ‘Get a Hold.’” Medium, 20 Jan. 2019, medium.com/microchop/it-took-dilla-12-minutes-to-maketribes-get-a-hold-ce1d0e31bf4a.