A generation of jazz musicians has grown up with hip-hop in its blood. The result is the thrilling reinvention of a genre that has been guilty of fixating on its past.
Nice long read about hip-hop’s love affair with jazz. Starting way back, when the likes of Stetsasonic, Gang Starr, A Tribe Called Quest and Jungle Brothers were sampling heavily from jazz records and explicitly drawing connections between the two African-American art forms. Up till now with Kamasi Washington who can fill out festivals and concert halls around the world with his own spacey hard bop outfit, but just as easily works closely with hip-hop musicians like Kendrick Lamar. It’s a “bilingual generation” that plays on the common grounds that the best jazz and the best hip-hop have.