{"id":11209,"date":"2025-09-07T23:06:26","date_gmt":"2025-09-08T04:06:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/postgenre.org\/staging\/4567\/?p=11209"},"modified":"2025-09-08T12:11:28","modified_gmt":"2025-09-08T17:11:28","slug":"kassa-overall-cream-roots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/postgenre.org\/staging\/4567\/kassa-overall-cream-roots\/","title":{"rendered":"Keeping the Roots Growing: A Conversation with Kassa Overall"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Here is a fun exercise for a reader\u2019s consideration. Consider these two quotes: \u201c[It is] just a bunch of notes thrown together without melody or soul\u2014hardly what I\u2019d call music\u201d and “[It’s] not music\u2026 [it] doesn\u2019t require musicianship\u2026.” What genre of music are they referring to? Here is a hint- the music grew organically through the hard work of artists – overwhelmingly young, Black men from urban areas – who stretched existing forms, while incorporating improvisation. So, what is it? Well, it is a bit of a trick question. The first quote is from a jazz critic deriding the birth of bebop. The second is Stanley Crouch attacking hip hop. The fact that Crouch is rallying against music that did not fit his shallow perspective is hardly a surprise; the man practically made a career out of deriding music he was too poor a drummer to make and about which he maintained an intentional ignorance. But the juxtaposition of the two quotes is fascinating. Even someone as narrow-minded as Crouch would not dare to question the artistic integrity of bebop. Instead, it is coined – partly due to Crouch\u2019s work – as a part of \u201cAmerica\u2019s classical music.\u201d Of course, part of the gradual acceptance and acclaim came from the passage of time. A lot can change in the half-century between the emergence of bebop and Crouch\u2019s bloviations. But now that we are equidistant in time from DJ Kool Herc\u2019s back-to-school jam at 1520 Sedgwick, where does that leave hip hop? While sampling and rapping have permeated the social status quo, their artistic recognition remains \u2026 varied. Kassa Overall\u2019s CREAM<\/em> (Warp, 2025) is an essential entry into the enduring conversation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, the meeting of jazz and hip hop is hardly new. But historically, the invitation to mingle largely came from the latter. The earliest samples were of musicians like Donald Byrd. By the 1980s and 1990s, groups like A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Gang Starr, and Digable Planets further deepened the connections through samples. Some – as with Guru\u2019s Jazzmatazz series – used live instrumentation as well. There were also jazz musicians showing an interest, Miles Davis, for one, but often they were simply jazz pieces with some samples, beats, or rap added on top, not a full integration of styles. While the Twenty First Century would bring more collaboration – with Roy Hargrove and Robert Glasper as some early leaders – this trend of \u201chip hopping jazz\u201d largely remained the norm. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

CREAM<\/em> flips this predominant approach on its head by starting from the opposite end. The album eschews the electronic trappings of drum machines, samples, or overdubs to let the heart and soul of these works to more discernibly emerge. But CREAM<\/em> is not simply one of many works that try to turn hip hop acoustic. Instead, the album takes hip hop songs – with a particular focus on ’90s recorded output by Notorious B.I.G., Wu-Tang Clan, and Dr. Dre, among others – and pulls their compositional structures in new directions while allowing ample space for improvisation.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of particular importance, though perhaps unsurprising for a drummer, is Overall\u2019s approach to rhythm. One of the greatest composers of the last twenty years was James Yancey, better known as J Dilla. Like Charlie Parker before him, Dilla\u2019s life was cruelly short, but he made such revolutionary steps in the little time he had here. Perhaps most important was his development of a third school of rhythmic thought: rhythmic time-feel. This concept is addressed at length in Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm <\/em>(MCD, 2022) by Dan Charnas, who also contributed liner notes to CREAM<\/em>. However, a short explanation is that the concept aims for a unique off-balance groove by combining straight and swung time. While this rhythmic time-feel approach is a common influence in jazz-hip hop hybrids, Overall’s use to explore hip hop classics in a fully acoustic setting is rare indeed. He still swings hard, but the adoption of time-feel gives the music a distinctive swagger as it moves forward. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The result is songs like a laidback balladic version of Juvenile\u2019s \u201cBack That Azz Up.\u201dA flute-led samba through Biggie\u2019s \u201cBig Poppa.\u201d Or the furtively mysterious allure of Dr. Dre\u2019s \u201cNuthin\u2019 But a ‘G’ Thing\u201d that recalls Wayne Shorter\u2019s \u201cSanctuary.\u201d In the process, Overall and his bandmates – saxophonist Emilio Modeste, keyboardist Matt Wong, bassist Jeremia Kal\u2019ab, and percussionist Bendji Allonce – expose the beauty and compositional ingenuity at the core of the original hip hop classics. At a time when questioners of the form are already losing ground due to things like Kendrick Lamar winning a Pulitzer Prize, CREAM<\/em> leaves them to face an undeniable truth: Not only is hip hop an inescapable branch off the tree that created \u201cAmerica\u2019s Classical Music,\u201d but its artists’ works are every bit as artistically significant. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overall is especially well-suited to make such a bold assertion. The once child prodigy went from making beats on an MPC and ASR 10 from a police auction to being nominated for a jazz Grammy. A\u00a0 leading figure at the frontlines of where jazz and hip hop meet, his prior albums like I THINK I\u2019M GOOD <\/a><\/em>(Brownswood, 2020) and Animals<\/em> (Warp, 2023) not only blurred the space between genres but did so while aptly tackling such heavy topics as mental health and racism.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We caught up with Overall on the road –  a thirty hour drive with his cousin Jeremiah from Seattle to Chicago – to learn about the origins of CREAM<\/em> and the importance of taking the artistry of hip hop seriously. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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PostGenre: CREAM <\/em>goes in the opposite direction of most music exploring the connection between jazz and hip hop in that it does not add beats or samples to acoustic music but instead takes well-known hip hop songs and finds ways to stretch them out and explore them acoustically. Where did that idea come from? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Kassa Overall: There were a bunch of events that led to the album becoming what it is. Little things mostly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For one, the Grammys asked [my band] to do a video for Grammy.com where we were to pick any song that’s been nominated for a Grammy and cover it in our own way. We ended up doing a version of [Snoop Dogg\u2019s] \u201cDrop It Like It\u2019s Hot\u201d where we freaked it out. We put in weird new chords, odd time signatures, and different things. We had fun with it. What we did was very easy for a jazz musician [in terms of technique]. We started playing the song in live sets, and people were really connecting with it. Even if what we were playing was the simplest and most obvious concept, we started to think that maybe what we were doing was unique. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I think I would actually go back a little bit further to when I first started my first record, Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz<\/em> (self-release, 2019). I remember having frustrations –  as a hip hop maker and hip hop lover, and as a jazz maker and jazz lover – of how everybody seems to always approach putting the two together in the same way. Take a couple of chords from jazz songs, put a beat on it, and that\u2019s it. Why do we always have to dumb down our skill set to make a hip-hop flavored jazz song? It didn\u2019t make much sense.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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