Is Jazz Dead? by Stuart Nicholson

Author:Stuart Nicholson [Nicholson, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781136731006
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-06-19T14:42:06.139000+00:00

If any point in history marked the rise of the DJ in contemporary popular culture, it was that moment back in the 1980s when Grandmaster Flash sealed his place in pop history with The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel, a never-to-be-forgotten seven minutes of existing recordings spliced together using three turntables and two mixers. A record made from nothing but other records? A record made by a DJ? At first Flash concedes he didn’t think anybody was going to get it. The turntable collaging technique that he used utilized two copies of the same album to isolate and extend the key riffs and percussion “breaks” that gave hip-hop its original name, “break music.” Not only was the record a huge underground hit, it’s now regarded as the granddaddy of sample records, a record that changed music making forever.

In the wake of Flash, rap and hip-hop mutated from urban folk art to global phenomenon with surprising speed. The first major jazz musician to pick up on the trend was Herbie Hancock, whose 1983 album Future Shock was produced by guerilla bassist Bill Laswell. The opening track, the Grammy winning “Rockit,” fused industrial sounds and turntable scratching from Grand Mixer on turntables. “When we put the record together, we used to go a lot at the time to the Roxy,” recalls Laswell. “It was on 18th or 19th Street on the West Side [of New York]. The head DJ was Africa Bambaataa and inside ofthat crew was DST and Grandmaster Flash, everybody would work there, do their thing. I remember even before we did the track, the initial two tracks with Herbie, we took him to the Roxy and Bambaataa was DJ-ing.”

“Rockit” became one of the biggest instrumental dance hits and videos of the 1980s, but perhaps surprisingly there were initially few takers from within jazz willing to follow Hancock’s path, although Laswell would pursue the creative use of turntables, samples, and sound-on-sound technology with his group Material on albums like Hear No Evil, Third Power, and Hallucination Engine, and on a range of other projects, often for the Axiom label. Meanwhile, in popular culture, while most hip-hop DJs were now combing the vast libraries of pop and funk for that elusive new “break” that nobody else was using, some were turning to jazz samples to flavor their music, such as A Tribe Called Quest — which used samples from the likes of Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan, and Cal Tjader, and had Ron Carter add the bass lines to “Verses from the Abstract” for their 1991 album The Low End Theory — Delasoul, Eric B and Rakim, and DJ Premier and Guru’s Gangstarr.

DJ Premier had good reason to include jazz samples in his music: his grandfather had been a jazz musician. When he got together with Guru, their debut creation, “Words I Manifest” — initially released as a single and incorporated on their 1989 debut album, No More Mr. Nice Guy — stood out among the late-1980s obsession

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