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The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 27, Issue 4, pp. 435–459, ISSN 0277-92 69, electronic ISSN 1533-8347.
© 2010 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests
for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s
Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/
jm.2010.27.4.435.
435
I am grateful for the helpful comments and suggestions on this
material by a number of individuals, including Jane Brandon,
Carlo Cenciarelli, Mervyn Cooke, Dan Grimley, Tim Hughes,
Mark Katz, Adam Krims, Katherine Williams, and numerous
anonymous reviewers. I owe special thanks to the British Library
and Dawn-Elissa Fischer and Marcyliena Morgan at the Stanford
Hiphop Archive (now at Harvard University) for access to media
materials crucial to this article. Additional support was provided
through a research grant from the Economic and Social Research
Council, UK (Ref. PTA-026-27-2307).
1
Christopher John Farley, “Hip-Hop Goes Bebop,” Time, July 12, 1993, available at:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,978844,00.html (accessed August
17, 2007).
2
Quoted in Danyel Smith, “Gang Starr: Jazzy Situation,” Vibe, May 1994, 88.
The Construction of
Jazz Rap as High Art
in Hip-Hop Music
J USTIN A. WILLIAMS
For doubters, perhaps rap + jazz will = acceptance.
1
—Christopher John Farley,
in Time, July 12, 1993
“T
he so-called jazz hip hop movement
is about bringing jazz back to the streets. It got taken away, made
into some elite, sophisticated music. It’s bringing jazz back where it
belongs.”
2
The late rapper Guru made this statement in a 1994 inter-
view for Vibe magazine, at a time when the “jazz rap” subgenre had be-
come a widely discussed phenomenon in media discourse. Simultane-
ously, the owering of eclectic rap groups and subgenres in the hip-hop
mainstream—a period some writers refer to as the “golden age” of the
JM2704_02.indd 435 11/22/10 5:06:09 PM
the journal of musicology
436
genre (1986–93)—was coming to an end.
3
During this era, multiple
subgenres aunted a wide variety of lyrical content, imagery, and eclec-
tic musical styles, digitally sampled and borrowed.
4
This essay focuses on a particular moment in hip-hop music history,
roughly 1989–93, which saw the construction of jazz rap as an alternative
to other rap subgenres such as “gangsta” and “pop rap.” Most impor-
tantly, the status of jazz as a sophisticated art form in the mainstream
culture industries in 1980s America played an important role in the cul-
tural reception of jazz rap. Despite Guru’s desire to bring jazz “back to
the streets,” the ideological damage had been done, so to speak—jazz
aesthetics and imagery contributed to highbrow distinctions within the
hip-hop music world.
Functionally speaking, the construction of jazz rap represented the
creation of a unique type of high art within the rap music world, the term
“high art” being understood specically as a distinction within the hip-
hop domain and not with respect to cultural discourse more generally.
When discussing rap music or hip-hop as an art form, writers position
certain groups or genres at the top of an authenticity hierarchy, as op-
posed to the lower “mass culture” of other rap subgenres. Although art-
ists, reviewers, and other commentators may not use the terms “high art”
or “mass culture” in the context of rap music, the meaning and purpose
of this distinction, which has been used for at least a century in American
culture, remain consistent with other cultural realms, past and present.
5
3
Considered by historians to begin in the mid- to late-1980s and ending in 1993,
this “golden age” began with Run-D.M.C.’s rise to popularity and ended with what Jeff
Chang calls “the big crossover” in Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. In this era, a diversity of artists
and groups such as N.W.A., Ice Cube, Public Enemy, and 2 Live Crew coexisted in the rap
mainstream with Jungle Brothers, KRS-One, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, women
such as MC Lyte and Queen Latifah, and pop-rap artists MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice.
Writers and critics lament the loss of this “golden age” in light of the post-1992 hegemony
of gangsta rap in the mainstream. See Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the
Hip-hop Generation (London: Ebury, 2005), 420; and William Jelani Cobb, To the Break of
Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip-hop Aesthetic (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 47.
4
A distinction is to be drawn between musical borrowing in general and (digital)
sampling, which amounts to a special case of musical borrowing. By the late-1980s or
early 90s, sampling had become cheaper and more efcient: many producers switched
from the E-Mu SP-1200 to Akai MPC samplers, which were more exible and allowed for
more complex sampling techniques. For more detail on this shift, see Classic Material: The
Hip-Hop Album Guide, ed. Oliver Wang (Toronto: ECW Press, 2003), 32; see also Joseph
G. Schloss, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-based Hip-hop (Middleton: Wesleyan University
Press, 2004), 34–35; and Felicia M. Miyakawa, Five Percenter Rap: God Hop’s Music, Message,
and Black Muslim Mission (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 107. For a thor-
ough explanation and discussion of digital sampling, see Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How
Technology has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), in particular,
chap. 7, “Music in 1s and 0s: The Art and Politics of Digital Sampling,” 137–57; see also
Joanna Demers, “Sampling the 1970s in Hip-hop,” Popular Music 22, no. 3 (2003): 41–56.
5
Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in Amer-
ica (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
JM2704_02.indd 436 11/22/10 5:06:09 PM
WILLIAMS
437
Although attempts to place artists and groups within subgenres are
inherently problematic, genre systems are nonetheless useful: “simply
reference points,”
6
as Krims suggests, a “blunt instrument” that is a
“necessary step in grasping representation in rap.”
7
As stereotypes or
“ideal types,” the genres in question are constructed and used by the
music industry, fans, and the media as structural interpretative frame-
works. Examining contemporary music journalism is a particularly use-
ful method by which to gauge this type of reception. Yet surprisingly,
journalism (especially on hip-hop) has received less attention than it
should in popular-music studies, for arguably it is reception, rather than
composer intentionality or a musicologist’s individual interpretation,
that proves crucial to the productive discussion of digital sampling and
other forms of borrowing in hip-hop and other musical cultures.
With regard to the term “jazz rap”: I use it here for the sake of
simplicity, since numerous classications (e.g., hip-bop or jazz hip-
hop) were given to artists and groups at the time. Jazz codes—sounds,
lyrical references, and imagery that were identied as jazz—facilitated
the establishment of this subgenre and became a focal point for writ-
ers and fans. Although groups belonging to the hip-hop “golden age”
sampled from a number of styles, jazz was a cultural product familiar
to the popular consciousness of various audiences in 1980s America.
Furthermore, ideological associations with jazz helped to shape iden-
tities for those who sampled and borrowed from jazz styles, and they
informed a hierarchy within hip-hop largely based on art-versus-com-
merce rhetoric.
Jazz and the 1980s
Mainstream jazz in the 1980s United States centered not so much on
new developments as on the revival of older styles; and what seemed to
dominate the public jazz discourse in this era was the notion that jazz was
serious art music. The 1980s witnessed a widespread expansion in the
cultural mainstream of what I call a “jazz art ideology,” many characteris-
tics of which developed during the bebop era of the 1940s and 50s; and
they were revived in part because of successful “neoclassical” conservative
jazz musicians like Wynton Marsalis.
8
By then, jazz had moved to concert
halls, academic institutions, and to within close proximity of the classical
6
Krims, Rap Music, 92.
7
Ibid., 55.
8
“Neoclassical” conservative jazz is a term used by Gary Giddins in his introduction,
“Jazz Turns Neoclassical,” Rhythm-a-ning: Jazz Tradition and Innovation in the ’80s (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985), xi–xv. The idea of jazz as an elite art form was ad-
mittedly supported by a selected number of critics and writers well before the bebop era,
particularly in France, and often centering on the work of Duke Ellington.
JM2704_02.indd 437 11/22/10 5:06:10 PM
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438
section of music stores. Jazz became a symbol for many things: America,
democracy, African American culture, and most important to this study,
highbrow art music.
9
Stylistically, the jazz revived in the 1980s became
what Stuart Nicholson calls “the hard-bop mainstream,”
10
and its pro-
motion by a number of younger musicians helped usher the music into
membership in the cultural aristocracy.
The 1980s jazz renaissance occurred in a number of ways, including
not only the touring of jazz artists and reissuing of jazz classics, but also
the aggressive marketing of a younger generation of jazz musicians. Films
like Bird (1988) and Round Midnight (1986) showed tormented genius
musicians, and Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues (1990)
11
romanticized the jazz
world and put jazz in the cultural consciousness of the hip-hop genera-
tion.
12
As for print media, dozens of jazz books and autobiographies were
published and reissued to create and accommodate demand during this
jazz resurgence.
13
The Cosby Show, the most successful American sitcom of
the 1980s, presented an upper-middle-class black family, used jazz musi-
cians as guests (including Tito Puente, Dizzy Gillespie, the Count Basie
Band, Jimmy Heath, Art Blakey, and Max Roach) and featured jazz-based
scoring as music cues between scenes.
14
Although the show had been crit-
icized for avoiding issues of race explicitly, it reinforced jazz’s association
with the black middle class by suggesting a highbrow sophistication to be
set off against lower-class African American representations in popular
culture, notably the “hood” lms of the early 1990s.
15
9
Robert Walser noted that “by the 1980s, jazz had risen so far up the ladder of cul-
tural prestige that many people forgot it had ever been controversial.” He cited a 1987
resolution by the U.S. Congress that declared jazz had “evolved into a multifaceted art
form” and that the youth of America need “to recognize and understand jazz as a signi-
cant part of their cultural and intellectual heritage.” (Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History,
ed. Robert Walser [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], 332–33).
10
For a more complete description, see Stuart Nicholson, Jazz: The 1980s Resurgence
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), vi.
11
A popular single from the soundtrack of Mo’ Better Blues was “Jazz Thing” by the
hip-hop group Gang Starr (MC Guru and DJ Premier). The song tells a selective history
of jazz, uses a number of jazz samples from across jazz’s history, and includes characteris-
tic turntable scratching styles from DJ Premier. The single and accompanying music video
uses stock footage from older jazz performances, such as those from Duke Ellington and
Charlie Parker. “Jazz Thing” brought the group national attention, though Gang Starr as
a group subsequently tried to distance themselves from any jazz-rap categorization.
12
Other jazz lms of the 1980s worth mentioning are the Chet Baker documen-
tary Let’s Get Lost (1989), dir. Bruce Weber, and the Thelonious Monk biopic Straight, No
Chaser (1989), dir. Clint Eastwood. Additionally, a number of jazz musicians were writing
lm scores at the time (e.g., Terence Blanchard, Mark Isham, Lennie Niehaus).
13
Christopher Harlos, “Jazz Autobiography: Theory, Practice, Politics,” in Represent-
ing Jazz, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 132–33.
14
The show ran from 1984 to 1992 and was the number 1 show in America for ve
consecutive years.
15
These lms include Boyz n the Hood (1991), dir. John Singleton, South Central
(1992), dir. Steve Anderson, Juice (1992), dir. Ernest R. Dickerson, and Menace II Society
JM2704_02.indd 438 11/22/10 5:06:10 PM
WILLIAMS
439
Television commercials were also associating jazz with afuence.
Chase Manhattan Bank, American Express, the Nissan Inniti luxury
car, and Diet Coke all used jazz in their television advertising.
16
In 1988,
Yves Saint Laurent designed their fragrance “JAZZ For Men,” which
ran ads in Rolling Stone magazine and elsewhere.
17
Another advertise-
ment in a 1991 Rolling Stone featured British jazz saxophonist Courtney
Pine modeling GAP turtleneck sweaters.
18
Partially inspired by Wynton
Marsalis’s taste for ne suits (and that of the other young musicians
who followed his lead), marketers connected jazz with high fashion.
The clean-cut images portrayed by these jazz musicians suggested a cul-
tural elite, a higher-class ethos sharply contrasted to the working-class
images of many rock and heavy metal performers.
There was a further institutionalization of jazz in education: middle
schools and high schools added jazz bands to their lists of ensembles,
universities offered classes and degrees in jazz, and parameters of the
music were codied for the purposes of teaching improvisation.
19
As
Grover Sales commented in his aptly titled Jazz: America’s Classical Music
(rst published in 1984), “Monk, Mingus, Dolphy and the Miles Davis
Sextet with Coltrane and Evans will fuel musicians of the future, just as
Bach and Haydn prepare conservatory graduates.”
20
Wynton Marsalis, more than any other individual, played a key role
in the mass-scale legitimization of jazz in the 1980s. A trumpet player
and composer from New Orleans, he was the rst recording artist to
hold a record contract in jazz and classical music simultaneously (at
age nineteen, with Columbia Records), and the rst artist to win Gram-
mys in jazz and classical in the same year (1983; he repeated the feat
in 1984). He cofounded Jazz at Lincoln Center in 1987, rmly placing
(1993), dir. Albert and Allen Hughes. Juxtapositions of the black middle class and a
lower class were not new. For example, this distinction was made during the Harlem Re-
naissance in the 1920s. For more on the black middle class, see William Julius Wilson, The
Declining Signicance of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Mary Patillo,
Black Picket Fences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); and Karyn Lacy, Blue-Chip
Black (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
16
See Krin Gabbard, intro. “The Jazz Canon and Its Consequences,” in Jazz among
the Discourses, ed. Gabbard (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 1–2; see also Gabbard,
Jammin’ at the Margins (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996), 102; and Richard Cook,
Blue Note Records: The Biography (London: Secker and Warburg, 2001), 182.
17
One example can be found in Rolling Stone, no. 565, November 16, 1989, 1.
18
Rolling Stone, no. 600, March 21, 1991, 2. This was part of a larger GAP campaign
entitled “Individuals of Style,” which featured Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Maceo Parker,
Courtney Pine, and others. See John McDonough, “Jazz Sells,” Downbeat, October 1991, 34.
19
This includes methods taught by Jamey Aebersold, Jerry Coker, and David Baker.
For a more detailed account of these developments in jazz education, see David Ake, Jazz
Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 112–45 (chap. 5: “Jazz ’Traning:
John Coltrane and the Conservatory”).
20
Grover Sales, Jazz: America’s Classical Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), 219.
JM2704_02.indd 439 11/22/10 5:06:10 PM
the journal of musicology
440
jazz in the concert hall on a regular basis. Described by Francis Davis
as “rebelling against non-conformity,”
21
Marsalis championed the great
composers of acoustic jazz while dismissing any nonacoustic endeavor
as a debased derivative of a pure art form. He was even more abruptly
dismissive of pop music and hip-hop. Inuenced heavily by jazz ide-
ologies of Stanley Crouch and Albert Murray, Marsalis became, to
quote Richard Cook, a “jazz media darling in an age when there simply
weren’t any others.”
22
Accepting interviews for magazines, television,
and newspapers as well as hosting jazz programs on National Public Ra-
dio and the Public Broadcasting System, Marsalis became the rare case
of a cultural producer (musician/composer) who was also a cultural
intermediary—a public intellectual whose inuence created boundar-
ies, denitions, and tastes for the public.
23
Reafrming the notion that
jazz was “America’s classical music,” he was (and still is) a gatekeeper of
the “jazz tradition.”
Although no time and place is ever truly homogeneous ideologi-
cally, the belief that jazz was a “serious music” became pervasive in
media discourse of the 1980s as jazz became associated with afuence,
sophistication, and a highbrow aesthetic that resisted being considered
a “popular music.”
24
Sonorities identied as jazz occupied the main-
stream cultural consciousness, and the political legitimacy of jazz would
affect the reception of those who borrowed from the imagery and mu-
sic of the genre.
Jazz Rap
Whereas musicians of the 1980s jazz mainstream tended to cultivate
older styles idiomatically intact, hip-hop artists were envisioning music
of the past differently, rst through the technology of the turntable,
21
Francis Davis, In the Moment: Jazz in the 1980s (New York: Oxford University Press,
1986), 29–41 (“The Right Stuff”). See also Stuart Nicholson, Is Jazz Dead? (Or has it moved
to a new address) (London: Routledge, 2005), 23–52 (“Between Image and Artistry: The
Wynton Marsalis Phenomenon”).
22
Cook, Blue Note Records, 212–13.
23
Perhaps the most exemplary document of his views at the time can be found
in an article Marsalis wrote for the New York Times (July 31, 1988) entitled “What Jazz
Is—and Isn’t,” subsequently anthologized in Walser, Keeping Time, 334–39. For more on
cultural intermediaries, see Keith Negus, “The Work of Cultural Intermediaries and the
Enduring Distance Between Production and Consumption,” Cultural Studies 16, no. 4
(2002): 501–15.
24
There were multiple forms of jazz in the 1980s, with a number of ideological
connotations. Two worth mentioning are the more avant-garde streams of jazz, exempli-
ed by John Zorn and Anthony Braxton, and smooth jazz, which was a lighter version of
fusion from the 1970s. Smooth jazz artists such as Kenny G and David Sanborn are often
the focus of criticism from jazz purists, but their albums were commercially successful in
the 1980s and helped to form their own signicant jazz subgenre.
JM2704_02.indd 440 11/22/10 5:06:11 PM
WILLIAMS
441
then with samplers and other studio technology to create something
new. Both hip-hop and jazz had their origins as dance music; they were
largely the product of African American urban creativity and innova-
tion, and they shared rhythmic similarities: hip-hop and hard-bop jazz
of the 1950s and 60s were stylistically dened by a dominance of the
beat. Bebop jazz was a source of inspiration for many 1950s hipsters
and beat poets, and poetry was often recited with jazz accompaniment
(almost as a proto-rap form). Improvisation (more specically, the abil-
ity to improvise in the generic idiom) was linked to authenticity in both
jazz and hip-hop.
25
For mainstream jazz, in addition to the technical
mastery of one’s craft, it was what one did with the past that made one
authentic, and battles (or “cutting contests”) were not uncommon in
the early days of jazz as a way to gain respect (and gigs) in the musical
community; in certain subgenres of hip-hop, one’s ability to freestyle
(improvise raps on the spot) and to “battle” rap are sure signs of au-
thenticity in certain “underground” rap and DJ circles.
Rap groups such as De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Gang Starr,
and Digable Planets emerged from the late 1980s and early 90s with
categorizations for their music, including jazz rap, jazz-hop, jazz hip-
hop, hip-bop, new jazz swing, alternative rap, and others.
26
Most overtly,
the shared African American musical lineage of jazz and hip-hop be-
came a focus in the reception of jazz rap in interviews and other jour-
nalism. From a practical standpoint, the artists’ parents and siblings of-
ten had record collections that were readily available and could be used
to sample.
27
In fact, some rap artists had jazz musician parents, most
25
Reginald Thomas, “The Rhythm of Rhyme: A Look at Rap Music as an Art Form
from a Jazz Perspective,” in African American Jazz and Rap: Social and Philosophical Ex-
aminations of Black Expressive Behavior, ed. James L. Conyers (London: McFarland, 2001),
165–66. For examples of underground rap scenes, see Marcyliena Morgan, The Real
Hiphop (Durham: Duke University, 2009), and Anthony Kwame Harrison, Hip Hop Under-
ground (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009). Cinematic examples of such battles
can be found in the Eminem quasi-biopic 8 Mile (2003), dir. Curtis Hansen.
26
The term “new jazz swing” can be found in Portia K. Maultsby, “Africanisms in
African American Music,” in Africanisms in American Culture, ed. Joseph Holloway, 2nd
ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 327. Jazz rap or alternative rap had
also been deemed (and dismissed as) “college boy” rap, no doubt inuenced by the high-
brow topics of groups like Digable Planets and jazz’s associations with college-educated,
middle-class audiences. Many groups, such as A Tribe Called Quest, did become popular
on college campuses before expanding to a wider audience. College radio stations also
had successful underground hip-hop communities that would also organize events on
campus. See Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, 422; Shawn Taylor, People’s Instinctive Travels and
the Paths of Rhythm (New York: Continuum, 2007), 66; Krims, Rap Music, 65.
27
One example of a producer inuenced by his parents’ jazz tastes is DJ Premier;
Ty Williams “Rap Session—Hip-Bop: The Rap/Jazz Connection,” The Source, September
1992, 21. See also David Toop, The Rap Attack 2 (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992), 189;
and Brian Coleman, Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-hop Junkies (New York: Villard,
2007), 164–65, 235.
JM2704_02.indd 441 11/22/10 5:06:11 PM
the journal of musicology
442
recognizably rapper Nas, whose father Olu Dara occasionally performs
on his son’s albums. Rapper Rakim (of Eric B and Rakim) was a saxo-
phone player whose mother was a professional jazz and opera singer.
28
The father of turntablist Grandmaster D.ST (later DXT) managed jazz
musicians like Clifford Brown and Max Roach.
29
As Buttery of Digable
Planets raps, “my father taught me jazz, all the peoples and the anthem /
Ate peanuts with the Dizz and vibe with Lionel Hampton.”
30
If jazz and
hip-hop are most often treated as separate musical and cultural institu-
tions, then the linking of the two acted as a symbolic exchange, an alli-
ance that increased the social capital of both.
31
Many groups that sampled jazz were part of a loose collective called
the Native Tongues: Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, and A Tribe Called
Quest, all formed in New York in 1988, rapping politically and socially
conscious lyrics while promoting Afro-humanistic identities. Although
they were inspired by Afrika Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation, it was the New
York City scene generally that most directly inuenced both their jazz
awareness and their knowledge of early hip-hop. Taylor notes that A
Tribe Called Quest in particular “steered away from the ubiquitous funk
and old-school soul samples of their fellow Tongue members and em-
braced rock and roll and jazz. . . . They were socially relevant, proudly
black and whimsical, quirky and condent, a near perfect amalgama-
tion of the other two groups.”
32
The lyrics and imagery of these groups often displayed an ethos
most appropriately identied as bohemian,
33
and their references
spanned numerous countercultures, from hippies to Five Percenter cul-
ture, beatniks, and blaxploitation lms. In the case of Digable Planets,
overt references to bebop and hard bop musicians stood side by side
with their rendering of existential and Marxist philosophies. Album ti-
tles such as Digable Planets’s Reachin’: A Refutation of Time and Space and
A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm
28
Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, 258.
29
Grandmaster D.ST was featured on the 1983 Herbie Hancock single “Rock It”
and this was one of the earliest high-prole collaborations between jazz and hip-hop art-
ists. S.H. Fernando, Jr., The New Beats: Exploring the Music, Attitudes, and Culture of Hip-Hop
(New York: Doubleday, 1995), 140.
30
Buttery, “Examination of What” (track 14) on Digable Planets, Reachin’ (A New
Refutation of Time and Space), (1:45).
31
Bourdieu makes the distinction between social capital and cultural capital in
“The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed.
John G. Richardson (London: Greenwood Press, 1986), 243–48.
32
Taylor, People’s Instinctive Travels, 9–10.
33
Krims, Rap Music, 65–70. Bohemianism is certainly a feature of the language and
style of the 1950s “hipsters” who also looked to jazz as part of a early cold war sensibility
of hipness. See Phil Ford, “Hip Sensibility in an Age of Mass Counterculture,” Jazz Perspec-
tives 2, no. 2 (2008): 121–63. And as Ford reminds us, “Elitism is essential to hipness,”
not only in contemporary jazz but also in cold war hip sensibilities more generally (142).
JM2704_02.indd 442 11/22/10 5:06:11 PM
WILLIAMS
443
project the complexity of their subject matter through an insider lan-
guage difcult to decipher (similar to arcane bebop song titles such as
“Epistrophy” and “Ornithology”). Both the obscurity of their lyrics and
their incorporation of jazz sonorities signaled a higher artistic plane—a
notion of rap as high art and expander of consciousness.
Jazz Codes
Musical elements that have been identied as jazz codes include a
walking acoustic bass, saxophones, trumpet with Harmon mute,
34
and
jazz guitar, to name a few.
35
As Steve Redhead and John Street have
written, authenticity “is rarely understood as a question of what artists
‘really’ think or do, but of how they and their music and image are
interpreted and symbolized,”
36
and the same could be said of genre
identications. For my purposes, the interpretation of jazz codes is an
issue of audience reception rather than intention or the identication
of sources for a jazz sample. Thus when Wynton Marsalis complained
in the late 1980s that “people don’t know what I’m doing, basically,
because they don’t understand music. All they’re doing is reacting to
what they think it remotely sounds like,”
37
he acknowledged that au-
thorial intent (or performer intent) may differ greatly from audience
interpretation. For example, an acoustic bass may signify a “live” jazz
aesthetic, even though it may be achieved through digital sampling. If a
rap group samples from a 1970s funk horn line, it may be identied in
its old context as funk; but in the newer context, the instrumentation of
sax and trumpet may be interpreted as jazz.
A jazz code falls under what Philip Tagg calls a genre synecdoche—
an instrument or musical structure that is shorthand for an entire style
or genre.
38
In jazz rap, this may be achieved by the timbre of a particular
34
The Harmon mute, specically designed for brass instruments, is made of metal
with a ring of cork around the outside so that air can escape only through the mute. It
creates a quiet but sharp and metallic sound and was often used to change timbre of the
trumpet or trombone in jazz big band music. It can be played with or without a metal
“stem” that drastically changes the sound when inserted in the mute. Its sound was spe-
cially associated with Miles Davis, who used the mute (without stem) frequently during
his long career.
35
This approach to jazz codes is particularly indebted to the semiotic methodolo-
gies of John Fiske and Philip Tagg.
36
Steve Redhead and John Street, “Have I the Right? Legitimacy, Authenticity and
Community in Folk’s Politics,” Popular Music 8, no. 2 (1989): 180. Redhead and Street
interpret Sting’s collaboration with jazz musicians for his rst solo album The Dream of the
Blue Turtles (1985) as a gesture of political legitimacy.
37
Rai Zabor and Vic Garbarini, “Wynton vs. Herbie: The Purist and the Cross-
breeder Duke It Out,” in Keeping Time, 342.
38
Philip Tagg, Introductory Notes to the Semiotics of Music, version 3 (1999), 26–27,
available at: http://www.tagg.org/xpdfs/semiotug.pdf (accessed August 22, 2009).
JM2704_02.indd 443 11/22/10 5:06:11 PM
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444
instrument (e.g., saxophone) and the jazz performance approach to an
instrument (e.g., “walking” acoustic bass lines). The parameters of tim-
bre, instrumentation, and performance approaches are arguably more
important to jazz identity than syntactical processes (melody, harmony,
and other musical features that can be represented in score notation).
Jazz as a performance approach produces a particular jazz feel (nota-
bly “swung” eighth notes and expressive sub-syntactical microrhythmic
variations)
39
along with the associations of particular instruments and
their timbres. (Admittedly, this is better represented through recorded
excerpts than through the “categorical perception”
40
of a musical score,
though I provide some transcriptions for illustrative purposes below.)
41
Technically speaking, it is the sub-syntactical level of expressive timing
(that which contributes to Keil’s “engendered feeling”) that character-
izes a swing feel. As Matthew Buttereld argues, the groove in jazz arises
not from syntactical processes, but from expressive microtiming at the
sub-syntactical level.
42
These are the parameters that contribute to the
identication of jazz codes.
Codes, like music genres, simplify in order to clarify and categorize
a heterogeneous reality. The audience then interprets meanings with
regard to these codes, actively constructing from a text (in this case, a
recording) and changing the text in the process. Rather than simply a
transmission from media to individual, there is a conversation between
the two. The attempt to x such unxed texts through genre categori-
zation is one of the two strategies the music industry has for controlling
unreliable demand (creating stars is the other).
43
The texts in question
are nonetheless sites of constant shifts and change, so that interpreta-
tion is largely dependent on the perspective of listeners or interpretive
communities. For jazz rap, the socially situated interpretations point
to the 1980s mainstream jazz art ideology. What follows are examples
of “jazz codes” in the lyrics, imagery, and “beats” of two canonical jazz
39
Matthew W. Buttereld, “The Power of Anacrusis: Engendered Feeling in Groove-
Based Musics,” Music Theory Online 12, no. 4 (2006).
40
“Categorical perception” is a term that Eric Clarke uses to describe the way we
perceive music in certain durational categories (e.g., quarter note, eighth note, half note,
etc.). See Eric F. Clarke, “Rhythm and Timing in Music,” in The Psychology of Music, ed. Di-
ana Deutsch, 2nd ed. (Burlington: Burlington Academic Press, 1999), 490.
41
Most hip-hop studies take a sociological or historical approach rather than a
musicological one. In fact, the use of musical notation is, more often than not, seen as
exclusionary and elitist by many who do academic work on hip-hop music and culture.
My intention in including music examples is primarily to emphasize the importance of
the musical detail on hip-hop recordings, notably what may be described as an intra-
musical discourse, an element whose agency all too often goes unexplored in hip-hop
scholarship.
42
Buttereld, “The Power of Anacrusis,” 4.
43
Simon Frith, “The Music Industry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, ed.
Simon Frith, John Street, Will Straw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 35.
JM2704_02.indd 444 11/22/10 5:06:12 PM
WILLIAMS
445
rap groups: A Tribe Called Quest and Digable Planets. (Here I will use
the hip-hop terminology “ow” to designate the delivery of rap lyrics
and “beat” to refer to its sonic complement: not only its percussive ele-
ments, but all sounds on the recording that do not include the rapper’s
“ow.”)
In A Tribe Called Quest’s second album, The Low End Theory
(1991), where jazz bassist Ron Carter is featured on “Verses from the
Abstract,” jazz codes can be recognized throughout; the sounds of
acoustic bass, saxophone, and vibraphone are the most prominent of
these.
44
Q-Tip and Phife’s lyrics (on The Low End Theory) feature criti-
cism of the music industry and the more commercially successful pop,
R&B, and “new jack swing” artists.
45
Q-Tip pointedly sets himself apart
from pop rappers in “Check the Rhime”:
Industry rule number four thousand and eighty,
Record company people are shady.
So kids watch your back ’cause I think they smoke crack,
I don’t doubt it. Look at how they act.
Off to better things like a hip-hop forum.
Pass me the rock and I’ll storm with the crew and . . .
Proper. What you say Hammer? Proper.
46
Rap is not pop, if you call it that then stop (2:54–3:14).
Example 1 shows the “Check the Rhime” saxophone phrase from
the chorus.
47
Acting as a jazz code, the sampled saxophone phrase pro-
vides a sonic alternative to R&B and pop rap, a musical complement
to the lyrical meaning. Phife invokes a similar distancing from pop on
their second single, titled “Jazz (We’ve Got),” when he claims that their
songs are “strictly hardcore tracks, not a new jack swing” (2:02). The
44
A Tribe Called Quest was formed in Queens in 1988. The members of the group
were producer/DJ Ali Shaheed Muhammad, MC/producer Q-Tip (Jonathan Davis), and
MCs Phife (Malik Taylor) and Jarobi (only on the rst album). Their debut album People’s
Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm (1990) also featured a number of jazz samples.
For analyses of unity between beat and ow in ATCQ’s “Scenario,” “Can I Kick It,” and
“Push It Along,” see Kyle Adams, “Aspects of the Music/Text Relationship in Rap,” Music
Theory Online 14, no. 2 (2008).
45
New jack swing was a style from the late-1980s and early-1990s that fused hip-hop
and R&B into a hybrid pop style. Notable producers included Teddy Riley, Jimmy Jam,
and Terry Lewis. The song “Show Business” discusses the difculties of working in the rap
music industry, structuring the common artist/group vs. music industry paradigm.
46
The use of the word “proper” in this instance is a reference to the catchphrase
used by MC Hammer in a 1991 Pepsi commercial, which introduced him as “MC Ham-
mer: rap star and Pepsi drinker.”
47
This phrase is sampled from “Love Your Life” by the Average White Band, Soul
Searching (1976) (also sampled by Fatboy Slim for “Love Life”). The song also samples
“Hydra” by Grover Washington Jr. from Feels So Good (1975) and the bass line from Min-
nie Riperton’s “Baby This Love I Have” and Steve Miller Band’s “Fly Like an Eagle.”
JM2704_02.indd 445 11/22/10 5:06:12 PM
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446
chorus of “Jazz” contains a sample of Lucky Thompson playing the rst
four measures of the jazz standard “On Green Dolphin Street.” The
song opens with the group chanting “We’ve got the jazz” repeatedly
with a jazz drummer (on brushes) and an acoustic bass pedal point.
Another example of what may be understood as an instance of a
pop/rap binary comes from “Excursions,” the rst track in the Low End
Theory. After a four-measure bass intro (with no drums), Q-Tip raps the
following verse (to the solo acoustic bass accompaniment):
Back in the days when I was a teenager
Before I had status and before I had a pager
You could nd the Abstract [Q-Tip] listening to hip-hop
My pops used to say it reminded him of bebop
I said, well daddy don’t you know that things go in cycles
The way that Bobby Brown is just ampin’ like Michael.
These opening lyrics acknowledge the African American lineage from
bebop to hip-hop, yet a distinction is drawn between black “pop music”
such as that of Michael Jackson and Bobby Brown on one hand, hip-
hop and bebop on the other. “Excursions” opens with an acoustic bass
gure that loops throughout the song (ex. 2a).
48
48
This bass riff is from “A Chant for Bu” by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. The
original is in ¾ time, and producer Q-Tip was able to copy-and-paste the rst two eighth
notes of the measure to create a beat in common time: “I took the original bass line,
which was in ¾ time, and I put a beat onto the last measure to make it
4
/
4
. I made the
drums underneath smack, so it had that big sound. And I put a reverse [Roland TR-] 808
H
@
@
@
H @
@
@
@
@
@
Y
Alto and Tenor
Saxophones
= 98
O
example 1. “Check the Rhime” (0:05)
@
@
@
@
@
@
L
L
L
L
L
L
Y
Acoustic
Bass
= 84
O
3
example 2a. “Excursions” (0:00)
JM2704_02.indd 446 11/22/10 5:06:13 PM
WILLIAMS
447
The acoustic timbre sampled here signies a musical authentic-
ity that nds its roots in both folk music and jazz; and on the chorus,
samples from a recording of “Time” on the 1971 album This Is Madness
from The Last Poets represents a borrowing of both lineage and the
cultural prestige of poetry (ex. 2b).
Just as Wynton Marsalis and other neoclassical, conservative jazz
musicians in the 1980s distanced themselves from pop music, A Tribe
Called Quest was distancing rap from pop.
49
In order to classify A Tribe
Called Quest as “true” hip-hop, Q-Tip distinguished himself from pop
rappers like MC Hammer. Both beat and ow work together to gener-
ate a sense of authentic or noncommercial (i.e., countercultural) iden-
tity. A Tribe Called Quest drew on a long-standing art-versus-commerce
myth by evoking a sense of authenticity that aligned jazz, so-called al-
ternative rap, and other musics. Similarly, criticizing the popular music
industry positioned ATCQ on the outside, again distancing them from
associations of corruption and decay often attributed to mass music.
[drum machine] behind it, right before the beat actually kicks in. I loved that Last Poets
sample on there, too.” Quoted in Brian Coleman, Check the Technique, 443.
49
Of course, this distancing from pop had been a phenomenon before the 1980s:
bebop musicians distanced themselves from “commercial” swing music of the 1930s and
40s, and rock and punk musicians have often dened themselves against pop in lyrics
and interviews. Even earlier, Louis Armstrong received criticism for surviving the Great
Depression by having a singing career on Broadway.
@
@
@
@
¤
H
@
H
@
@
@
@
@
@
@
@
¤
H
H
L
L
L
L
L
L
Y
Y
Y
Trumpet
in B
Tenor
Saxophone
Acoustic
Bass
@
3
example 2b. “Excursions” (1:40)
JM2704_02.indd 447 11/22/10 5:06:14 PM
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448
Economic denial is a familiar story, a quality of bourgeois production
found in jazz, rap, and many other forms of popular music and art as a
mark of their authenticity.
50
ATCQ’s recordings thus stage an awareness
of mainstream commercialism as other by suggesting that artists such as
MC Hammer and Bobby Brown are operating under a false conscious-
ness compared with their informed, less mainstream rap counterparts,
even if this is not explicitly the case. Such dichotomies are reminiscent
of what Phil Ford calls the “asymmetrical consciousness” of the hip-
ster and the square (“The hipster sees through the square but not vice
versa”).
51
Of all the jazz rap groups from this period, Digable Planets ar-
guably aunted jazz connections and references most overtly by men-
tioning jazz musicians in many of their lyrics and using numerous jazz
samples.
52
Their bohemian image, which had been largely borrowed
from the concept of the 1950s hipster, was evident in their use of such
jazz-related words as “cool,” “cat,” “hip,” and “dig.” Jazz was also used
as a marketing tool for the group. An ad for their debut album in The
Source magazine (April 1993) contained the headline “jazz, jive, poetry,
& style.” The same issue contained a Digable Planets interview with pic-
tures of the members in a jazz club setting, both male members being
shown with a trumpet. And their rst music video, for “Rebirth of Slick
(Cool Like Dat),” featured the group performing in a jazz club setting
in New York City. Jazz became the vehicle by which to market Digable
Planets and the framework to use for reviews, interviews, and other
journalism.
53
The complex collage of terminology and cultural references in their
lyrics borrowed from multiple countercultures: 1950s hipsters and beat
poets, spoken word poetry, hippies, Five Percenter Culture, “old school”
hip-hop (Fab 5 Freddy, Crazy Legs of the Rock Steady Crew, Sugarhill Re-
50
The idea of being “uncommercial” or not “selling out” was a characteristic of
authenticity found in a number of music genres. It extends at least as far back as the Ro-
mantic notions of transcendence and timelessness in nineteenth-century music. Bourdieu
has written about the idea of economic disinterestedness as a bourgeois production illu-
sion; see Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” 242.
51
Ford, “Hip Sensibility in an Age of Mass Counterculture,” 123.
52
Formed in 1989, Digable Planets included members Buttery (Ishmael Butler,
from Brooklyn), Doodlebug (Craig Irving, from Philadelphia), and Ladybug (Mary Ann
Viera, from Maryland).
53
“Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)” was released in November 1992 in anticipa-
tion of the February 1993 album release of Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space).
“Rebirth of Slick” received heavy radio airplay by January, the accompanying music video
was prevalent on both MTV and BET, and it had sold 400,000 copies by early February.
This single is by far the most well known from the group; it reached number 1 on the
Billboard Hot Rap chart and number 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles chart, and the
album reached number 15 on the Billboard Top 200. “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)”
also received a Grammy in 1994 for Rap Performance by a Duo or Group.
JM2704_02.indd 448 11/22/10 5:06:15 PM
WILLIAMS
449
cords), and other poets (The Last Poets, Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou).
There were jazz references (Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, Hank Mob-
ley, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach), allusions to 1970s blaxploitation lms
(e.g., Cleopatra Jones), and other signiers of African American identity
(e.g., Afros and other hair references such as “don’t cover up your nappy,
be happy with your kinkin” from “Examination of What”). As in so many
American countercultures, particularly those in the 1950s and 60s, refer-
ences to drugs (usually marijuana, as “nickel bags”) complemented an
antiauthoritarian atmosphere (speaking against Uncle Sam, the “pigs,”
and “fascist” conservatives). Lyrical references to Sartre, Camus, and po-
litically tinged lyrics about abortion (in the song “La Femme Fetal”) were
frequently mentioned in reviews of the album.
The sonic and visual imagery of the jazz club played a signicant
role in their music as well as in their media image. At the end of the
rst track of Reachin’, “It’s Good to Be Here” (which included jazz gui-
tar, trumpet, and acoustic bass), an announcer (3:25) begins to intro-
duce the group to the backdrop of a jazz piano vamp, with bass and
nger snapping on the backbeat (beats 2 and 4 in
4
/
4
time, ex. 3):
Good evening insects, humans too
The Cocoon Club
54
is pleased to present to you tonight a new band
Straight from sector six and the colorful ghettos of outer space
They are some weird mother fuckers but they do jazz it up
So let’s bring them out here, yeah.
54
The “cocoon club” is perhaps a reference to the famous Cotton Club of Harlem
as well as a continuation of the insect metaphors in their lyrics and stage names.
example 3. “Jazz Club Motive” from “It’s Good to Be Here” (3:35)
¤
¬
¬
¬
¤v
¬
@
d
Y
Y
Y
Y
Y
h
¡
+
Keyboard
w/Piano Sound
= 112
O
Bass
Ride Cymbal
Finger Snaps
swing feel vamp
JM2704_02.indd 449 11/22/10 5:06:15 PM
the journal of musicology
450
Following these words from the announcer, Buttery introduces
the group and then says “the mind is time / the mind is space / a
horn rush, a bass ush / the mind’s the taste / so sit back, enjoy the
set, yeah,” later repeating this line during a fadeout. The music video
for “Rebirth of Slick” features the members taking the New York sub-
way to a local jazz club where they perform with a Japanese rhythm
section to a diverse, yet small, audience. (The entire video is shot in
black-and-white.) The irony of this is obvious—promoting a live aes-
thetic of a jazz club for a recording that had been constructed through
digital sampling. The presence of jazz instruments nonetheless suggests
“liveness.”
55
Because of the cultural associations with acoustic jazz (in
this case, acoustic bass, piano, and drums playing a jazz vamp), these
jazz instruments would be heard as live, thereby suggesting the authen-
ticity of unmediated expression and creativity. No doubt the narration
of the “announcer” plays a crucial role in creating a jazz club sound-
scape as well. A similar effect occurs at the end of “Swoon Units,” where
a jazz club “sound stage” is created by means of a jazz rhythm section
and the sound of audience talking (as Buttery says he is “hippin up
the nerds”). At the end of the album, each member of the band pro-
vides a nal stanza with the earlier jazz club motive sonic background.
These three separate jazz club interludes on the album use the same
musical material, thereby solidifying the interpretation of various jazz
tropes as central themes or as fundamental to the group’s image and
style.
56
Their debut single “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)” is exemplary
in the use of jazz codes within hip-hop beats. As shown in table 1, the
instrumental introduction is sixteen measures long (4 + 4 + 4 + 4); the
rst four measures include the solo walking acoustic bass phrase that
repeats throughout the song (as bass gure 1; see ex. 4a).
57
The second four measures consist of bass gure 1 accompanied by
nger snapping on beats 2 and 4. The third set of four measures adds
drums, and the fourth adds a horn line with saxophone and trumpet.
Verses include acoustic bass and drums, with a variation on the bass line
(bass gure 2) in every concluding four-measure unit. On the chorus,
55
The most extensive study of “liveness” is Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in
a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999).
56
“Last of the Spiddyocks,” a track with numerous jazz musician references and
features a Harmon muted trumpet in the beat, ends with audience applause—another
signier of liveness.
57
The bass line also features as a leitmotiv in “Appointment at the Fat Clinic”
(track 11) and “Escapism (Gettin’ Free)” (track 10), not as central to the basic beat as in
“Rebirth of Slick,” but as a small moment within the other two songs. This bass line, now
associated with Digable Planets’ moment of success, has been sampled by later rap artists
(e.g., E-40 for “Yay Area”).
JM2704_02.indd 450 11/22/10 5:06:16 PM
WILLIAMS
451
the words “I’m cool like that” repeat every two beats with the horn line
from the intro (with the bass and drums, ex. 4b).
The particular sonic texture from the chorus (horns, bass, and
drums) becomes the central jazz trope in the song. The drum sounds
(not given in the transcription) include a modied beat from The Hon-
eydrippers’ “Impeach the President” (1973), which is an often-sampled
example 4a. “Rebirth of Slick (Cool like Dat)”
L
L
L
C
L
Y
C
v
= 98
O
4
7
Bass figure 1
C C
C
Bass figure 2 (last 4 bars of each verse)
One-bar rhythm section
break going into chorus
example 4b. “Rebirth of Slick” chorus (0:29)
L
L
Y
Y
Y
Y
C
Acoustic
Bass
Trumpet
Tenor
Saxophone
& Trombone
Finger Snaps
C
TABLE 1
“Rebirth of Slick,” opening measures
Instrumental introduction measures
Solo acoustic bass (bass gure 1) 1–4
Bass gure 1 with nger snaps 5–9
Bass gure 1 with nger snaps and drums 10–14
Bass gure 1 with snaps, drums, and horn line 15–19
JM2704_02.indd 451 11/22/10 5:06:17 PM
the journal of musicology
452
funk song. The track is still identiable as jazz through the use of bass
and horns, although it does not use jazz-style drum sounds (a point
of comparison would be the drum sounds on A Tribe Called Quest’s
“Jazz”).
58
Doodlebug’s third verse of “Rebirth of Slick” demonstrates the ab-
stract, specialist language of their lyrics:
We get you free ’cause the clips be fat boss
Them dug the jams that commence to goin’ off
She sweats the beats and ask me could she puff it
Me I got crew kid, seven and a crescent
Us cause a buzz when the nickel bag a dealt
Him that’s my man with the asteroid belt
They catch a zz from the Mr. Doodlebig
He rocks a tee from the Crooklyn nine pigs
Rebirth of slick like my gangster stroll
The lyrics just like loot come in stacks and rolls
You used to nd the bug in a box with fade
Now he boogies up your stage plaits twist the braids.
Both A Tribe Called Quest and Digable Planets used complex lyrics that
may appear incomprehensible to a square outsider. As Kyle Adams has
argued, the lack of narrative unity or cohesion in the lyrical content of
groups like A Tribe Called Quest can be explained through a rapper’s
desire to match the sounds and rhythm of their “ow” to a precom-
posed “beat.”
59
Even if this is the case, connections to 1950s hipster ter-
minology signify a loosely unied countercultural or “hip” ethos be-
tween beat and ow.
60
Groups like A Tribe Called Quest and Digable
Planets were negotiating a complexity of topics and ideas musically and
lyrically, and a closer reading of the two groups would show striking dif-
ferences in a number of ways.
61
But in the media reception of many of
these groups, jazz became a readily identiable unifying force.
58
The timbres of funk drum sounds are a rmly ingrained sonic signier of hip-
hop, beats that allow a surprising amount of exibility for the sound of the overall prod-
uct, depending on the other sounds sampled or borrowed. The bass line and horn gures
derive from Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ “Stretchin” from the album Reections in
Blue (1978).
59
See Adams, “Aspects of the Music/Text Relationship in Rap.”
60
I do not mean to imply here that nding unity should be the goal in music analy-
sis of any kind, as smaller units of meaning can also warrant investigation in the close
reading of music recordings. See Justin A. Williams, “Beats and Flows: A Response to Kyle
Adams,” Music Theory Online 15, no. 2 (2009).
61
Though I focus on jazz references in these groups, it is worth acknowledging the
high degree of unconcealed intertextuality in hip-hop music and culture more generally,
and I would go as far to say that it forms the fundamental aspect of hip-hop aesthetics.
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WILLIAMS
453
Media Reception
Jazz rap groups like A Tribe Called Quest were often dened by
their sounds in ways that their counterparts in other rap subgenres
could not be. To quote Crane, “Cultural information that is already fa-
miliar because of its associations with previous items of culture is more
readily assimilated into the core,”
62
the “already familiar” being jazz
codes and their attached high art ideologies. The “core,” in this case, is
the mainstream discourse as framed by various media; and print media
such as Rolling Stone, The Source, Vibe, and Rap Pages contextualized the
jazz samples in terms of class, intelligence, and artistic achievement.
One Rolling Stone review described the sounds of ATCQ’s rst al-
bum as “funkied quiet-storm pseudo-jazz you might expect young Afro-
centric upwardly mobiles to indulge in when they crack open that bottle
of Amaretto and cuddle up in front of the gas replace: plenty of sweet
silky saxophones.”
63
John Bush wrote “Without question the most intel-
ligent, artistic rap group during the 1990s, A Tribe Called Quest jump-
started and perfected the hip-hop alternative to hardcore and gangsta
rap.”
64
One writer expressed that the Low End Theory “demonstrated that
hip-hop was an aesthetic every bit as deep, serious and worth cherishing
as any in a century plus of African-American music . . . giving a rap the
same aesthetic weight as a Coltrane solo.”
65
Journalist Brian Coleman
wrote of the group “Every time they hit the studio they added a serious,
studious, jazz edge to their supremely innovative productions.”
66
Other
adjectives used suggested that they were “more cerebral”
67
than other
styles, had a “more intellectual bent,”
68
and were “more reective.”
69
62
Diana Crane, The Production of Culture: Media and the Urban Arts (London: Sage,
1992), 10.
63
Chuck Eddy, “Review of People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm,” Rolling
Stone, no. 576, April 19, 1990, 15.
64
John Bush, “A Tribe Called Quest,” allmusic.com, available at: http://allmusic.
com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:dcxq95ld6e (accessed June 1, 2007).
65
Peter Shapiro, The Rough Guide to Hip-Hop, 2nd ed. (London: Rough Guides,
2005), 363, 365.
66
Coleman, Check the Technique, 435.
67
Big B, “Record Report—Arrested Development,” The Source, May 1992, no. 32,
56. See also “Jazz Rap,” in The All Music Guide to Hip Hop: The Denitive Guide to Rap and
Hip Hop, ed. Vladimir Bogdanov (San Francisco: Backbeat, 2003), ix.
68
“Given its more intellectual bent, it’s not surprising that jazz-rap never really
caught on as a street favorite, but then it wasn’t meant to.” “Jazz Rap,” in The All Music
Guide to Hip Hop, ix.
69
“Among the leading proponents of this more reective style (including De
La Soul and the Jungle Brothers), A Tribe Called Quest was arguably the most accom-
plished.” Considine and Randall, “A Tribe Called Quest,” from The New Rolling Stone Al-
bum Guide, 2004, on Rollingstone.com, available at: http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/
atribecalledquest/biography (accessed June 1, 2007).
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the journal of musicology
454
Such descriptions implied the elevation of this music to the status of a
(bourgeois) high art comparable to jazz.
For Digable Planets, media reception of Reachin’ also focused on
jazz as a high cultural facet of their music. Lyrical references to jazz
and musical borrowing of jazz codes featured prominently in reviews.
Digable Planets were described as “accessible without succumbing to a
pop mentality.”
70
Kevin Powell wrote in his review that Digable Planets
“is everything hip-hop should be: artistically sound, unabashedly con-
scious and downright cool. And Digable Planets is the kind of rap act
every fan should cram to understand.”
71
Both reviews noted an element
of intellectualism in their music, the former explicitly citing jazz and ex-
istentialist references. Another reviewer wrote that in Reachin’ “sampled
snatches of music from jazzmen Sonny Rollins and Art Blakey conjure
the feel of smoky bebop clubs and two-drink minimums. . . . These jazzy
undercurrents give the album a laid-back quality that refutes the riotous
stereotype of rap.”
72
The frequent juxtaposition of jazz rap with rapper/producer Dr.
Dre is particularly pertinent in the context of Digable Planets since
both had albums and singles released at about the same time.
73
Dr.
Dre’s album The Chronic is often seen as the yardstick historically and ge-
nerically when gangsta rap begins to dominate the rap mainstream and
crosses over into pop music realms.
74
ATCQ had also been compared
directly with Dr. Dre, as Kevin Powell wrote that A Tribe Called Quest
and De La Soul provided “nuthin’ but ‘P’ things: poetry, positive vibes,
and a sense of purpose.”
75
This was a reference to Dr. Dre’s “Nuthin’
But a ‘G’ Thang,” the rst single from The Chronic. Thus when the me-
dia reviewed Digable Planets or other jazz rap artists and albums, they
contrasted jazz rap with Dr. Dre (and his label Death Row Records),
viewing the latter as representative of a gangsta rap mainstream. The
distinctions drawn encompassed sonorities used, lifestyles promoted,
and ideologies implied. One article states:
70
Editors of The Source, “Pop Life,” The Source, January 1994, 26.
71
Kevin Powell, “Review of Reachin’ (A Refutation of Time and Space)” (4 stars), Rolling
Stone, no. 650, February 18, 1993, 61. Powell is most likely referencing the MC Lyte song
“I Cram to Understand You,” as intertextual references were often as important to hip-
hop journalism as it was to the music.
72
Farley, “Hip-hop Goes Bebop.”
73
Both Digable Planets (“Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)”) and Dr. Dre (“Nuthin’
But a ‘G’ Thang”) had a single and music video permeating media space at the same
time. See Billboard, February 6, 1993. Both singles were nominated for the Best Rap Per-
formance by a Duo or Group Grammy Award, with Digable Planets winning the award.
74
See Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, 420; and Eithne Quinn, Nuthin’ but a “g” Thang:
The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 161.
75
Kevin Powell, “Review of Midnight Marauders and Buhloone Mindstate,” Vibe, No-
vember 1993, 103.
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WILLIAMS
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In the early 1990s, while Suge Knight’s Death Row records dominated
hip-hop with artists like Dr. Dre and Tupac, Digable Planets chose the
same high road that De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest had already
taken—they all but ignored gangsta culture. MCs Doodlebug, Butter-
y, and the sweet-voiced Ladybug combined a positive vibe with jazz
samples to create ultra-laid-back joints that provoked head bobbing
rather than drive-bys. Their debut, Reachin’, invaded college boom
boxes and birthed the Top 20 hit and Grammy winner “Rebirth of
Slick (Cool Like Dat).”
76
Placing De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, and Digable Planets on a
“high road” in opposition to Death Row artists like Dr. Dre and Tupac
Shakur juxtaposes the two with respect to subgenre and implies both
Digable Planets’ perceived audience and their listening space (“college
boom boxes”). Although both Dr. Dre and Digable Planets were consid-
ered rap music, for many the two represented opposite ends of a rap
spectrum. Such positioning, constructed by those who worked within
these imagined juxtapositions—including artists, media, fans, and the
industry—served to legitimate the artists’ own practices.
77
Jazz Codes and Meaning
Jazz is of course by no means univocal. It is important to note that
the jazz art ideology identied here is far from the only existing identity
for jazz in the 1980s and other eras. For example, in 1950s lm noir,
“crime jazz” often accompanied the corrupted, dark side of the city;
jazz projected sex, drugs, and other vices of a depraved urban land-
scape (e.g., The Sweet Smell of Success, The Man with the Golden Arm). As
bebop musicians were crafting an elite, virtuosic music appreciated by
hipster-intellectuals, jazz-inuenced lm scores used instruments such
as a scooping jazz saxophone to represent the sexuality of a femme fatale.
This is still evident in recent parodies of lm noir, for example on the
television cartoon series The Simpsons.
78
And although this essay is pri-
marily concerned with the use of jazz in the hip-hop world, there were
76
David Malley, “Digable Planets,” Rolling Stone Album Guide, 2004, available at:
http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/digableplanets/biography (accessed June 1, 2007).
77
Many other hip-hop groups, such as Organized Konfusion, Stetsasonic, Main
Source, Black Moon, Freestyle Fellowship, The Roots, Quasimoto, and Souls of Mischief
have incorporated jazz codes that have contributed to their alternative rap categoriza-
tions. Although the media gave much less attention to jazz rap after the mid-1990s, the
link between jazz and hip-hop continues into the twenty-rst century with artists including
U.S. trumpeter/rapper Russell Gunn, U.S. pianist Robert Glasper, and U.K. saxophonist/
rapper Soweto Kinch.
78
These musical tropes were still used in the 1980s; one example was the use of the
saxophone in the action series MacGyver for a sexually charged fantasy sequence between
MacGyver and a woman.
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the journal of musicology
456
instances in which inuence owed in the other direction as well: art-
ists closer to the jazz world who collaborated with musicians and ideas
from hip-hop scenes in the 1980s and 90s.
79
Were such practices defensible artistically? At worst, the less con-
servative jazz musician who used elements from hip-hop or the hip-hop
producer who digitally sampled from jazz records might be accused of
gravitating to whatever was commercially popular and protable at the
time. Record labels, by the same token, could be criticized for fostering
hip-hop and jazz collaboration in order to rebrand an old genre and
thus sell back catalogues. At best, jazz musicians who borrowed and
collaborated with hip-hop could be said to improve the genre, staying
close to their musical lineage while trying something new in the spirit
of jazz as a verb rather than a noun. Thus whereas jazz codes added a
degree of sophistication and cultural elevation to rap, hip-hop codes,
such as turntable scratches and hiss from sampled vinyl, could be heard
on a number of jazz recordings as “subcultural capital” said to signify
hipness or coolness.
80
The examples cited above help show how jazz can symbolize a va-
riety of meanings, depending on context and interpretive community,
for example high culture, the “street,” sexuality, hipness, elite tastes, or
urban corruption. However, it was jazz, constructed and distributed as
high art in the 1980s mainstream culture industries, that proved to be
the most pervasive ideology in contemporary cultural interpretations.
As Robert Fink has written, there is now a redenition of art music that
includes jazz (and rock); new composers borrow from rock and jazz, so
that “postminimalism’s embrace of alternative rock/jazz culture is arty
composers turning not away from artiness, but toward it.”
81
In many of these cases, the interpretation of jazz codes tends to-
ward the general rather than the specic, so that the precise meanings
79
For example, three years after Gang Starr’s successful “Jazz Thing” (where rapper
Guru stated, “The 90s will be the decade of a jazz thing”), Guru made a hip-hop album
entitled Jazzmatazz Vol. 1 (1993) in collaboration with various jazz musicians including
Branford Marsalis, Donald Byrd, and Courtney Pine, and he later produced three sub-
sequent volumes of the series (vol. 2, 1995, vol. 3, 2004, vol. 4, 2007). At this time, jazz
musicians such as Herbie Hancock, Branford Marsalis, Quincy Jones, Wallace Roney, and
Greg Osby were making hip-hop inuenced albums. Additionally, Blue Note Records
allowed the group US3 (led by British producers Geoff Wilkinson and Mel Simpson)
to sample extensively from their catalogue free of charge, producing Hand on the Torch
(1993), which became the top-selling album on Blue Note Records at the time, and the
rst to reach platinum sales in the United States. Their single “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)”
received widespread radio play and added to the jazz and hip-hop fusion trends at the
time. For information on the use of electronics, turntables, and sampling technology in
more recent jazz, see chap. 6, “Future Jazz,” in Nicholson, Is Jazz Dead?
80
“Subcultural capital” is theorized in Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures (Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 10–14.
81
Robert Fink, “Elvis Everywhere,” American Music 16, no. 2 (1998): 146.
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WILLIAMS
457
of songs can be less important than what the genre has been imag-
ined to represent. In an attempt to decode meaning, journalists often
categorize jazz rap artists in terms of preestablished frames. A muted
trumpet or a walking acoustic bass are recognizable signiers—sonic el-
ements that have become emblematic of jazz, as interpreted by certain
sociohistorically situated interpretive communities. As in earlier jazz al-
bums and concerts that used string sections as a sign of class (e.g., Paul
Whiteman’s symphonic jazz of the 1920s, “concert jazz” made famous
by Duke Ellington, or Charlie Parker with Strings from 1950), acoustic
bass and horns have become a sign of class in rap music.
82
Jazz in the
1980s became associated with the middle class, and its ideological as-
sociations were brought to groups who sampled jazz. Jazz rap became
identied as a counterculture (although the artists themselves do not
use the term), an “alternative” within the rap world, partly dened by
jazz signiers that reinforced preexisting cultural meanings.
As Gary Tomlinson has noted with respect to authentic meaning
in music, “all meanings, authentic or not, arise from the personal ways
in which individuals, performers and audience, incorporate the work
in their own signifying contexts. . . . The authentic meanings of a work
arise from our relating it to an array of things outside itself that we
believe gave it meaning in its original context.”
83
His comments point
to the importance of locating a context for the act of relating musical
codes “to an array of things outside itself,” a crucial component in the
study of musical borrowing and intertextuality of any era, and certainly
applicable to the understanding of jazz rap and the “signifying context”
for various interpretations of the genre.
Jazz codes arising from that context could easily be identied and
distinguished from other rap music sonorities that had largely become
the norm. For example, the sound of an acoustic bass—“Can I Kick It?,”
“Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat),” “Excursions”—is strikingly differ-
ent to that of the funk bass or synthesized bass of many rap styles, for
example, Dr. Dre’s “G-funk” style. And the use of a jazz guitar—“Bonita
Applebum,” “Push It Along,” and “It’s Good to be Here”—is conspicu-
ously opposed to the use of rock or metal guitars for Rick Rubin’s pro-
duction work with the Beastie Boys and Run D.M.C.: the former implies
82
The use of classical idioms and instruments to elevate jazz and African American
culture has a long history, best described in John Howland, Ellington Uptown: Duke Elling-
ton, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2009). In light of these traditions, it is interesting to note that on a general level, jazz has
a similar function for hip-hop as classical forms had for concert jazz. The current case
may emphasize the African American cultural linkage, whereas the former emphasized
the hybridity between European (white) styles and African American ones.
83
Gary Tomlinson, “Authentic Meaning in Music,” in Authenticity and Early Music,
ed. Nicholas Kenyon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 123.
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the journal of musicology
458
a George Benson sound, whereas the latter points more to Eddie van
Halen or Jimi Hendrix. Likewise, a muted trumpet or certain horn
lines may suggest jazz, but in other styles of rap, instrumental horn lines
may be synthesized; more often, drum sounds from funk music will be
sampled with the accompanying horn sounds (e.g., trumpet, trombone,
saxophone) omitted from the sample.
To take the bifurcation of styles a step further: if early 1990s gang-
sta rap suggests a listening space of a car or West Coast block party, then
jazz rap may evoke more bourgeois environments, such as the modern-
day jazz club or a hi- stereo system in one’s living room. Jazz rap im-
plied a more introspective or private experience, to be listened to on
a Walkman as opposed to a dance club (e.g., early 90s pop rap of MC
Hammer or Vanilla Ice).
84
Musical codes can sometimes imply particu-
lar spaces (such as a jazz club), based on a number of factors, includ-
ing cultural and stylistic associations as well as dominant images from
our media-saturated society. If jazz is said to create a certain “vibe” or
“atmosphere,”
85
then this is further proof that jazz, and other musics,
have the ability to imply certain spaces in their recordings. In short,
sounds are situated spatially as well as socially and historically.
86
As Stuart Hall has written, one of the ideological functions of the
media is to distinguish between the center and the periphery—that
is, between the realm of a legitimizing “mainstream” and that of an
“alternative.”
87
But in a subculture, legitimacy is reversed, the center
being understood as inauthentic, whereas the periphery exudes authen-
ticity. Having a niche, perceived to be followed by few, helps to solidify
the subcultural identity of the periphery. For example, bebop, with its
niche authenticity as opposed to swing music, was one particular sub-
culture. The same niche authenticity can be said to exist in folk music,
art lms, so-called indie labels, “alternative” musics, and “conscious” or
“backpack” rappers. In an “age of mass counterculture” (to borrow Ford’s
phrase), the constructions of these subgeneric categories are important
84
Matt Diehl has described East Coast rap as “interior,” for contemplative Walk-
man listening on the subway as opposed to the West Coast automobile-centric listening
of “pop rap.” Matt Diehl, “Pop Rap,” in The Vibe History of Hip Hop, ed. Alan Light (New
York: Three Rivers Press, 1999), 129.
85
For an example of sampling to create atmosphere in Brand Nubian, see Mi-
yakawa, Five Percenter Rap, 111–14.
86
For attention to this third dimension from a geographical perspective, see Edward
Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford: Black-
well, 1996).
87
Stuart Hall, “Culture, Media, and the Ideological Effect,” in Mass Communication
and Society, ed. James Curran, Michael Gurevitch, and Janet Woolacott (London: Open
University Press, 1977).
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WILLIAMS
459
and ever-present, offering membership in an elite society that attempts
to appear more closed and marginalized than it actually is.
88
Despite protestations from the artists themselves, groups such as A
Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Digable Planets, and Gang Starr were
largely dened by the styles from which they sampled and borrowed.
A walking acoustic bass, a muted trumpet, or saxophones are sonic
elements that have become emblematic of jazz, and jazz codes enact
commentary with these attached, historically situated ideologies. Rap
music’s borrowing from jazz was a key gesture in the dening of jazz
rap as a sophisticated alternative in hip-hop’s ongoing struggle for cul-
tural legitimacy.
Anglia Ruskin University
ABSTRACT
Multiple factors contributed to the elevation of jazz as “high art” in
mainstream media reception by the 1980s. The stage was thus set for
hip-hop groups in the late-1980s and early 90s (such as Gang Starr, A
Tribe Called Quest, and Digable Planets) to engage in a relationship
with jazz as art and heritage. “Jazz codes” in the music, said to signify
sophistication, helped create a rap-music subgenre commonly branded
“jazz rap.” Connections may be identied between the status of jazz, as
linked to a high art ideology in the 1980s, and the media reception of
jazz rap as an elite rap subgenre (in opposition to “gangsta” rap and
other subgenres). Contemplation of this development leads to larger
questions about the creation of hierarchies, value judgments, and the
phenomenon of elite status within music genres.
Keywords: A Tribe Called Quest, Digable Planets, hip-hop, jazz, popular
music
88
This is aligned with Ford’s writing on 1950s hip sensibilities: “The ethic of exclu-
sion, of trials and secret knowledge—in short, an ethic of elitism.” Ford, “Hip Sensibility
in an Age of Mass Counterculture,” 140.
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