via Spekulation's facebook page
This popped up in my inbox a couple days ago and after giving it a listen I was pleasantly surprised. Billed as a jazz-rap effort, I was skeptical. Too often do these kinds of projects end up sounding corny, with the artists forgetting what made each genre successful in the first place to find some terrible middle ground (re: the last 3 Jazzmatazz records).
Spekulation‘s Depression Era EP, which you can grab for free at their bandcamp, avoids sounding like rappers trying to be hard over Kenny G, though its not without its flaws. A collaborative effort featuring MC Spek, bassist/composer Nate Omdal, DJ Absolute Madman, singer Michele Kazak, and a host of studio musicians, the group claims to have used hip-hop as a starting point with musicians adding jazz touches rather than sampling jazz to begin with and making it into hip-hop. The EP works best when this intent is made obvious on the first half. My favorite cut was “What Do You Do?”, with its hard-hitting snares, dark bass line, Nas scratch, and sultry singing from Kazak with subtle help from the horn section. I also dug “Flew the Coop,” which will probably be the closest a Northwest record will ever sound like a go-go song.
I’ve wondered why hip-hoppers and jazz heads have not collaborated more as of recent in the region, especially given the attention both scenes have been receiving both on a local and a national level. Garfield and Roosevelt jazz bands were written up in the New York Times in an article that pointed to Seattle as a jazz hotbed for a new generation. Other than extremely talented trumpeter Owuor Arunga showing up to play with the Physics or live bands backing local hip-hop acts, there has not been much of a real overt jazz influence since Sabzi brought lush big-band backdrops to the Blue Scholars’ debut LP way back in 2003, a sound that came to define the scene until the recent local explosion of music and its subsequent fragmentation into a ton of subgenres over the last couple years. The Depression Era EP is an interesting entry into the field, one that has its moments and hopefully signals more collaboration between these currently disparate scenes.