There's been a lot of talk about the fusion of Hip-Hop, cla**ical rap and jazz for quite some time. Like the strong Black men in Guru's life used to say, "Do something and stop all that talkin'!"
Jazzmatazz, an experimental fusion of Hip-Hop and jazz, is Guru's answer. The collaboration with contemporary and cla**ical jazz artists is as much an experiment as it is a natural progression for the rapper. Roy Ayers, Donald Byrd, MC Solaar, Branford Marsalis, Ronnie Jordan, Courtney Pine, Carlene Anderson (Young Disciples), N'Dea Davenport (Brand New Heavies) and Lonnie Liston Smith are the featured artists.
"It's the type of album I could give to my pops and say, ‘Just listen. This is an experiment in Hip-Hop and jazz. It's got some cats on it that you've probably been listening to.'"
Although Guru and DJ Premier of Gang Starr are credited with heightening the Hip-Hop's community in jazz, Guru admits, "We started using jazz because everyone else was doing James Brown samples." Then again, the mellow tracks with the hard rap beats make a perfect mate for his trademark voice.
"Gang Starr has sort of been down with this whole rap/jazz fusion from where it started," says Guru. "There was jazz music before there was a jazz thing." It was the "Jazz Music" cut on their No More Mr. Nice Guy LP that peaked Spike Lee's interest when he was filming Mo' Better Blues. That led to the collaboration with Branford Marsalis. Guru, or Gifted Unlimited Rhymes Universal, recited jazz history over DJ Premier's turntable scratches and the rhythms of the Branford Marsalis Quartet.
While "Jazz Thing" was receiving a huge following in Europe, several people approached Guru about working with live musicians. "I'd say for Gang Starr, we are a cla**ical rap group. So we stick strictly with turntables and a mike. That's what it all started with, so that's what we do. If I ever have an opportunity to do an experimental project, I would try it."
As the group Gang Starr, Guru and DJ Premier release their own records and work on other people's music as well. Some of their projects include work with Neneh Cherry, as well as remixes for Soul II Soul, Loose Ends and Wendy & Lisa. DJ Premier's company, Works of Mart, did five tracks for Boogie Down Productions and a few for Branford Marsalis.
"My company is called Guru Productions. I've done remixes, and production for this female rapper, Nefertiti, from L.A. Then I did Jazzmatazz," Guru says.
Jazzmatazz isn't the first attempt to bring elements of Hip-Hop and jazz together. It's been almost a decade since Herbie Hanco*k used a turntable scratcher on his jazz-fusion LP, Rockit. Fab Five Freddy and drummer Max Roach were performing live at The Kitchen in New York around that time as well. Quincy Jones' Back on the Block brought Kool Moe Dee and Big Daddy Kane together with Miles Davis, Sarah Vaugh and Dizzy Gillespie on a cut called "Jazz Corner" in 1989. The ever-evolving Miles Davis was working on Doo-Bop with Prince and Easy Mo Bee before he died. There were other groups like Stetsasonic ("Talkin' All That Jazz") and DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince ("All That Jazz") who were using samples on their records before A Tribe Called Quest and Digable Planets, not to mention what appeared to be a Hip-Hop jazz-fusion movement brewing in Europe.
While both musical forms have roots in the urban African-American experience, one basic difference kept them apart for nearly a decade. Jazz purists have problems with sampling, and most rappers aren't trained musicians. The bottom line is they use different instrumentation. For rappers, it's the voice over the mike and turntable with a funky beat. For jazz artists, it's their live instruments. Mixing the two has its challenges.
With Jazzmatazz, "I wanted to make sure that every artist that was featured ... that you could hear them in balance with my voice." Guru said. "The most difficult part was the mixing."
Two things were established when Guru and his management decided to do the project. One, Guru would produce it ("I'm not rhyming to beats I don't like"); two, they would use three older and three younger jazz artists-older artists because rappers are sampling their music; younger artists because they already know about rap. Branford Marsalis was down, as well as British guitarist Ronnie Jordan, who coined the term "new jazz swing," British saxophonist Courtney Pine, and female singer N'Dea Davenport, who went to Clark College while Guru was attending Morehouse.
"It was funny because when I saw her video, it was, like, I know her. When our managers hooked us up by phone, it was like, ‘Yeah!' It was really easy, really natural. Mostly everybody was willing to do the project."
"A couple of older cats wanted to find out more before they totally committed themselves. Lonnie Liston Smith ... he's like an older cat. He's real cosmic and smooth. We sent him a copy of the song I did for Mo' Better". Then he called me. He calls me Goo-Ru. He said, ‘Goo-Ru, I didn't know you did that song, man. Man, that is bad! When are we going to get started?' As it went on, everything started happening naturally."
"Roy [Ayers] has a son who's 18 who loves rap, you see what I'm sayin'? Donald [Byrd] teaches at Queens College. He teaches jazz. So you know Donald deals with students who love rap. Even thought they are going to learn about jazz history, they're still coming with some Hip-Hop attitude."
Guru programmed the beats and worked up a groove relative to the person he was sending it to. "I sent out all the beats ahead of time so people could hear them. So they'd have some kind of vibe before they came to work." From Donald Byrd showing Guru how Miles Davis held his trumpet, to Guru imitating Miles' raspy voice, the artists learned about rap and jazz, as well as each other. "I think they learned rap is not just about sampling and plagiarism. It's an art form."
"I learned how much of an improvisational art form jazz is, because I wrote all my rhymes on scribbly pieces of papers in the sessions around two or three in the morning. We were just sort of hangin'. It wasn't really a fact of ‘You're a jazz artist, and you're a rapper.' It wasn't really an age thing. It was like, we're doing a record together and we're going to enjoy it."
"A lot of other things I learned was just how everything is relative. . . how real jazz is in relationship to how real rap is. It's all from the Black experience. It was like doing a record with my uncle or something . . . my cool uncle."
Guru (real name: Keith Elam) grew up listening to Sonny Rollins, Nancy Wilson, John Coltrane and Charlie Parker. Although his father had a respectable jazz collection, he credits his godfather with exposing him to the "really old school of jazz."
"He used to make me sit there in front of the big speakers and just listen to this ... I'd be trying to borrow some money so I could go to some Funkadelic concert with my older brother."
Elam, the son of a municipal judge, lived in a private family house across the street from the projects in Boston with his older brother and two sisters. He found himself in a lot of trouble proving himself to his peers and rebelling against his parents before he went to Morehouse College, where his second level of exposure to jazz took place.
"When I was like 13 or 14, the kids used to challenge me because they thought I had more materially than them. Then I thought I had to prove I was down with them, so I got into some fights. Then I got with cool kids, and we started doing a lot of crazy stuff. I got into a lot of trouble. My father used ta be like, ‘Your friends are bums. You're gonna grow to be a bum, and you're not gonna stay in my house if you ain't gonna pay rent.'"
Guru credits two of his female cousins with "creating a spark in me to direct my life in a more positive manner." They used a similar approach he uses in his message-oriented music. They didn't talk down or preach to him, constantly telling him that what he was doing was wrong.
"They'd see me bringing guns into the house and having girls up there, violating every rule, right? They were like, ‘Yo, brother, we need to talk. When you get some time, could you stop by my room so we could talk about something?'"
"I couldn't dis them because it made me curious as to what they were about. As things went on, I opened up and was very close with them. Then they started taking me to the mosque. I became very much interested in the Nation of Islam. Then when I went to Morehouse, I studied a lot of religions. One of my favorite instructors was a religion instructor, Dr. Carter, a brilliant man. That definitely has had any effect on my music."
Street, intellect and spirituality are often used to describe the music of Gifted Unlimited Rhymes Universal. He describes his rhymes as relative to himself and reality with a world view. His message-oriented music incorporates lessons learned from a variety of people, places and experiences.
"The spirituality comes in ... because it all starts with knowledge of self. When you know yourself, you can better deal with others and your environment around you. If people are not proud of who they are, they are going to do things that reflect that."
"Black people get divided on superficial things ... like if you're light-skinned/dark-skinned, if you're a Christian or you're a m**m. It's designed for us to be divided. That's what we need to realize and stop trippin', you know? If we know that the system is set up to divide us as a people, we can't dwell on that. We just have to attack it. That's the whole thing. Like my grandfather used to say: ‘You want juice, you gotta know what fruit to squeeze.'"