To suggest that electronica owes a debt to the past is an understatement. The genre is built, to a great extent, from samples of previous recordings. And no single well of musical history has proven as potable to electronica’s practitioners as jazz.
As both literal source material and as inspiration, jazz informs electronica with a singularity that no other genre approaches — certainly not rock’n’roll, whose star system and song structure bear little resemblance to the electronic scene; not classical, whose experimental wing nevertheless inspires today’s digital sonic explorers; not even hip-hop, which laid the foundation for beat- driven, sample-laden pop.
Jazz, though, informs much of today’s electronic music. Turntablists like the Invisibl Skratch Piklz crew and Mix Master Mike explore a musical athleticism with LPs that consciously recall Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s avant-garde jazz showmanship. Portishead and Tricky have defined trip-hop — essentially downbeat electronica plus vocals — as a field of modern, smoky cabaret. Funki Porcini and Amon Tobin have built entire albums from wildly reconfigured samples of jazz licks and caterwauling drum solos.
And of late, electronica has been reciprocating. When Norwegian jazz trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer was putting together his own material in 1994, he began to explore the ambient-minded textures of Bill Laswell. The result appears on his new album, Khmer (ECM), which augments a midsize electric-jazz band with samples and electric percussion. On tour, Molvaer has added a DJ, who spins records into the band’s sound. Khmer includes a second CD, with remixes of tracks by the Rockers Hi-Fi, Mental Overdrive, and the Herbalizer, who Molvaer befriended at a jazz festival when he lent the band’s trumpeter his Harmon mute. Molvaer enjoys the remixers’ sometimes drastic
reworkings of his own recordings. “I have heard thousands of versions of ‘’Round Midnight,’ he says by way of comparison, “and some of them I am sure Thelonious Monk would not recognize.”
He associates remixing with jazz’s tradition of revisiting a select songbook. “Jazz musicians have done this by playing standards,” he says, his awkward English not diminishing his enthusiasm for the subject. “Remixes are doing one thing that is there, but taking a different angle. And you can also kind of ‘design’ things. Like, if you heard a song and you wanted it to be on the dance floor, you could do a New Yorican soul mix, or you can do a drum & bass mix.”
Arriving from the opposite trajectory, Jack Dangers wanted to inject some jazz into his band Meat Beat Manifesto. So he rented two of his favorite musicians, reed player Bennie Maupin and synthesizer player Pat Gleeson. The results appear on a tune called “The Thumb” on MBM’s new album, Actual Sounds and Voices (Nothing), a tensile bonding of industrial rock and jazz fusion. Elsewhere on the record Dangers sings, “Beamed from the Hale-Bopp through bebop, Do you know what I mean?/ Triggered by a laser beam, listening to A Love Supreme.”
“All this music’s improvised,” says Dangers, whose favorite jazz includes the work of George Russell and electric-era Miles Davis. “You turn a computer on, [but] it’s not going to do anything for you. The way this music starts, it’s not up here” — he points to his head — “not, Oh, I’ll write something down. You slam a beat in, get it going, [add a] bass line, loop it up, whether it’s in a computer or a sample or on a hard drive. If there was a tape machine which did all that, people would have used that 20 years ago.”
Beth Custer is one of San Francisco’s most in-demand clarinetists. She’s best known for her long stints with the jazz-inflected Club Foot Orchestra and the world-beat Trance Mission. Her duo Eighty Mile Beach just released its debut, a dreamy trip-hop affair titled Inclement Weather (Om Records). Besides singing, she plays most of the instruments (clarinets, keyboards, glass harmonica); partner Christian Jones provides the beat loops and produces. A highlight of the album is the song “Red Helicopters,” which opens with a Monkish piano motif; the tune’s analog origin belies the digital nature of the recording process.
“I’ve only worked with Grassy Knoll’s Bob Green and with Christian in this realm, and I’ve never found working with technology a drag,” she says. “Because they are so artful, it never occurred to me that they’re not using an instrument. The only frustrating part,” she adds, “is setting up.”
For trumpeter Ben Neill, the challenges of “setting up” are what help inject personality into his technologically-enabled music. Neill has been developing his “mutantrumpet” for several years, collaborating with DJ Spooky, who appears on his new album, Goldbug (Verve/ Antilles), among others. The proprietary trumpet features multiple bells plus devices that trigger computerized effects, including live sampling and stage lighting.
“What it’s about,” he says, “is introducing improvised elements, which are in a sense imperfections, into the programmed music environment. The electronics become a third virtual player; they respond differently some nights than others. In some cases, I’m doing manipulations on things that have some degree of randomness.”
Though Neill is classically trained, his trumpet’s pop-jazz flavor has proven especially enticing to acid-jazz fans. Improvisation plays a strong role, though he says it’s informed more by American avant-garde composers Terry Riley and La Monte Young than by Miles Davis.
“I feel like we’re getting more into improvising using the computer technology as this mediator between two people,” he says. The suggestion is that not only does electronica have a lot to learn from improvised music, but that this may be the start of a mutual admiration society.
This originally appeared in a special dance report issue of Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine in November 1998.