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Progressions in Jazz in the 21st Century
- Paul Taylor
- 2 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Since the turn of the 21st century a few substantial movements and scenes within jazz have brought forth the healthiest and most vibrant community of young artists since the genre's popular decline in the 60's and 70's. Jazz isn't coming back-- because it never really left. But for so long the genre was firmly isolated from the going-ons of other sects of popular music. During the '60s and '70s jazz largely abandoned it's long-held relationship with pop music, where the process of adapting traditional pop songs and musical theatre pieces to jazz standards had led to the Great American Songbook of standards that most any jazz group could perform. Some of my favourite works from the Blue Note era of jazz came from these standards, from John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" to The Jazz Messengers' "Caravan".
Being isolated from the popular music of it's day not only hindered the genres popularity, but also created an almost entirely self-consuming culture. Ignoring the influence that other genres took from jazz, the genre itself remained insular for an exceptionally long period. This era had it's bright spots, from the developments made within Avant-Garde Jazz by acts like The Necks and Sonny Sharrock to Japanese Jazz Fusion artists like Casiopea and Masayoshi Takanaka. However the era also saw the creative decline of much of the genre's front-runners, be it Miles Davis, Pharaoh Sanders, or Sun Ra, without many younger artists to replace them. It's telling that the most notable and prominent movement from the era was the smooth jazz boom, popularized by the oft hated Kenny G. In a word, much of this eras' jazz was derivative, but typically only of other previous jazz works and styles.
So to break out of this funk, this cannibalistic culture had to go. If you're aware of the issue that some LLM's have had recently with AI increasingly feeding off of it's own output-- poisoning itself-- I think of this the same way. Music, and all art, is inherently derivative, but innovation can only really only go so far without outside influence. Fittingly, I'm reminded of one of Q-Tip's lines off "Verses from the Abstract" from A Tribe Called Quest's landmark The Low End Theory:
"Progressions can't be made if we're separate forever."
And in the late '90s, the genre was given the keys it needed to truly move forward through the lenses of Electronica and Hip Hop.
Nu Jazz evolved out of various forms of electronic music in the late '90s and would prove a major influence on the UK jazz scene which has boomed in the last decade or so, as well as on US artists like Thundercat and Alice Coltrane's own grand nephew Flying Lotus. This new UK jazz scene (which RateYourMusic refers to as New London Jazz) borrows principally from the Spiritual Jazz and Jazz Fusion of the '60s and '70s merging it with the electronically augmented Nu Jazz. Artists like The Comet Is Coming, Sons of Kemet, Yussef Dayes, Nala Sinephro, and Nubya Garcia have been the front runners of the scene.
The other major development was at the intersection of hip hop and jazz. Jazz rap was one of the '90s biggest subgenres for rap, particularly on the east coast with the Native Tongues collective whose principal members included A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and Jungle Brothers. But it was smaller acts like Guru and Justice System who leaned hardest on their jazz influences, with more extensive instrumental sections. Another step forward takes you to the instrumental and lo-fi hip hop scenes with the likes of Nujabes, Uyama Hiroto, and Madlib.
2003's Shades of Blue: Madlib Invades Blue Note is a perfect example of this, undoubtably hip hop but with serious jazz influences that extend beyond a few samples. And Uyama Hiroto's fittingly titled Freeform Jazz (2017) is a full expansion of the sound Nujabes pioneered brought fully into the world of jazz. Finally, if you take that ratio one step further you end up with the jazz-first groups who are defined by their close integration with hip hop, like Makaya McCraven and BADBADNOTGOOD. These groups rely on hip hop drum grooves and structural elements, with the instrumental variety, technicality, and intricacy of jazz. BBNG's III (2014) and McCraven's Universal Beings (2018) are the best they have to offer.
This last new development in jazz is arguably the least popular and least integrated into the jazz world at the moment, but I think it has the potential to become something truly substantial. I'm referring to the video game music jazz scene which originated from popular jazz covers of VGM tracks posted online throughout the 2010's by artists like insaneintherain, and has since cropped up alongside Smash Bros. tournaments in New York. The 8-Bit Big Band is the most prominent group in this scene, having won a Grammy for their arrangement of "Meta Knights Revenge" in 2021, and they demonstrate what this scene brings to jazz as a whole.
At the start I talked about the process of "standardization": how throughout the first half of the 20th century, pop songs and musical theatre pieces were covered again and again by jazz bands before their identity as a pop song was eroded, where they became something that jazz musicians were just expected to know how to play. These standards played a big part in the Blue Note era of the '60s and '70s. The VGM scene now represents a return to this idea, that live NYC scene I mentioned have constructed their own equivalent songbook, the Great Video Game Songbook, made up of transcriptions of VGM tracks which players from all backgrounds have become familiar with primarily from their jazz interpretations.
The key idea with standards is that people might be familiar with their jazz forms, but have no recollection or knowledge of where the song originally came from. And for the VGM scene this has evolved in much the same way for songs from '80s, '90s, and '00s video games like "Bob-Omb Battlefield" from Super Mario 64 or "Snake Eater" from Metal Gear Solid III. A generation of young musicians who have been primarily exposed to this music in it's covered form since official soundtracks are usually so inconvenient.
If you're interested, Adam Neely has a terrific YouTube video on this subject, a combination of travel vlog and video essay on his experience performing with The 8-Bit Big Band and experiencing the VGM scene. I highly recommend you check it out here: YouTube Link
This is a companion / highly extended intro to November's AOTM #1, III by BADBADNOTGOOD. If you're interested in an in-depth review of that album the post is linked below.
-Paul Taylor
(Assistant News Director at WXOU)
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