Jazz hip-hop fusion is distinguished from other jazz styles by its fusion of hip-hop beats, samples, scratching, and rap lyrics blended with the techniques of jazz improvisation. Most early experimentation with hip-hop merely layered freestyle rapping over a live jazz instrumental track that incorporated scratching (Guru’s Jazzmatazz, 1993). As the genre evolved, jazz artists drew from a broader pool of aesthetic possibilities, weaving together disparate elements into the fabric of the jazz track, rather than simply layering them. For example, hip-hop’s “hardcore” aesthetic is embedded in Greg Osby’s tracks of “Mr. Gutterman” and “Street Jazz” from his 3-D Lifestyle (1993). The sound is aggressive, polytextured, polyrhythmic, and polysonic. It samples sound effects associated with this aesthetic, including excerpts from political speeches, sirens, gunshots, babies crying, screams, and street noises—all of which capture the ethos, chaos, tension, anger, and despair common in inner-city life. Jazz hip-hop fusion artists of the 2000s and 2010s, like Robert Glasper, found new ways to adapt the musical language of hip-hop production to traditional jazz ensemble instrumentation. For example, Glasper’s track “Dillalude #2” from his album Black Radio Recovered incorporates techniques including sampling, quotation, and looping to transform a series of J Dilla beats into a seamless instrumental suite for the Robert Glasper Experiment. The work of 21st-century jazz hip-hop fusion artists sometimes evokes the jazz-influenced spoken word style of artists like Gil Scott Heron and the Last Poets. Lupe Fiasco, for example, dedicates his spoken word outro on Glasper’s recording of “Always Shine” (from Black Radio) to “my hero Heron, Gil Scott.” M’Reld Green’s spoken-word critique of gentrification on “Prayer for the People” (from Marquis Hill’s Modern Flows Vol. 2) recalls the overtly political spoken word recordings of the 1960s and 1970s.

On recordings with his Blacktet, in particular 2014’s Modern Flows EP, Vol. 1 and 2018’s Modern Flows Vol. 2, Hill blends straight-ahead jazz playing with rap and spoken word passages.

Glasper’s key contribution was adapting the distinctive beats and loops of hip-hop production to the instrumentation of the jazz piano trio.

Pianist Robert Glasper was among the most influential of the next generation.

Instead of utilizing a process called quantization, which automatically subdivides beats into a standardized loop, Dilla often used a drum machine to perform his beats by hand. This process gave his beats a loose and flexible feeling that captured the attention of drummers in both hip-hop and jazz.

major influence on the development of jazz–hip-hop fusion in the early 2000s was alternative hip-hop producer James “J Dilla” Yancey.

The RH Factor’s innovative fusion of jazz, hip-hop, and contemporary R&B made a major impact on young musicians—most notably Robert Glasper and the members of Snarky Puppy—who were fluent in jazz improvisation but maintained strong connections to other styles of African American music including hip-hop, soul, and contemporary gospel.

In the early 1990s, hip-hop artists primarily rapped over looped samples of a jazz melody. By the late 1990s, however, jazz musicians explored new ways to intertwine the languages of jazz and hip-hop.

In 1994, Branford Marsalis recorded Buckshot LeFonque, an eclectic album that drew from and combined various popular styles with jazz. The track “The Scratch Opera” employs many production techniques and elements from rap, such as sampling, scratching, rapping, and poly-texturing.

The fusion of jazz and hip-hop evolved into a distinctive style when rappers began sampling jazz melodies and rhythms from recordings of Dizzy Gillespie, Lonnie Liston Smith, Donald Byrd, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, and Roy Ayers, among others, and later collaborating with jazz musicians. Stetsasonic’s “Talkin’ All That Jazz” from In Full Gear (1988) samples jazz breaks from Lonnie Liston Smith’s “Expansions” and Donald Byrd’s “(Fallin’ Like) Dominoes.”

Saxophonist Greg Osby was the first to collaborate with rappers, resulting in a musical hybrid he called “Street Jazz.”

Most jazz musicians, nevertheless, did not recognize the potential of rap for musical experimentation until after 1990.

Gang Starr was the first rap group to work directly with jazz musicians, recording “Jazz Thing” with Branford Marsalis for Spike Lee’s movie Mo’ Better Blues (1990)—a song derived from Gang Starr’s “Jazz Music” (1989).

In London’s club scene in the 1960s and 1970s, DJs began mixing rare jazz tracks, largely from the Blue Note catalogue, with psychedelic styles, funk, and other popular genres along with percussion tracks to produce a groove (a syncopated and repetitive foundation established by the bass and drum) labeled “acid jazz.” In the 1980s, club DJs began adding elements of hip-hop to the mix and emphasizing the rhythmic component by incorporating live musicians—drummers, percussionists, and horn players—who played over pre-recorded music to create a new type of danceable jazz. Simultaneously, in the US, hip-hop DJs teamed up with jazz artists to produce a jazz–funk–hip-hop fusion style. Working with DJ Grand Mixer D.ST, jazz pianist Herbie Hancock, for example, experimented with the art of scratching on the hit “Rockit” (1983).

popular in the 1990s