Drummer Kassa Overall’s new album Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz was released in January. (Photo: Spencer Ostrander) On a cold December night at Manhattan’s Jazz Gallery, drummer Kassa Overall, pianist Jon Batiste and bassist Ameen Saleem made music that was, by turns, hard-swinging, brooding, bluesy and abstract. It flowed easily, like a
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Kassa Overall: “In our living room, there was a drum set, a piano, a trumpet, a sax and an early beat machine. So, by the time I was 5, I knew how to sequence beats.” (Photo: Spencer Ostrander)[/caption]
At a Brooklyn coffee shop in April, Overall seems much like he does onstage — sweet-natured, laid-back but nonetheless the source of torrents of ideas. “I was learning how to walk and talk and swing all at the same time,” he said of his upbringing in Seattle, Washington. His father was an avid jazz fan, his mother “a hippie who learned to play tabla drums.” His older brother played saxophone. “In our living room, there was a drum set, a piano, a trumpet, a sax and an early beat machine. So, by the time I was 5, I knew how to sequence beats. By middle school, I spent days doing that.” Overall soaked up Thelonious Monk’s recordings at the same time he was mimicking Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.” By the time he entered Oberlin College, he had gigged as a drummer at jazz clubs. Studies with drummer Billy Hart and saxophonist Gary Bartz helped him understand not so much what to play, he says, but “why we play what we play.”
Geri Allen, he says, would often rehearse one set of music and then call for different tunes on the bandstand. “I resented that at first,” Overall says. “But now I realize that she was training us to feel the energy in the room and play what was needed, to be in that moment. Now I need to do that all the time.” As a young musician trying to break through in jazz clubs like Smalls and the Zinc Bar, he recalls Roy Hargrove as “the cat who came with his horn, ready to play with us, to teach us by example,” as well as “the one who paved the way, in terms of not getting locked into one style or into the past.” When Jon Batiste’s manager called him about sitting in on The Late Show, and asked if he could “scratch” with turntables, he said, “No, but I can do something better — what Jon actually wants, but doesn’t know it yet.”
“At times, I’ve been frustrated while explaining who I am and what I do,” he says. “I’ll say I’m a ‘drummer’ or a ‘rapper’ or a ‘laptop artist.’ I like to create ideas, have musicians perform those ideas, take those ideas and chop them up, have musicians play them again, you know?” He sees what he does as cutting-edge hip-hop production as well as the natural extension of what jazz musicians have always done — messing with what came before. It seems silly that he hadn’t really combined playing jazz and making rap or hip-hop tracks until his recent album, because he’s so good at this blend, so fluid and natural. He offered up his headphones and then played me “Good Lord, Good Lord,” drawn from Fortner’s organ playing during that March gig, and overlaid with his own rapping about the challenges of making a statement, and a living, as a musician. Next, he shared his remix of “What a Wonderful World,” from Batiste’s last album. Batiste had floated the well-worn ballad on a drone from a single note. In Overall’s remake, a funky 4/4 beat with a high-hat shimmy slides right in, the incongruity somehow serving instead of defeating the song’s reflective mood.
Overall said that he called his recent album Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz because a woman in London told him that’s what the local kids like to do these days. He likes that idea and thinks that younger listeners are connecting anew with the adventurous sounds jazz musicians make. “They can hear this stuff, and they respond,” he says. But his title also refers to a deeper idea. “It’s not just ice cream. It’s not just entertainment. It’s something much deeper. But it can still go down smooth.” - Larry Blumenfeld https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMIqV7pgzh0