September 30, 2001 Article in the NY-Times :
Techno Dances With Jazz By MIKE RUBIN
YIELDING samplers and laptops instead of saxophones
and pianos, electronic musicians are increasingly
borrowing from - and aspiring to make - jazz, and
now they have a new ally in the pianist Herbie
Hancock. While Mr. Hancock's electronic forays into
the outer reaches of jazz, as well as his experiments
with pop, funk and disco, have mostly been scorned in
the jazz world, they've won him a following among
techno producers.
Mr. Hancock is revered in electronic circles less for
his 1960's acoustic piano work - both on his own
albums and those of Miles Davis - than for his
prescient early 70's records like "Head Hunters" and
"Sextant," which helped introduce synthesizers to
jazz, and his 1983 hit single, "Rockit," which
featured percussive turntable scratching and was an
MTV staple when many current electronic musicians and
D.J.'s were children.
Mr. Hancock remains an icon. Drum-and-bass artists
have prolifically sampled his work, while the British
techno producer Kirk Degiorgio released a record
called "The Message in Herbie's Shirts," which
suggested that the clothes Mr. Hancock wore in the
cover photos of his 70's albums offered clues about
the merits of the music inside.
In the case of Mr. Hancock's new album, "Future 2
Future" (Transparent Music), Mr. Degiorgio's
hypothesis proves accurate: the cover shows Mr.
Hancock wearing a clear plastic windbreaker like those
that are popular in the techno subculture. The
transparency hints at some of the insubstantial
music contained therein. The album's flaws are readily
apparent, especially compared with recent releases by
others that have striven to create a techno-jazz
hybrid.
"Future 2 Future" is notable for bringing together a
jazz musician of Mr. Hancock's stature with
contemporary electronic artists (though they make
only token appearances on the album). They include the
British acid house and drum-and-bass innovator A Guy
Called Gerald (Gerald Simpson), the New York
turntablist DJ Rob Swift, and the Detroit techno
standout Carl Craig, one of the black musicians who
developed this soulful, heavily percussive electronic
dance music more than a decade ago.
"Kebero," the collaboration with Mr. Craig, is
inexplicably broken into two segments on the album;
female vocals float ethereally amid his loops of
African percussion, over which Mr. Hancock layers
keyboard textures. But just as the song seems as if it
might swirl into something interesting, it's over,
segueing into an inconsequential spoken-word track.
Mr. Swift and Mr. Simpson's contributions don't fare
much better. Mr. Swift displays more dynamic
scratching work in his current Gap commercial, and
while Mr. Simpson's hyperkinetic drum-and-bass beats
strive to stake out a groove, Mr. Hancock's keyboards
are too soggy and saccharine to enhance it.
The rhythmic clatter of drum-and-bass pervades the
record. "The Essence" sounds like an outtake from Roni
Size's 1997 album, "New Forms," right down to the
rapid-fire beats, acoustic bass lines and diva vocals
(in this case from Chaka Khan). But 1997 hardly
qualifies as the "future" anymore. The album's most
successful track, "Alphabeta," is built around sturdy
drumming from Jack DeJohnette, with the refrain
provided by a muffled sample from Derrick May's
landmark 1988 Detroit techno single "Strings of Life."
A gently funky collage of acoustic and electronic
elements, the track heralds the possibility of a true
techno-jazz fusion that the rest of the album fails to
deliver.
But even as "Future 2 Future" disappoints, Mr. Hancock
is, as usual, onto something that other artists have
been more adept at attaining. While jazz and popular
dance music have intersected since the days of disco,
dance music has usually been drawn more to the sweet,
uptempo soul grooves of Roy Ayers than to the spikier
electronics of Mr. Hancock's "Sextant." But as
dance music itself has become more electronic, its
creators' interests have expanded. Electronic
producers of all stripes are now inspired by a broader
jazz palette, whether as fodder for samples, as part
of the search for rhythmic diversity, or as a
reference point for their own artistic aspirations
toward a cerebral sophistication removed from the
sweat of the dance floor.
Among techno-jazz fusion endeavors, Mr. Craig's
Innerzone Orchestra project is noteworthy for having
taken its cue from the more abrasive sounds of
records like "Sextant" rather than from the treacly
tones favored by the acid jazz movement (a glossy
mixture of 70's jazz, soul and funk) and drum-and-bass
artists like Goldie and LTJ Bukem. Innerzone's 1999
album "Programmed" features Mr. Craig matching his
samplers and drum machines against live drums and
piano played by veterans of Sun Ra and the saxophonist
James Carter's groups.
The British producer Jason Swinscoe, who records under
the name Cinematic Orchestra, takes a different
approach to live instrumentation. On his 1999 album,
"Motion," he lifted samples from old jazz records, had
musicians reinterpret those samples, then sampled from
those new recordings to piece together each
composition. The components mesh with mechanical
precision while maintaining a feeling of
improvisation.
Most attempts to meld jazz and techno have not worked
quite so well. In some ways it's an impossible
marriage. While both genres are largely instrumental
and futuristic and share roots as dance musics,
attempts to blend them usually can't reconcile the
improvisational freedom and rhythmic spontaneity
of a live jazz group with electronic dance music's
reliance on repetition and solitary computer-assisted
production methods.
Given the obstacles, when electronic producers embrace
jazz, they most often wind up turning their backs on
the dance floor entirely. Consider Tom Jenkinson, a
fusion bassist who makes ungainly drum- and-bass under
the name Squarepusher. On albums like "Music Is Rotted
One Note," he defiantly resists settling into a groove
long enough to tap a foot to.
For "Masses," the British drum-and- bass duo John
Coxon and Ashley Wales (aka Spring Heel Jack)
presented backing tracks to distinguished avant-garde
improvisers, including the saxophonists Tim Berne and
Evan Parker and the pianist Matthew Shipp, to play
along with in real time. The result is sometimes
pretty, more often squawky free jazz that is
frequently as invigorating as it is dissonant, but
listeners would be hard pressed to find much techno
there.
Despite such seeming incompatibility,
cross-pollination between genres continues. Mr.
Degiorgio, Mr. Hancock's fashion critic and perhaps
the most
tireless crusader toward a techno-jazz fusion, offers
one possible solution on his forthcoming album, "21st
Century Soul," recorded under the pseudonym
As One. Blending warm melodic washes of 70's-era
Fender Rhodes piano with funky drum patterns - both
programmed and played - Mr. Degiorgio's retrofitted
approach might best be described by another of his
recording aliases: Future/Past.
The British house producer Matthew Herbert turns back
the clock even further on "Bodily Functions," this
year's most successful combination of electronic
beats and jazz. The album is a tribute to 40's
standards in which Mr. Herbert builds supple house
rhythms underneath torchy female vocals, using
piano, acoustic bass and beats culled from sampled
anatomical sounds (including blood, teeth, bones, and
laser eye surgery) to reveal electronic music's human
pulse. Like the best techno-jazz fusions, it's a
merger of man and machine that sounds satisfyingly
organic and new.
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