Blog Post #6

I have been trying to improvise over John Coltrane’s Giant Steps on my guitar recently and it is just not happening. For anyone that is unaware of the history of this song, I recommend starting with this video:

It is ridiculously hard and switches between 3 keys what seems like every bar. Coltrane highlights how complex and difficult this song is by including the original recording of his pianist, Tommy Flanagan, haltingly trying to improvise over his chord progressions. Rather than letting him re-record his part, he kept the worst one just to show how hard the song really is. Flanagan was publicly not happy with his representation on this song, saying “that’s messed up”, but still, his part has become immortalized as a foil to how impressive John Coltrane really was.

If you haven’t listened to that song, please do yourself a favor and check out the entire album. It’s Coltrane at his technical best. Whether it is his actual best is an argument (and an impossible one at that) for another time.

This might be a hot take, but I saw a video the other day claiming Kendrick Lamar saved jazz music from extinction and I agree (to an extent). Jazz music, in the conventional sense, has been slowly dying and now accounts for only around 1.4% of music consumption in the United States. However, I believe jazz is beginning to take a new approach after the introduction of To Pimp a Butterfly, jazz-rap.

This isn’t to say that Kendrick is the the only one; rather, he is far from the first rap artist to include jazz melodies in his music. A Tribe Called Quest, The Pharcyde, The Roots, Guru. There is a fairly long list of rappers who have blended jazz with rap for decades. However, most of these albums felt like they were following a standard formula and weren’t really creating anything new. They tended to be more rapping, with a few jazz elements or samples thrown in, or they were more jazz, with a few spoken word or rap stanzas thrown in. It is one thing to sample old Blue Note Records to rap over, it is another to create new, compelling and emotional jazz tracks that resonate with a large audience. This is exactly what Kendrick did with To Pimp a Butterfly. 

He brought artists to work on the album that had  respect for both rap and jazz, including some of the greatest modern jazz artists like Kamasi Washington, Thundercat and Ambrose Akinmusire.

Fans of jazz could see what Kendrick was up to with these features, and it worked beautifully. This jazz-rap fusion could only have come from someone who knew the history of both genres and how to respect the classics while also knowing when to push the boundaries.

This also came at a time when Kendrick had just released one of the greatest concept albums of all time, Good Kid, M.a.a.d City. Critics and regular listeners alike could see that he was something special and he had become one of the most sought after artists of the 21st century.

All this to say, To Pimp A Butterfly was the perfect storm. Much like Coltrane with his Giant Steps record, Kendrick was in the unique position of being able to have the public’s ear and attention while also being on the forefront of rap and jazz, pushing the boundaries of what people perceived the norm should be. He popularized jazz in a way that hasn’t been seen since Kenny G and the smooth jazz era of the 90s and ended up creating an album that rode the line perfectly and greatly furthered both genres.

That’s all I got for now. Wear a mask, be safe.