Jazz Rap Overview: 4 Notable Jazz Rap Artists

Jazz rap, or jazz hip-hop, is a genre of music that folds elements of jazz into songs by hip-hop artists. The elements are often samples of vocals, solos, or jazz instrumentation taken from recordings, though some jazz rap tracks feature original accompaniment by jazz musicians. Jazz rap artists scored several hits in the early 1990s, like Us3’s “Cantaloop” (Flip Fantasia),” and the subgenre remains active today through jazzy indie recordings by artists like Kendrick Lamar.

Jazz rap began in the United States during the late 1980s, though there were some influential predecessors.

• Forerunners: Jazz music and rapping first came together on postwar radio when Black radio DJs like Holmes “Daddy-O” Daylie offered rhyming delivery between jazz and R&B tracks.
• Early experiments: Artists like Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets rhymed over jazz-funk tracks in the 1960s and early 1970s.
• First recordings: The first true jazz rap recordings surfaced on the East Coast in the late 1980s. Stetsasonic—one of the first hip-hop acts to perform with live instrumentation—sampled keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith on “Talkin’ All That Jazz” from their 1988 album, In Full Gear, while hip-hop producer DJ Premier and rapper Guru of Gang Starr built “Words I Manifest,” from their 1989 debut, No More Mr. Nice Guy, around a sample of music written by trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. During this time, the New York collective Native Tongues—which featured hip-hop artists like Jungle Brothers, A Tribe Called Quest, and De La Soul—also merged boom bap beats with jazz instrumental loops.

Jazz rap rose from the underground with a string of early hits in the 1990s.

• Critical praise: Albums like the Jungle Brothers’ Straight Out the Jungle (1988) and A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory (1991), which featured bassist Ron Carter, earned critical praise.
• First hits: The first jazz rap hits came from Brooklyn’s Digable Planets and the UK’s Us3. Digable Planets’ single “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat),” from their album Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space), topped the charts and won a Grammy. Meanwhile, Us3’s funky “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)” from their 1993 LP, Hand on the Torch, which featured samples from Blue Note Records artist Herbie Hancock, topped charts and became a gold record.
• Expansion: Jazz rap reached its creative zenith in the early 1990s. De La Soul’s third album, Buhloone Mindstate, featured collaborations with funk and jazz heavyweights like Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley, while Toronto’s Dream Warriors and Los Angeles’s Freestyle Fellowship furthered the subgenre’s boundaries with unique samples and song structures. Miles Davis’s posthumous 1992 release, Doo-Bop, also experimented with hip-hop beats, forging deeper connections between the two genres.

Jazz rap fell out of favor with mainstream listeners in the mid-1990s.

• Decline in popularity: Changing tastes hastened the end of jazz rap’s tenure on the charts in the mid-1990s, though artists from both camps continued to employ its sound.
• Continued innovations: Guru of Gang Starr created Guru’s Jazzmatazz, a series of albums featuring collaborations between jazz masters like Donald Byrd and Freddie Hubbard and rappers like MC Solaar. Guru’s bandmate, DJ Premier, teamed with jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis in the group Buckshot LeFonque, while East Coast and West Coast acts like Nas, the Pharcyde, Souls of Mischief, and the Roots wove jazz textures into their own recordings.
• New directions: Jazz rap lives on in music from several new hip-hop performers. For his 2003 Blue Note label debut, Shades of Blue, Madlib sampled freely from the label’s historic catalog of recordings, while the Canadian jazz group BADBADNOTGOOD teamed with Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah for 2015’s Sour Soul. In 2016, Kendrick Lamar won the Grammy for Best Rap Album for To Pimp a Butterfly. Its sonic palette explored jazz, funk, and hip-hop through vocals by DJ/producer Pete Rock and instrumentation by jazz musicians Robert Glasper and Kamasi Washington.

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