Every so often in these dark and long music histories, distant genres collide with and collapse upon each other in breathless fits and they leave behind new and alien caverns that we graft names to. Jazz came screaming from blues and European classical traditions, one subverting the other until their melded skins made attendant eardrums glow like embryos. This is the genuine hope, this is the hope that is not always delivered—that we may find the unknown when we let our separate maps arbitrarily meet and relinquish their lines.
In the late ’60s, some evil bastard, who will not be forgiven when called from the book of names, designated this process as “fusion,” as though it were cold, sterile chemistry (which, don’t get me wrong, in some cases it totally is, but it can also be incidental heat and smoke), and then applied this to the new music of all eddies and no land in sight previously known as “jazz-rock,” which was just as bad for invoking the genres as binaries when the actual music was neither and both simultaneously. These exchanges between jazz and rock were illicit, their handshakes uncertain, their voices wet with wah-wah.
Regardless, these interactions now file under “fusion” and punch their cards sneering beside Chick Corea’s defanged keys and the devils of smooth jazz who all work beneath terrible smiles; all cheapened by their new designator despite relative quality, as each was pushing something new through the exhausted canal. These new somethings no longer require names, just class designations so they may be collectively set aside if we are left unmoved by their meekest representative. The effects suffocate: it is impossible to inhabit these middle spaces without sharing room with and enduring the long glances of the sterile, there by the grace and virtue by which they gummed their way into the public consciousness. It is impossible to make new music—the gates are guarded by flaming swords and long, endless mouths that constantly invoke “originality” as though it it could ignite the air without requisite particles.
Q-Tip’s Kamaal the Abstract, a “fusion” record, is not new music in the strict sense. Forces from the upper regions dissolved its intended April 2002 release date a week prior, long after its promo season. One imagines Arista felt the genesis of this current record climate coming in and so retreated to reliable heat sources. The coal ran out and now they and their colleagues crawl belly-down in the snow. Meanwhile, Kamaal finally saw release last month and it is still every bit the genre dissolution that occupied file-sharing networks these last 7 years—it blurs the lines between hip-hop, jazz and funk until sky, horizon and land are indistinct, until they are one, until they may trade positions or leak into one another at any time deemed appropriate.
Q-TIP: “FEELIN’”
Which isn’t to say that the record’s nine jazz funk greats aren’t rooted firmly in hip-hop tradition, as clarified in Clayton Purdom’s deft review of its official incarnation. “What occurs on Kamaal is less an attempt to marry hip-hop with classic jazz in a formal manner than merely an unraveling of [A Tribe Called Quest's loving and perfect] loops, still within the context of contemporary pop,” Purdom says. “Jazz instrumentation is treated throughout Kamaal like rock guitars on an OutKast track, not aspiration but dominant ingredient.” The record’s first few seconds are a brief guitar chord that evaporates quick into a groove belonging to either hip-hop or funk, a groove that occupies the fluid binaries of both, restrained yet made entirely of elastic. Kamaal is also home to the miracle of live instrumentation, but this is less a case of a bunch of white people loving The Roots (because they’re just so darn talented at playing their “real” instruments) than it is a means to an instrumental end. Kamaal arcs on the push-and-pull between the high mechanization of hip-hop and the organic vessels that bleed jazz. Thus, the slow and reclining yet exact funk of “Do U Dig U?” can yield an immense flute solo and can feed off its sweeping and delicate fruit for five minutes.
Just as when the decidedly-rock guitar returns sharp in “Feelin’”‘s chorus, its designs set on stratosphere-transcendence through upward chord progressions while still remaining locked in groove, there is uncertainty in Q-Tip’s constructed divide. One is unsure if the ground will be there tomorrow, or if all the watercolors in play will conspire to realign our gravity.
There is also freedom here.
There is a second record in this mold from the same year (2002), a second record that leads us shaking down the invisible bridge that would probably reveal that it’s not even really there were we to give up belief for a few sad seconds. Abilene’s Two Guns, Twin Arrows is a fusion record in the “jazz-rock” archetype, although the “rock” it employs is shot through through layers of sediment and subgenres. As always, when we reach post-hardcore we reach the truth.
Abilene began as the latest project of one Alex Dunham, of D.C.’s Hoover and myriad short-lived groups that regardless expelled their lung contents toward the sky before quitting the light—they made their grievances known, those Regulator Watts and that Radio Flyer. The first Abilene record observed snowfall because, sometimes, when you feel everything in ever-sharpening degrees, the snow is either a calm, reassuring deterrent or the final confirmation that you will freeze to death here. I do not claim to be an expert on the psychological trauma portended by long, wasted guitar works, but it is my belief that the first Abilene record is actually the realization of your impending frozen carcass. It resigns itself to it, replicating the oppressive precipitate through guitars that draw circles until they generate enough energy to glow.
ABILENE: “TWISTING THE TRINITY”
This is not the stated mission of Two Guns, Twin Arrows, which will eradicate snow and reduce the hillsides to rock and sediment. Dunham is briefly reunited with Hoover bassist and June of 44 trumpet player Fred Erskine, and in this union there is, as Robert of Hardcore for Nerds says, “a reshaping of tense, rhythmic post-hardcore into a new movement of fire, jazz, distortion and feedback.” This is a post-hardcore record, but the traditional bass-and-drums architecture is allowed to grow faint, to sink, to operate on entirely separate rhythms from that of guitar and vocals—to trace circles in the whirlpool. It runs headlong into Dunham’s guitar howls, into Fred Erskine’s trumpet and his pleas against wintering. It takes on jazz as Q-Tip does—on post-hardcore’s own terms—but it goes one further, allowing for mild disassembly by its visitors.
This is where true freedom lies—not under anarchy, not under the heavy debt of genre, but in the long pit built between the two. And we, too, may feel free there—as we are stretched like cable and our basic stuff tears, as we near the break and snap, we feel our horrible emancipation meeting us and relieving us of function. We feel it when we drink so thoroughly that we become numb and impossible angels and yet remain all-too-cognizant of the innate sharpness of objects. We have yet to feel the apocalypse but the sky still glows like baked steel, etc. This is not mere “fusion,” despite the term’s application in all attendant music publications. This is the chasm where nothing is static. Not composition, not the shape of your own body.
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