GRAMMY-nominated jazz visionary and Doris Duke Artist Award winner Kassa Overall has shared his upcoming album’s debut single, “Rebirth Of Slick (Cool Like Dat),” a burning 15/4 odd-time arrangement of the Digable Planets 90s hip-hop classic, which Overall learned from the inside out during a year on the road opening for the band and touring with them as their drummer. In his version, the conga pattern of the Digable original becomes a drum break, the lyrics “we be to rap what key be to lock” become a drum fill, and the swing feel of the original Art Blakey sample is restored. Overall says, “It nods to Digable Planets’ smooth flow and Art Blakey’s ‘Stretching.’ Knowing the song so well, I was able to flip the script with odd time rhythms and utilize many elements from the original, from vocal parts to production details. This one is high energy and still crispy.”
His new album CREAM, is out digitally, on CD and vinyl September 12 via Warp Records. With CREAM, his fourth solo studio album, Overall pays homage to the twin passions of his youth — hip-hop and jazz drums in the tradition of Elvin Jones. Across 8 instrumentals, the visionary drummer and producer transforms hip-hop classics by The Notorious B.I.G., Wu-Tang Clan, Dr. Dre, A Tribe Called Quest, OutKast, Digable Planets, and Juvenile into timeless standards that are rhythmically adventurous, witty, and often sublime.
Dan Charnas, acclaimed author of Dilla Time lays the scene in his liner notes for the record: “Enter Kassa Overall, with new notions. What if, instead of covering only the songs that it can easily see itself in, jazz mined a broader swath of hip-hop… for its rhythms, for its humor, for the clever way it frames its source material?…Kassa Overall’s album, CREAM, perhaps the first of its kind, answers that question with jazz explorations of eight canonic hip-hop songs.”
Overall shares, “This album is almost a boomerang response to all my previous work. No edits, no overdubs, no samples or drum machines. Just a great group of musicians playing together. It just so happens that the compositional material we are drawing from is rap records I grew up on!”
“CREAM isn’t just covers—it’s a full-on reimagining of hip-hop through jazz, digging into the musical guts and soul of both,” Overall explains. “It’s a fresh take on how these genres talk to each other—not just a collision, but a conversation that’s been brewing since the ‘90s.”
Reversing the convention of rap albums sampling jazz, Overall pulls off another backflip in a stunning career arc, illustrating his mastery as a producer, drummer and arranger who aggressively mines the continuum between jazz and hip-hop from every angle without any shortcuts.
