“Defining Nu Jazz” by Samad G

 

A question I ask myself constantly, as a musical contributor to the genre, is what is “Nu Jazz”. Nu Jazz has been defined by many including spotify which calls it “Jazztronica” and one definition that pretty much sums them all up comes from “Cherwell”, one of oxford's oldest student newspapers. It says that Nu Jazz is, “a musical genre that incorporates aspects of various genres to create an innovative and refreshing approach to jazz, thus blurring the staunch conceptual lines of musical genre.” For me this is a huge generalization or umbrella term to put what this music is under because it gives listeners such a wide variety of options. Two artists who I could consider Nu jazz are Anomalie and my personal favorite, Kiefer, and these two artists have two completely different styles of music. Anomalie is much more electronic with funky west coast synths and ideas (despite being from Canada) and Kiefer has a more chill and nostalgic, yet groovy sound that it is hard to describe in words and is uniquely his own. So from the consumer or listeners perspective it’s this huge genre that covers many things. But from my perspective of playing and making music I think it’s much deeper than this. I believe that the Nu Jazz genre is one that we can’t truly define yet not because it’s so broad but because it’s definition changes depending on who it is you’re listening to. A perfect way I can show an example of this is if we look at kendrick lamar’s past two albums “Damn” and “Mr Morale and The Big Steppers” and contrast them with Kiefer’s last two albums, “When there’s love around,” and “Between Days”. In Kenderick Lamar’s previous two albums we can easily tell they’re hip hop. Through the beats and the fact that there’s a rapper present in the music, but even if we take away the rapper’s voice the production quality and style still screams hip hop. If we compared the beats from those albums to the beats Dj Premier made in the 90’s we can confidently say both are hip hop. Now we look at kiefer’s previous albums. “Between days”, is a beat tape that utilizes live instruments and synthesizers to create unique grooves for every single song that seem to have a hip hop influence but then we look at the album prior to that “When There’s Love Around”. This album is completely different from “Between Days” It’s recorded with a live band and sounds almost like jazz however it isn’t any type of traditional jazz. These are songs with jazz influence and hip hop influence occasionally but with something that we can only hear kiefer do in his style of music that I say is uniquely him and defines his sound or version of “Nu Jazz”. If I tried comparing any of Kiefer’s albums to any other “Nu Jazz” artist’s albums such as Rob Arouja, Anomalie, Elijah Fox, Cisco Swank, and many many more, it becomes very hard for us to say that any of these people compared to one another are in the same genre. They all sound completely different but can be found in sometimes the same “Nu Jazz” or “Jazztonica” playlist. This truly shows that the Nu Jazz definition is a big generalization to something we can’t define due to the fact that its meaning changes with the artist.