BadBadNotGood aren’t your typical jazz dudes. On the cover of their new album they appear half-naked, wearing only towels; their drummer used to have a penchant for performing in a pig mask; and they’re more inclined to do a version of a track by controversial hip-hop collective Odd Future or 90s shoegazers My Bloody Valentine than reinterpret a John Coltrane classic.
In 2016, though, their weirdness is winning. BBNG are the jazz group the rap world runs with. Like a bombastic trifle, the band layer jazz, soul and funk on to a base of wobbly improvisation and top it all off with a layer of hip-hop swagger. Since releasing their first album five years ago – a mixture of original material and wigged-out covers of hip-hop artists like Nas, J Dilla and Ol’ Dirty Bastard – the group have recorded with Ghostface Killah and been Frank Ocean’s backing band at Coachella, while their members have shared writing credits with Rihanna and Drake.
Live, BBNG bring a similarly unorthodox vibe. Professorly keyboard player Matthew Tavares, a gentle giant with a crop of bleached hair and a wry sense of humour, calls their live set “improvised and crazy” and the band pogo, sweat and shake with breakneck punk energy on stage. This is reflected back by the crowd: at one gig, a J Dilla tribute concert in Toronto, female audience members crowdsurfed towards them and grinded against them onstage; possibly the first time in history that’s happened to an improv jazz group.
When I meet the band in Barcelona’s wonderfully named Satan’s Coffee Corner before their appearance at Sónar festival, the foursome show little sign of their onstage freneticism. Tired, but scrupulously polite, they are very much the Danny Brown collaborators you could take home to your parents, apologising for talking over each other and asking for permission to pause the interview while they eat their pumpkin toast.
Despite their manners, the group have always shared an ear for the irreverent. The three founding members (saxophonist Leland Whitty was a later recruit) met through the jazz programme at Toronto’s Humber College in 2010, where their tutors did not appreciate their contemporary take on the genre. Drummer Alexander Sowinski is clearly still smarting about the reaction to their medley of Odd Future covers and Gucci Mane’s queasily psychedelic Lemonade, which he says their teachers dismissed as having “no musical value”.
“Hip-hop was one of the first genres that I personally got into that wasn’t my parents’ music,” says bass player Chester Hansen, his demeanour more Pavement roadie than jazz guru as he ponders why a group of Toronto teens chose to marry improv jazz to hip-hop filth. “Then we all started to learn to play instruments, analysing all different genres of music – including jazz – and using that knowledge to see what was happening in all this hip-hop music we liked.”
Tavares agrees. “I feel like jazz throughout history has always been a tool where people have used it to play contemporary music,” he says. “For us, that was the contemporary music we liked.”
Undeterred by their tutors’ criticism, the next day they recorded a video of that same Odd Future performance and put it online. Tyler, The Creator – the collective’s mastermind – saw the video, tweeted his approval and the clip went viral. The next five years would bring a whirlwind of activity: over three studio albums BBNG began to concentrate on original material, with tracks such as CS60 proving they could bring an improvisational touch to hip-hop’s laid-back swing. Perhaps their crowning achievement was 2015’s collaborative album with Wu-Tang MC Ghostface Killah, the symphonic, cinematic Sour Soul.
Yet new album, IV, tops even that. It pairs BBNG’s hip-hop-influenced jazz style – lolloping bass, other-worldly sax, film noir keyboards and swinging drums – with an insubordinate attitude to musical genre and guests that read like a guide to Pitchfork’s best new music, including Haitian-Canadian artist Kaytranada on the slinky funk number Lavender and Future Islands’ Samuel T Herring on the stirring soul of Time Moves Slow.
“We weren’t really thinking about an album, we were just making music and not trying to force any collaborative efforts or ideas on to someone coming in,” says Sowinski of IV. “That’s why there’s a soul song, a weird rap song, a housey song.” And jazz? “I wouldn’t really say there is a moment of actual jazz on the record,” Tavares decides.
What he means, he later clarifies, is “traditional jazz” - the kind of thing you’d find marooned between Dizzy Gillespie albums in your used record emporium. And yet the band’s set-up on IV of bass, drums, piano and saxophone, as well as the extensive solos and improv nous, means the spirit of jazz is ever-present, even as BBNG explore different genres. They also continue to be booked for what Hansen calls “real heavy jazz festivals” alongside more generalist affairs such as Sónar.
Jazz, of course, has played a bit part in rap ever since the 80s, thanks to records such as Gang Starr’s Words I Manifest (which samples jazz classic A Night In Tunisia) and Stetsasonic‘s Talkin’ All That Jazz. More recently, the likes of Flying Lotus, J Dilla and Madlib have commandeered the genre’s loose, swinging feel, while jazz artists such as Robert Glasper have looked to the rap world for inspiration. Where BBNG stick out is in the style of rap they bring to the jazz game, combining a love of Bill Evans, Sun Ra and Art Blakey with the abrasive, commercial sounds of Waka Flocka Flame and Kanye West.
Jazz sometimes flirts with the mainstream – most recently on Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 album To Pimp A Butterfly, which brought the avant-garde sounds of Thundercat’s bass noodling and Kamasi Washington’s soulful sax squall into the lives of millions
Sowinski believes Butterfly’s success could see more engagement with the genre. “These are not forefront, mainstream, typical sounds you would hear in rap music,” he says of Kendrick’s album. “The music becoming more accessible and popular is giving a life again to more improvised jazz.”
Two hours later at the Sónar festival, BBNG remind us again of why their take on jazz is far from the dusty, corduroy jacket-wearing stereotype. Sowinski’s stage patter is part jazz-show host, part Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson, and they alternate between frantic skronk, serene melody and dirty funk, while Sowinski hits his drums so hard you wonder if it is somehow personal.
BadBadNotGood play jazz, then, but not as you might know it. This is jazz with its ear to the ground for new musical trends and its feet on shuffle; jazz that’s not afraid to loosen its tie and look a bit silly. It is – as Tyler, The Creator once put it – “Dave Brubeck Trio Swag”, and maybe the spikiest thing to come out of Toronto since the CN Tower.
IV is out on Friday July 8 on Innovative Leisure
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