Guru Talks About Evolution Of 'Jazzmatazz'

10/08/2000 10:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Craig Rosen

(10/8/00, 10 a.m. ET) - Rap artist and producer Guru says that the label "jazz rap" applied by the media to his group Gang Starr's style of hip-hop in the '90s wasn't truly accurate.

Guru told LAUNCH, "The media starting labeling us as jazz rap, and I didn't like that. And I felt if we were pigeonholed into that, we wouldn't be able to evolve," he says, "if we didn't feel that it represented what Gang Starr was about anyway. Because Gang Starr is one-on-one dialogue with rhymes to the urban youth. With hard beats and scratches, it's like original hip-hop, so it's like way beyond something like jazz rap."

However, the idea of blending live jazz with rap inspired Guru to forge a bridge between traditional jazz players and rap artists in a live setting, which resulted in the first Jazzmatazz album in 1993. Since that first album, the concept has evolved, although the name remains the same. Guru says that the third installment in the series, Jazzmatazz: Street Soul, to be released Tuesday (October 10), relies less on traditional jazz sounds and more on the improvisational spirit of jazz. "Jazzmatazz reflects spontaneous collaboration, that's what it is. Jazzmatazz is also an attitude. And like I said, a style of music that's created out of a blending of all these things. So you never know what you'll come up with necessarily. I wouldn't say it's just R&B and hip-hop, because there's elements of jazz in it, just in the way that it's so spontaneous, and there's so much improvisation that's involved. I wrote all the lyrics in the studio with people that I was working with. "-- Janine Coveney, Los Angeles

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