Kassa Overall Combats Cover Corniness With Canny Cool

First things first: here are three new tracks to snack on...

Black Josh, "Yes, Man (feat. Sniff)"

Che Noir, Jack Davey & The Other Guys, "Incense Burning"

HUMAN ERROR CLUB & Kenny Segal, "NOT HECN AROUND"

The concept behind CREAM, the jazz drummer/producer/bandleader Kassa Overall's new album for Warp Records, came from a rather unlikely place: the Grammys website.

The Recording Academy, the organization behind the industry's leading awards show, was running a video content series under the banner ReImagined, in which artists across genres covered previously-nominated songs in their own style. For his installment, Kassa–a onetime Grammy nominee himself for his contribution to fellow drummer Terri Lyne Carrington's 2019 album Waiting Game–took on Snoop Dogg's "Drop It Like It's Hot." By his own adventurous musical standards, the risks proved apparent from jump.

"When you think about doing a jazz version of a hip-hop song, or just any way you mix hip hop and jazz, you don't want it to come off corny," he says, deliberately avoiding the perilous smooth route. "It's got to have some kind of mathematical architectural work that we could grow inside."

Instead, Kassa and his band delivered something with elements tethered to the Pharrell-backed original while still moving with improvisational fluidity. The song soon became part of his live repertoire, garnering palpable audience excitement and inquiries about where a copy might be found. "And I was often like, yeah, it doesn't exist yet."

With a history that includes collaborations with Danny Brown, Lil B, and Wiki, as well as the likes of Arto Lindsay, Vijay Iyer, and Yoko Ono, Kassa seems like a uniquely optimal artist to attempt something like CREAM. Comprised of eight ingenious interpretations of rap classics like The Notorious B.I.G.'s "Big Poppa," Outkast's "SpottieOttieDopaliscious," and, naturally, the Wu-Tang Clan's "Cash Rules Everything Around Me," this instrumental album marks a fresh peak in the upward artistic journey for the Seattle native and erstwhile New York denizen.

"Usually I get a take down and then I work on it for eight years," Kassa says of the difference between the CREAM recording seasons and his previous mode of operation. "To just go in, get the right take, and send it to the mixing engineer, that was a great feeling."

CABBAGES: Your versions tend to bring these rap classics closer to the samples used to make them in the first place, from songs like Isley Brothers "Between the Sheets" and Art Blakey's "Stretching." Was it your intent to reconnect these hip-hop hits with their foundational sources? 

Kassa Overall: Yes. It was also intentional to stir a conversation about sampling, remixing, or original composition. A lot of what we're playing, once we play the melody, we end up in a space that's like, this could be any song. There's a lot of original ideas being presented in this project. John Coltrane on "My Favorite Things," we love the melody but technically, Coltrane wrote some shit.

For me, I was trying to think about this circular approach. If you take one of the songs, you reference elements from the hip-hop version, like the production [or] the arrangement. And you reference elements from the original version. But then, you also reference an aesthetic that was there before all of those. So if you think about it from a Black music perspective, you're connecting hip-hop, the original–which may be funk or soul or whatever–back to the '60s spiritual jazz element, maybe even pulling into some West African elements. It creates this circular thing. That was kind of the idea of like, wow, let's make this timeless. 'Cause it is. 

You worked on your prior album, 2023's ANIMALS, with Ishmael Butler of Shabazz Palaces and, of course, Digable Planets. Did he offer any kind of feedback or reaction to your take on "Rebirth Of Slick (Cool Like Dat)?" 

When you talk about not being corny, Ish is the original. He's very open-minded, but it can't be corny. It's got to have some intention or integrity to it. I can't speak for him, but I just know when he's not feeling something, he can't feel it. So I sent it to him and he was hype on it. He hit me back a day or two later like, yo, you snapped. That might've made me feel like we got something here. He is a jazz fanatic; he played sax back in the day and he knows what's up. The fact that we could take something that he did and bring it into that world of something that inspired him, I think he might've been into that.

I mean, you're like a little corny whenever you're near him. He's really cool like that. 

You've worked with your fair share of rappers over the year, not just on ANIMALS but previously with Das Racist. Given the providence of the CREAM songs, what was the thinking behind keeping this a primarily instrumental LP? 

There were a couple joints that had some vocals, just bits of vocals, and we decided not to use them. I don't know how to answer it exactly, but I will say this, I always wanted to make an album that people could put on and just live their life to, and not have to listen to know what's happening. There's a lot of music like that today too, where a lot of people, in a sense, they're getting over. It's not elevator music, but it serves that purpose; we could just put this on and we can hang out. We can look at our phone, we can watch Reels, and you hear some stuff in the background that you're vibing to. I wanted to make something that had that, and you didn't have to tune in all the way. 

In every record I make, there's clear record inspirations. This was more Kind Of Blue, A Love Supreme, Eastern Sounds by Yusef [Lateef]. All of those records, (1) they're instrumental primarily, and (2) you can just put 'em on and just be in there. The beautiful thing about them though is, if you do put on headphones and zone all the way in, there's all this little stuff that you can get inside. But you also can listen from a distance. I think that was the intention.