Hip hop seamlessly horns its way into jazz

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This article was published 14/06/2023 (1152 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Hip hop has emerged as jazz’s creative and rebellious child on music’s family tree.

Few musicians know of that relationship any better than Keyon Harrold, who brings his trumpet and his experience from both jazz and hip hop to launch the 2023 Winnipeg International Jazz Festival tonight.

He aims to build a musical bridge between jazz audiences, who are keen to see someone touted as the future of the trumpet, and hip-hop fans, who dig his collaborations with rap and R&B superstars.

“Hip hop was obviously one of the most influential cultural shifts, not just in America, but the world,” says Harrold, who plays the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s mainstage at 7:30 p.m. “I wanted to do a project that celebrates the genesis of how certain hip-hop music was made, and a lot of its very rich music.

“I want to show certain people who wouldn’t necessarily say, ‘I love jazz,’ but they don’t realize they love jazz because it’s the backbone of some of the greatest hip-hop songs. We’re going to be taking classics and new songs and presenting beauty in that way.”

The New York-based Grammy Award winner grew up in Ferguson, Mo., in a family of nine boys and seven girls, with the beats of rap and hip hop from the 1980s and ’90s swirling through the house.

“My oldest siblings were always listening to it and I was listening to what they had,” the 42-year-old says. “Whether I was in the room or not, I was still feeling the vibes.

“There was A Tribe Called Quest, there was Nas, Run-DMC, so many others that were going on. So many different incredible songs and so many groups that were just killing it.”

He also grew up with a family obligation to learn about jazz and play in his grandfather’s Memorial Lancers Drum and Bugle Corp, a band that for more than 30 years has created not just Grammy winners but teachers and community leaders in the St. Louis suburb where Harrold’s family lives.

“It was something all my grandfather’s grandkids had to do, and many people in the community, all over St. Louis. We learned the music of Count Basie and Duke Ellington and I fell in love with it,” Harrold says.

The two musical paths joined in the Big Apple, where Harrold was attending the New School’s jazz program. On a recommendation from pianist Robert Glasper, he landed his first professional gig, joining Common’s backing band right after the rapper released his 2000 breakthrough album Like Water for Chocolate.

Common, the Academy Award-winning rapper and producer, became the first of many of rap and hip-hop A-listers to seek out Harrold and his trumpet, including Beyoncé, Jay Z, Snoop Dogg, Rihanna and Eminem, among many others.

“That really opened up my world,” Harrold recalls of those first shows with Common, who headlined the 2019 Winnipeg jazz fest. “I thought I was going to be a straight-ahead jazz musician, through and through. But that experience opened me up to new music, to the Roots, so many incredible musicians.

“I was so focused on learning jazz, but that opened me up to different kinds of music that hip hop was sampling that I was learning. Oh my God, that Thelonious Monk tune was sampled for that, that Ahmad Jamal song was the basis of that.”

Harrold has hardly left jazz behind. He was the sound of Miles Davis’s trumpet during many sequences of the 2016 biopic Miles Again, which starred Don Cheadle as the legendary performer and composer.

He also got to perform with members of Davis’s bands, such as Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, who’ve become jazz greats in their own right.

“I’m basically Miles Davis’s stunt double in the movie, which was unbelievable,” he says. “I grew up listening to Miles Davis… his influence on me went deep. Some of those times in the movie, I knew exactly what it was; I didn’t have to study anything because I had been living with his influence on me since I started.”

Cheadle even dubbed Harrold “the Mugician,” for how he would seamlessly match his sound to Cheadle’s movements on the trumpet while filming. It’s a moniker that’s stuck, and became the title of Harrold’s 2017 album, which blurs the boundaries between jazz and hip hop even further.

“My artistry transfers. It travels. I play the same when I’m playing jazz as (when) I’m playing hip hop. It’s just finding the right space for it,” he says. “They’re one and the same but at the same time they have different elements. There’s only a limited amount of notes, there’s a limited amount of chords and inversions of those chords. The only thing that changes is the actual beat.”

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @AlanDSmall