Brass Bows & Beats: A Hip-Hop Symphony
August 1st, 2010
Title: Brass Bows & Beats: A Hip-Hop Symphony
Artist: Adam Theis and Jazz Mafia
Label: Yonas Media
Catalog No.: 323 651 158
Formats: CD; MP3
Release Date: 2010
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San Francisco-based jazz musician and composer Adam Theis was the recipient of the Gerbode-Hewlett Foundation’s Emerging Composers Grant in 2008. The fruit of that project was Brass Bows & Beats: A Hip-Hop Symphony, which Theis staged in April 2009 as a large-scale live performance with a 50-piece orchestra comprised of the professional jazz musicians from Theis’s performance collective, the Jazz Mafia, as well as a DJ and a variety of vocalists including singers Karyn Paige and Joe Bagale, and Bay Area rappers Seneca, Dublin, and Lyrics Born.
The album is a live recording from the premiere performance. While the endeavor was certainly ambitious, and the musicians are clearly skilled and seem to be enjoying the collaboration, calling this a “hip-hop” anything seems to overstate the matter somewhat—the titular beats are relatively sparse, and other hip hop musical elements such as turntabling and rapping are occasional or downplayed parts of the texture, though done well when they occur. This might more accurately be called a fusion jazz tone poem—and an excellent one at that—but admittedly that’s not quite as catchy a subtitle.
Following is a promo video, “Behind Jazz Mafia’s Brass, Bows, and Beats:
Reviewed by Ann Shaffer
Review Genre(s): Jazz
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