Kassa Overall (USA)
Szervezés:
“One of modern jazz’s boldest futurists” – wrote Pitchfork about Kassa Overall. About that Kassa Overall who is a Grammy-nominated jazz musician, drummer, MC, singer and producer. In his music he connects jazz, hip-hop and avant-garde experimentation with unselfconscious ease, creating a completely unique sound world. His songs are innovative and accessible at the same time: they push genre boundaries while remaining direct and captivating throughout. He comes to the House of Music following his latest album, 2025’s Cream, on which the emphasis shifted from hip-hop toward jazz, while he transplanted huge hip-hop classics (hits by Wu-Tang Clan, Dr. Dre, Notorious B.I.G., Outkast and A Tribe Called Quest) into his own distinctive jazz universe.
Overall’s mixtapes and albums to date, including his live records, have already included 2019’s Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz, made with Arto Lindsay and Roy Hargrove, and 2020’s I THINK I’M GOOD, both of which received very positive critical acclaim. With these he explored the territories of jazz rap, nu jazz, alternative R&B and abstract hip-hop, and with such effectiveness that by his 2023 album ANIMALS he was joined by huge stars such as Danny Brown, Lil B, Wiki, Nick Hakim, Laura Mvala, Francis & The Lights, and Shabazz Palaces, who, like him, are busy reforming hip-hop.
Overall’s 2025 Cream release put a twist on what had come before and, instead of jazzy hip-hop, transplanted rap into jazz, following the Elvin Jones jazz-drummer tradition. In addition to the artists listed in the introduction, he reworked his teenage favorites, including such classics as Digable Planets and Juvenile. “CREAM is not simply a collection of covers: it’s a complete reimagining of hip-hop in the language of jazz, one that penetrates to the musical essence and soul of both genres. It’s a new approach to how these two genres communicate with each other: it’s not just about a meeting, but a dialogue that has been evolving since the nineties,” Overall explains.
About Kassa Overall
A graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Overall has been a defining figure in the jazz world for more than two decades. In 2020, Pitchfork called him “one of modern jazz’s boldest futurists.” He has toured and recorded with such renowned artists as Geri Allen, Jon Batiste, Steve Coleman, Vijay Iyer, Terri Lyne Carrington and Gary Bartz, and his production work can be heard on albums by, among others, Theo Croker, Arto Lindsay and Danny Brown. Seattle-born Kassa Overall attended Washington Middle School and Garfield High School. As a child he already showed extraordinary talent as a drummer, and later he taught himself how to make beats on an MPC and an ASR-10 sampler, which he acquired at an auction held by the Seattle police.
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