I've been a fan of jazz music for almost as long as I can remember. Whether it was dancing to the improvisations of Vince Guaraldi while watching Peanuts and Charlie Brown as a toddler, or grooving to the swing of the Count Basie big band in elementary school, jazz has been a part of my life from a very young age. My father plays saxophone, and my grandfather on my mother's side was the president of the Chicago Jazz Institute until his death. I guess you could say myself and my brother were destined to love the genre from before we were even born.
Unfortunately, jazz music is well past its heyday, and true lovers of the genre are few and far between. Less than 1% of streamed music is categorized as jazz. So one would imagine how heated the discussions about the state of jazz music and its future can become amongst its fans. However, the reality is jazz is far from dead, as long as you're willing to look beyond basic genre classifications. It's easy to find obvious jazz influences in rock music, hip-hop, R&B, funk, soul, or by listening to the improvisations of jam bands. I even had a friend tell me me that some metal music is heavily influenced by jazz.
But now, there's a new evolution of jazz that's taking shape, which some have referred to as Viral Jazz. Now here's the crazy thing. Before I even knew this music had a name, I started to find connections between some of these bands and artists that I was checking out. I'm sure I'm not unique in making these connections, and perhaps this is how others have felt at the birth of something new.
For instance, I remember listening to Kneebody when their first album came out and I was still in music school. I discovered Knower and Louis Cole several years ago, although I don't exactly remember how. I recently came upon DOMi and JD Beck, and their album NOT TiGHT. And then I'd come across a random video where maybe they'd be collaborating together, like seeing the drummer and sax player from Kneebody in a Louis Cole video (see below).
Or the bass player from the above video also be in a Scary Pockets video. Or I'd see one of the guitar players (Rai Thistlethwayte) and bass player (Sam Wilkes) from that Scary Pockets video also be in a Knower video (see below) which was shot in (seemingly) the same house as the Louis Cole video from above, with Louis Cole now playing drums (also with singer Genevieve Artadi). PHEW!
Oh, also Thundercat released a song called I Love Louis Cole. And he also appeared in one of DOMi and JD Beck's music videos. So yeah, there's a lot of overlapping and intersecting going on.
Then I came across this article from NPR, mentioning many of these artists (and more), and giving this whole movement a name; Viral Jazz.
From the article, referencing Louis Cole:
Cole is a stupefyingly proficient multi-instrumentalist, singer, producer and trickster whose bracing new album, Quality over Opinion, releases this Friday on Brainfeeder. He's been a major player in the musical online attention economy for the better part of a decade, as a solo act and as one-half of Knower, with singer-songwriter and producer Genevieve Artadi. Together with virtuoso oddballs like MonoNeon, an electric bass whiz and vocal funkateer, and DOMi & JD Beck, a sly keys-and-drums duo repping mayhem in the rhythm matrix, Cole stands at the center of a cohort whose identifying traits are easy to recognize and harder to define. Many of these musicians have at least a tangential connection to Thundercat, the bassist and falsetto warbler whose interstellar jazz-R&B has been a defining Brainfeeder trademark. Like him, they're known for jaw-dropping technical ability, jazz-inflected genre fluidity and an irreverent yet allusive savvy regarding image and platform. At this disorienting moment in our age of digital exchange, they can sometimes seem like the only ones who've gleefully cracked the code.
And there it was. An article that started to put these pieces together! It was incredible to read something that laid it all out, while also incorporating other artists I didn't realize were connected, or was not yet familiar with. No, about that name:
A few months ago, pianist and composer Vijay Iyer coined a good handle for this new musical phenotype. Taking to Twitter, he wrote: "latest subgenre: 'viral jazz'," adding a parenthetical: "(I don't think the term exists, but the music definitely does)."
Putting the name Viral Jazz aside for the moment, I think it's clear that whatever this is, it's definitely at least related to jazz, if it wouldn't be called it outright. But to me, this is the clearest indicator that jazz is alive and well, regardless of what name it may go by.