They sparked a breakbeat-jazz hybrid scene on both sides of the Atlantic that yielded much musical fruit for a brief time but never cracked the blinged-out materialist hip-hop mainstream of the late Clinton and early Bush years.
Guru and DJ Premier of Gang Starr did much to assert the common humanity and creative urges of rappers and beboppers in their collaborations with Donald Byrd and others on their epochal Jazzmatazz series of albums of the late ’90s and aughts. Collage, cut-and-paste, sampling, remixing, and genre contamination has been a preferred mode in African-American music since the 1800s. This kitchen-sink template set the stage for everything that’s come down the pike since, from mojo-handed talents as diverse as Little Richard, Nina Simone, Jimi Hendrix, The Isley Brothers, Larry Levan, Ron Hardy, A Tribe Called Quest, and Lauryn Hill. Where they moved to was a hot, newfangled conflagration of gospel beats and vocalizing gone blasphemously secular, jazz harmonies and gutbucket blues forms-all that mess being pioneered by one Ray Charles. Not entirely their fault: serious jazz got a lot less concerned with the dance floor from the mid-’40s on, thanks to Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, who were more concerned if their virtuosic flights made them happy than if they did everyday people all the serious hoofers, toe-tappers, and lindy-hoppers got the message and moved on. In a nutshell, the pioneers of ’80s and ’90s breakbeat dance culture were following precedents set by jazz musicians of the 1920s, ’40s, ’60s, and ’70s-even if some didn’t know it. Meanwhile, Maurice White’s Earth, Wind & Fire so wickedly blurred the line between avant-garde soul and electronic jazz as to render distinctions between the genres patently absurd. Students of Miles-like Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, and Weather Report-soon followed, with sublime composition, improv chops, and grooves steady enough to yank in hardcore disciples of James Brown, Sly Stone, and Funkadelic. By the 1970s, Sun Ra had already pioneered the introduction of electric pianos and Moog synths into serious freedom jazz: Miles Davis had strapped a wah-wah pedal to his horn and was in the studio making vicious breakbeats with tape loops, tabla players, and live handclaps on electronic jazz masterpieces like On the Corner and Get Up With It.