
I THINK I’M GOOD (Brownswood)
Kassa Overall
Released February 2020
AllMusic Favorite Jazz Albums 2020
Jazziz Best Albums of 2020
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kRZ55bVK_n89jUS1_2il0_OJe1sLfdrJc
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/1Ba6s8UdfrUFi8I2EKNn6u?si=4LfCXK2NQaKc-YcxUiKOYA
About:
Seattle-raised, Brooklyn-residing Kassa Overall is a
jazz musician, emcee, singer, producer, and drummer. His second, full-length
album, I THINK I’M GOOD, is the work of an artist whose voice has ripened to
its own hard-earned, provocative conclusions, erasing the need to talk about
dissolving barriers between hip hop and jazz because he has begun a new
conversation.
I THINK I’M GOOD is a window into the real life
of Overall, a Bushwick-based artist wrestling with the abhorrent American prison
system, the ebbs and flows of romantic relationships, and perils of trust, all
seen through the kaleidoscopic lens of a brilliant 21st century composer. The
backdrop to these varied themes is Overall confronting his experience with
mental illness, which included a manic episode and subsequent hospitalisation
when he was a student. Themes of incarceration and claustrophobia weave through
the record, but never drown out the feeling of a fragile but vital hope.
“Mental instability or hyper-sensitivity was something
that felt too taboo to talk about,” said Overall. “I want to show the
world that mentally sensitive people are the innovators of our society, and
hopefully set a new standard that includes a healthy way of life and embracing
our unique perspective on reality.”
Recent years have seen something of a worldwide
movement making jazz and improvised music relevant to fresh audiences,
providing a critical cultural counterpoint to feelings of political
disenfranchisement and globalised anxiety. Exciting scenes are springing out of
grassroots musical communities from London to Melbourne, Chicago to
Johannesburg. But perhaps the most vital of these scenes remains in New York, a
city that is still ground zero for the most competitive jazz musicians in the world,
a community that continues unbroken from Charlie Parker to the present. This is
Overall’s home turf, and it shows on I THINK I’M GOOD, which is a tour de force
of New York’s brightest young up-and-comers (Joel Ross, Morgan Guerin, Julius
Rodriguez, Melanie Charles, J Hoard) as well as some of its more established
fixtures, including Sullivan Fortner, Brandee Younger, Theo Croker, Craig
Taborn, Aaron Parks, and Vijay Iyer. Iyer’s contribution is a gorgeous,
melancholic tribute to their shared musical mentor, Geri Allen, with whom
Overall played for seven years. Dr. Angela Davis, a longtime jazz supporter and
fan of Overall’s work, makes a recorded cameo, punctuating the album’s dive
into the human condition and exploration of social justice.
Like Karriem Riggins before him, Overall belongs to
a rare class of musicians naturally fluent in both jazz performance and hip-hop
production. He’s also a clear contemporary of brazen, potent genre-shifters
like Madlib, Flying Lotus, Solange, and Kendrick Lamar. Yet one of the most
striking aspects of I THINK I’M GOOD is its singular intimacy, a byproduct of
Overall’s indie hustle and uncanny at-home and on-the-fly production methods.
In fact, most of the album happened out of Overall’s Bushwick bedroom and a
backpack. “I’ve recently begun to think of myself as a backpack jazz
producer, which is something like a cross between a jazz musician, a backpack
rapper and a bedroom producer,” said Overall, who mostly used a skeletal
mobile studio (laptop, a simple audio interface, and microphone), giving the
album a distinctively inward, almost confidential flavour.
But Overall describes his method as being a far more
social endeavour than bedroom production. “The bedroom producer is mostly
solitary and stationary, but the backpack producer is collaborative, mobile,
and totally improvisatory in the truest sense of our tradition. My studio is
with me almost all the time. I need to be able to work whenever and wherever,
at my own pace.”
As Time Out New York frames his talent, Overall is
“a Renaissance man: part chopsy, super-funky jazz drummer, and part rising
producer-MC.” Since the January 2019 release of Ice Cream, NYC and global
audiences have had the opportunity to experience Overall’s singular brilliance,
which has been embraced with rave reviews from The New York Times, AFROPUNK,
Downbeat, NPR, BBC Radio 6 Music, and other influential media outlets.
Track Listing:
1. Visible Walls 03:04
2. Please Don’t Kill Me 02:59
3. Find Me 04:52
4. I Know You See Me 03:21
5. Sleeping on the Train 01:05
6. Show Me a Prison 03:42
7. Halfway House 03:45
8. Landline 02:23
9. Darkness in Mind 06:01
10. The Best of Life 01:56
11. Got Me a Plan 03:03
12. Was She Happy (for Geri Allen) 03:44
Personnel:
Kassa Overall: vocals (1-4, 6-12), drums (2-5, 7-12), percussion (6), synth bass (9, 10)
Mike King: synths (1, 2), synth bass (1), Mellotron (4, 7)
Brandee Younger: harp (1, 2)
Jay Gandhi: bansuri flute (1, 5)
Courtney Bryan: piano (1, 5)
Morgan Guerin: bass clarinet (1), floor tom splash (3, 6), EWI, saxophone, electric bass (3), clarinets (9)
Sullivan Fortner: piano (2, 7, 9)
Stephan Crump: acoustic bass (2, 3, 4, 7, 9)
Joel Ross: vibes (2)
Theo Croker: flugelhorn (2)
Aaron Parks: sampled piano (3), piano, synth (10)
J Hoard: vocals (3, 4, 6)
Julius Rodriguez: piano, Korg synth (3, 6)
Paul Wilson: synth, effects (3), synth bass (6)
Melanie Charles: vocals (4)
BIGYUKI: synth, synth bass (4)
Craig Taborn: sampled piano (6)
Angela Davis: voicemail vocals (6)
Carlos Overall: tenor sax (8)
Mike Mohamed: drums (9)
Joe Dyson: drums (10)
Rafiq Bhatia: guitar (10)
Tim Kennedy: piano (11)
Vijay Iyer: Rhodes (12)
Producer: Kassa Overall
Mixed by Daniel Schlett (tracks: B3, B4), Josh Giunta (tracks: A1 to B2, B5, B6), Paul Wilson (30) (tracks: A1 to B2, B6), Xander Knight (tracks: B5)
Mastered by Mike Bozzi
Artwork: Jesse Brown (6)
Creative Director: Lauren Du Graf
Review:
Kassa Overall is not the first musician to address the boundaries between jazz and hip-hop, but he is among the most visionary in trying to erase them. Many younger jazz players (Overall is a fine drummer) have grown up with hip-hop as a, if not the, cultural prime mover in popular music since the early 1990s. Overall tried to synthesize them into a whole on his debut album Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz in 2019, to create a new genre made of equal parts.
I Think I’m Good is Overall’s first for Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood. It’s more confident, as if Overall, the Brooklyn-based MC, singer, drummer, and jazzman, can see the horizon of his aesthetic vision coming into view. With a cast of bright, young up and comers and seasoned players alike, he pushes ahead, rapping and singing about mental illness: nowhere in jazz or pop has it been taken on with such an even-keeled, unflinchingly honest, first-person gaze. Overall uses hip-hop production in service to his lyric and musical M.O. On opener “Visible Walls,” harpist Brandee Younger, bass clarinetist Morgan Guerin, and Jay Ghandi on bansuri flute engage with one another as Overall sings almost prayerfully, “I hope they let me go tonight… I pray that you can sleep tonight.” It’s laid-back, with Mike King’s synth and bass adding pronounced but fluid layers of rhythm. Overall voices his protagonist’s desire to be freed from the walls of an imprisoning hospital, but he also addresses the interior voices wreaking havoc on his mind. “Find Me (feat. J. Hoard)” offers twinned samples from Aaron Parks’ piano with Julius Rodriguez’s live playing and Guerin’s EWI, sax, and electric bass. They hover above Overall’s syncopated drum kit in a fluid gumbo at once musically adventurous and heartbreakingly soulful. Angela Davis guests alongside Hoard on “Show Me a Prison,” with its sinister rhythms and Craig Taborn’s doomy, sampled piano as they crisscross neo-soul and jazz cadences with hip-hop and dissolve into one another as Overall adds an elusive croon. “Landline” is a harrowing and explosive autobiographical duet with brother and saxophonist Carlos Overall. “The Best of Life,” with Parks, additional drummer Joe Dyson, and guitarist Rafiq Bhatia create a strange, delightful meld of Ramsey Lewis-esque pianistic lyricism (Parks can play anything), Los Angeles-style rhythmic interplay, and slippery yet speedy East Coast rap to carry the poignant lyrics about drug addiction home. The closer, “Was She Happy (For Geri Allen),” is a moody, nearly cinematic tribute duet between Vijay Iyer’s Rhodes piano and Overall’s drum kit. Ultimately, I Think I’m Good is not merely the work of a fine backpack producer, but that of a master conceptualist and painterly musician compelled by both a rigorous aesthetic sensibility and the weighty importance of his chosen topics to deliver a provocative and genuinely seamless musical fusion for the future.
Thom Jurek (AllMusic)