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)