"I'm trying to make music that challenges the listener on a lyrical, sonic, and political level." -Kassa Overall

Timing is everything for acclaimed drummer Kassa Overall and his debut album Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz couldn’t be more timely. The release of his new album coincides with a reinvigorated movement forged by the amalgamation of jazz and hip-hop. Not every effort to intertwine the two genres has been triumphant. The integrated subgenre certainly has its complexities, but Mr. Overall has a serendipitous recipe for success — add supernatural talent and ice cream. Kassa is a visionary and his new album is an epochal layered synthesis of jazz language and hip-hop vernacular laced with the kind of fervor and foresight that elucidates great music and moves beyond trendy niches and transient compositions.

Kassa, a Seattle native, moved to New York City in 2006. He attended the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and studied jazz performance under the tutelage of Grammy-nominated jazz drummer and educator, Billy Hart. Kassa credits Hart’s early mentorship as the impetus for helping him to realize the possibility of becoming a jazz drummer.

Tell me about the emergence of your career and the natural trajectory that you’re on now.

Kassa: My whole life I’ve been making beats, writing raps, playing and learning jazz drums. Growing up listening to my dad’s records, taking lessons, and going the musician route I came up as a fan of rap and those things being very divided until more recently, I was able to bring everything together, and that was the key for me.

Mr. Overall began playing drums at the age of 1. His parents bought his brother Carlos who was 4 years older than him a drum set when he was born. “All I wanted to be was my brother for the first 12 years of my life.” His brother who eventually switched from drums to the saxophone appears on both the standard and extended versions of Mark Sampson, a beat driven, sonorous saxophone groove that further cements the title of his new album.

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What inspired the synergy that shapes your sound?

Kassa attributes the catalyst of this new fusion to a defining artistic moment that occurred aboard an airplane while on tour a few years ago with Dee Dee Bridgewater. “I’d been trying to write a rap but didn’t have any beats on my phone at the time.” He searched through his phone and found "What’s New" by Ahmad Jamal and was reminded that the ballad tempo had relatively the same rhythmic composition as a Hip-Hop beat. He recalls the specific notes and chords and how ripe they were for sampling. “It was like one of the first Hip-Hop beats ever made, that wasn’t made yet,” Kassa exclaimed with exhilaration. One can’t help but to nod their head thinking about Jamal’s mellifluent post-bop 1958 release. Originally composed by Bob Haggart, lyricized by Johnny Burke, and recorded by Bob Crosby in 1939, the previously entitled "I’m Free", which later came to be known as "What’s New" was crafted by Haggart as an instrumental a year earlier. To Kassa’s point, Jamal’s version of the song is a hip-hop head’s dream. You can imagine yourself cruising on a summer day with the windows down getting lost in its rhythm. Kassa added that “my writing was easily inspired by the music in "What’s New" because each chord is different, and so it’s inspiring different things. One of the better songs I’ve written was the song I wrote on the airplane and that’s when I thought – wait a minute, there are so many ways to connect music besides a hip-hop drum beat or a jazz chord.” He asserts and exalts this belief throughout his new album.

Kassa: When I started mixing all these things together that’s when everything started taking on an individual voice and I’ve kind of been preparing for that moment my whole life by studying these different idioms traditionally. It was my goal to be one of the greatest drummers and it was my goal to be able to make beats with the consistency of J Dilla and Pharrell. I’ve taken lessons my whole life, done the musician thing, but then also I would learn how to make beats and suddenly everything came together. Separating those things my whole life then bringing them together suddenly it gave this real blend, it was more like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich rather than a smoothie, so to speak. These things – that are fully separate, and studied, grown, and brought together become one. I think I’m playing in a dangerous terrain.

There’s been a lot of unsuccessful attempts at mixing jazz and hip-hop together, and I guess for me, maybe the reason why it’s a little easier is that it wasn’t really my goal to do so. My goal was to create music that represents all the aspects of who I am without boundaries or preconceived definitions of what it should be. I really am a hip-hop student, and I really am a Jazz student, fully. I’ve been playing drums since I was the age of one, but I’ve been writing raps and messing with beats since I was like four years old.

Kassa’s new album is indeed buttery smooth an easily enjoyable. This is not an experiment for Mr. Overall but rather a natural progression of the work that he’s been cultivating his entire life. In addition to playing the drums, Kassa is a beat alchemist and plays the piano – using the keyboard for song writing and production.

What and who influences you?

Kassa: I think that I’ve always been a very sensitive human being, meaning that I can feel everything strongly, you know. With that being said, the things that make my soul awaken, anything, there’s no boundaries on it. There’s no political or social reason. If it moves me, it moves me. One of the first artist to move me in that kind of a way where I would listen to their work religiously and try to learn from was Bob Marley. My dad was heavy into the Rasta culture when I was growing up. He played the saxophone back in the day and plays piano a little bit but mostly as a hobby. He knows music and he was able to pass the knowledge and the gift on to us. Next, I would say John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis, but those were like early on.

What about Max Roach?

Kassa: Yes, absolutely… I’ve transcribed Max Roach in my prior work. But if I was going to talk about Max then you get into this conversation about the jazz drum greats. I’d have to say Max, Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, Tony Williams, Roy Haynes, Billy Higgins, Ed Thigpen, and I can go on. But for me, it was Art Blakey first and then Max. I was more into Blakey and then I saw Elvin about 9 times. I would see him every year and I got fully into his work. I had my Tony Williams moments, but ultimately, I resonate more with Elvin than Tony and then Billy Higgins because Billy was the selfless, egoless drummer. He didn’t have to play a lot of stuff — you could feel the spirit of what he was doing.

What inspired the title of the album?

Kassa: I had a friend in London, and we were all hanging out at someone’s house. She works in the music industry out there and she’d been talking to a couple of teenagers 14-18 years of age asking them what they liked to do for fun and their response gave birth to the title of the album. It’s become a thing where kids go get ice cream and they’re digging in crates for records and getting into jazz and there is a resurgence of young people and high school kids getting into it and jazz is that cool thing. There’s always something whether it’s comic books or another form of counterculture and it’s like if jazz is that — I’m all for it. I’m trying to champion that movement.

Who did the album Artwork?

Kassa: My girlfriend gave me the idea of putting an ice cream cone in the background of the album cover. She started off with a lo-fi image of an ice cream cone and we sent it to Jesse Brown, a digital artist out of Seattle. What they each brought to it gave the album cover that memorable feel and the rest is history. Hip-hop as an influence extends out to everything that I do.

What went into the development of the album?

Kassa: I’ve been on collaborative mix tapes, music videos, and other people’s albums. My thing was I have a lot of music and I felt like there was no better time than right now to release my album. I took a six song EP and turned it into a ten-song album. It was fun, some of the songs like Mark Sampson I wrote my junior year in college at Oberlin on the piano and I recorded it with Mark Sampson before he passed away. When I was finishing up this record, this song was always one of my favorites, so I brought it into the lab, and we remade it from scratch. Some of the songs on the album are ideas that I’ve had for years that finally came together. As far as production and new recording it took about 2 years to finish the album.

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How did you connect with J. Cole?

Kassa: When I was thinking about the inspiration for this album J. Cole came to mind. About two years ago I coproduced Theo Croker’s album Escape Velocity. J Cole was working on his album at the time and it turned out that he was looking to work with Theo Croker because of a Jill Scott tweet. J. Cole showed up at Minton’s Playhouse looking for Theo and the sound man sent me a text message looking for him. So then, Theo hits me up like I’m going to the studio to work with J. Cole and invited me to come. I met J. and played him my video and Theo got on J. Cole’s record. It was about 10 days where we were just hanging around the whole camp and I saw the way they were making the album with live musicians and I thought to myself – I can do this. So that was also another inspiration for my whole new wave for creating music. It was like seeing the way that somebody like J. Cole makes their album and watching the way other people make albums on a larger scale and knowing that I could do it and that I’m an amazing musician and I have incredible musicians around me.

What was it like working with Roy Hargrove?

Kassa: When I moved to New York, Roy Hargrove was the same cat that he was until he passed away. I used to frequent the Zinc Bar and he would be in there. He would come up, take a solo, and walk around afterwards in his zone. It was hard to get his attention initially, he was so into the music and me being kind of young and enthusiastic I would tell him that his music was great and introduced myself about 4 or 5 times before he recognized who I was. One day I played at the Fat Cat, an up-tempo burner, and I played it like the old cats with the showtunes type of vibe and something about my ability to do that he recognized that I had something that the old cats had and afterwards he came over to me and told me that I sounded great and talked about the kind of style that I was playing. He was like “you’re taking the Irving Berlin, showtune type of style and that’s what Max and others did,” and he came alive through the music.

I always looked up to Roy and thought he was really cool. He was into the music but also into the culture. In 2016, I took a drum solo at Dizzy’s Club and he liked it. He used to be at Smalls Jazz Club often and I saw him there one night at the jam sessions and he told me again that he liked the drum solo I did at Dizzy’s and after that whenever I would play at the sessions he would come up and play. He enjoyed playing with me and he was pushing me musically and being supportive of what I was doing. He would always say that I was exuberant – “man I like you because you’re exuberant about the music.” I would come to see him whenever he was playing, and we would hang out backstage and talk about music and Jordan’s because he had every pair. I asked him to be on the album and it took him a little while, but he came to me one day and said: “Kassa, I’ll get on the album.”

Months went by and eventually he came through and we recorded his part of La Casa Azul at Louis Cato’s home studio, and he loved it. He said he was working on some hip-hop type of thing of his own and wanted me to rap on it. I’ve had a lot of people pass away in the last 3 years. The thing about Roy is, I was in Paris and I was looking for a sign of when I should put the album out, considering the right way to do it, should I pursue labels, etc. and the next day I found out that he passed away and it broke me up. Part of it was knowing that this was somebody that had so much in them to give and who gave a lot, but you didn’t get to have all the conversations that you could have had with them. He had so many more things to say to the whole world and everybody could feel that. I feel honored that he allowed me to get closer to him over the past couple of years or so, but I also felt like that was just the beginning. So, when I got the news that he passed I felt ashamed for not putting my music out. I realized that there’s no promise of anything and it became urgent for me to release the album immediately.

What do you hope to achieve through your music?

Kassa: I want to show people who I am and get them in tune with my personality, my energy, and the way that I make music. I’d like to set a new standard of possibilities for music creators and listeners. I respect listeners I want to challenge them. I feel like the listeners are evolving and I've been noticing that over the past year or two when I'm playing. People get it, their ears are developing so I'm trying to make music that challenges the listener on a lyrical, sonic, and political level. Mary Lou Williams said that jazz in her time, was anything that had a beat and if you use that definition, pretty much everything we heard come out of America is jazz, you know. I'm trying to challenge the listener and challenge myself. I want to make things that are great, and I think that when I do that, years down the road there won't be that timestamp of catering to the moment. I'm trying to make something that's hot forever.

Kassa Overall is currently completing a 6-month residency at the Jazz Gallery in NYC featuring his new work and collaborations alongside Mark Shim, Jason Moran, Aaron Parks, Sullivan Fortner, Kris Davis and Craig Taborn. Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz is available via Apple Music, Amazon Music, Spotify, YouTube Music, and more.

Akinfe Fatou

Writing since February 2019 · 1 story contributed