Kassa Overall
Kassa Overall
Kassa Overall is a drummer, producer and MC who strikes a fresh, harmonious realignment of contemporary hip-hop and jazz. Showing shades of Karriem Riggins, Madlib and Flying Lotus, the drummer and producer fuses the sounds of hip-hop and jazz, informed by the dozen years he’s spent honing his jazz drumming chops in the heart of the New York scene.
Raised in Seattle and based in Brooklyn, Overall has been working at the forefront of jazz for two decades, touring and recording as a sideman drummer with artists as varied as Geri Allen, Francis and the Lights, Yoko Ono, and Arto Lindsay. He’s featured on drummer Terri Lyne Carrington’s Social Science, worked with Brandee Younger and his new record “I THINK I’M GOOD” features Vijay Iyer and Theo Croker (whose album he co-produced). He’s also shared stages with many of the greats, including Donald Byrd, Mayer Hawthorne, Yoko Ono and Gary Bartz. Meanwhile, he’s maintained a separate career as an indie hip-hop producer and rapper with groups like Das Racist and Kool and Kass.
As adept behind the drum kit as he is looping samples on a laptop, Overall’s music is a product of live improvisation as much as studio experiments. He dubs his sound “backpack jazz”, a nod to his DIY, stripped back mobile studio, which he employs in addition to traditional studio sessions, and which consists of a laptop, a simple audio interface, and microphone, which he packs into his bag for recording sessions in hotel rooms and friends’ lounges.
Explaining his thinking behind the term, he says, “It’s something like a cross between a jazz musician, a backpack rapper and a bedroom producer.” Crucially, it’s a far more social endeavour than bedroom production. “The bedroom producer is mostly solitary and stationary,” he says. “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.”
On his latest album, “I THINK I’M GOOD”, Overall elevates that social, cross-pollinating discipline to another level. It sees him wrestle 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.
It follows his 2019 debut album “Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz”, which earned rave reviews from The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Afropunk, WBGO, WNYC, KNKX and Downbeat. According to the NYT’s Giovanni Russonello, the album is “one of the few genuine-sounding, full-scope amalgams of contemporary hip-hop and jazz to surface in recent years.”
On “I THINK I’M GOOD”, Overall builds on that assured debut to deliver an even more expansive vision, aided by a cadre of New York’s brightest up and comers, including Joel Ross and Morgan Guerin. It even features an especially recorded cameo from legendary activist and author Dr. Angela Davis.