Jazz Rap

Jazz rap (also called jazz hip-hop) is hip-hop built on jazz: beats made from sampled jazz records — upright bass lines, muted trumpet, Rhodes chords, vibraphone and ride cymbals — or played by live jazz musicians, with rappers who favour a relaxed, conversational flow. It took shape in New York between 1988 and 1993 with the Native Tongues collective, Gang Starr and Digable Planets, and its DNA runs through lo-fi hip-hop, Nujabes and Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly.

This guide covers how the style emerged, what its records are made of, the albums that define it, and how it overlaps with boom bap — the drum-first East Coast production style with which it shares an era, a city and many producers — and with acid jazz, its British club-side cousin. To see how a jazzy beat reads to a classifier, run a clip through our free AI music genre detector.

Jazz rap is defined less by tempo or drum pattern than by its harmonic and timbral source. The beat is still hip-hop — a looped drum break with a hard snare on two and four — but the material laid over it comes from jazz: a walking or looping acoustic bass, a horn phrase, a piano or Rhodes voicing with sevenths and ninths, a vibraphone shimmer. The result sounds warmer, softer and more harmonically rich than most rap of its time.

The rapping usually matches. Jazz rap MCs such as Q-Tip, Guru and Ladybug Mecca tend to rap in a calm, behind-the-beat, almost spoken style, and the lyrics often turn to everyday observation, Afrocentric and spiritual themes, wordplay and the history of Black music itself. The connection is deliberate: many jazz rap records present hip-hop as the continuation of a tradition that runs from bebop and hard bop through soul and funk.

The boundary with boom bap is soft. Boom bap names a drum sound — punchy kick and cracking snare from sampled breaks — while jazz rap names the musical palette on top. Many classic records are both, and producers such as Pete Rock and DJ Premier move freely between jazz-heavy and harder material. A useful rule: if the jazz sample is the centre of the track rather than one ingredient, it is jazz rap.

Rap and jazz were linked before jazz rap had a name. Poets such as Gil Scott-Heron and The Last Poets recited over jazz and funk in the early 1970s, and early hip-hop DJs dug through their parents' jazz-funk records for breaks. The 1988 single "Talkin' All That Jazz" by Stetsasonic, a defence of sampling, is one of the first records to make the connection explicit.

The style itself came from the Native Tongues, a loose New York collective. Jungle Brothers released Straight Out the Jungle (1988); De La Soul released 3 Feet High and Rising (1989); and A Tribe Called Quest — Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Jarobi White — followed People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm (1990) with The Low End Theory (1991). Its stripped-down bass-and-drums arrangements, with jazz bassist Ron Carter playing on "Verses from the Abstract", made it the style's defining record. Midnight Marauders (1993) refined the sound further.

In parallel, Gang Starr — Guru and DJ Premier — recorded "Words I Manifest" (1989) and "Jazz Thing" (1990), the latter for Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues. In 1993 Guru launched Jazzmatazz, Volume 1, recording with jazz players including Donald Byrd, Roy Ayers and Branford Marsalis rather than sampling them. Pete Rock & CL Smooth's "They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)" (1992) built a classic on a saxophone loop.

1993 was the peak year. Digable Planets' Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space) produced "Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)", which won a Grammy for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group. In London, Us3 were given access to the Blue Note catalogue, and "Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)", built on Herbie Hancock's "Cantaloupe Island", became an international hit. West Coast groups such as The Pharcyde and Freestyle Fellowship developed their own jazz-inflected styles, and The Roots in Philadelphia played the music live.

The style's second life came through producers. J Dilla's off-grid, swung drum programming, Madlib's Blue Note project Shades of Blue (2003) and Japan's Nujabes — whose Modal Soul (2005) and soundtrack work for the anime Samurai Champloo reached a global audience — laid the foundation for the lo-fi hip-hop that would fill streaming playlists a decade later. In 2015 Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, recorded with Robert Glasper, Terrace Martin, Kamasi Washington and Thundercat, brought jazz rap back to the centre of mainstream hip-hop.

What identifies a jazz rap record:

• Tempo: mostly 85–95 BPM, the classic East Coast range, with lo-fi descendants slowing to 70–85.
• Drums: sampled breaks with a dry kick and cracking snare, often swung; the ride cymbal from the jazz sample sometimes doubles as the hi-hat.
• Bass: acoustic upright or electric bass lines, sampled or played, often more melodic than in other rap.
• Harmony: extended jazz chords — minor sevenths, ninths, elevenths — from piano, Rhodes, vibraphone or guitar.
• Horns: short trumpet or saxophone phrases looped as hooks, or live solos.
• Vocals: relaxed, conversational flows; frequent references to jazz musicians and Black musical history.
• Texture: vinyl crackle and the slightly dusty sound of sampled records, which became a deliberate aesthetic in later lo-fi.

Where it sits against its neighbours:

Jazz rap was built from crates, and certain labels and eras recur constantly. Blue Note's hard bop and soul-jazz catalogue of the 1950s and 1960s, CTI's glossy 1970s jazz-funk, and spiritual and fusion records of the same decade supplied many of the loops. Musicians whose recordings became staples include Herbie Hancock, Donald Byrd, Lonnie Liston Smith, Ahmad Jamal, Roy Ayers and Grant Green.

The examples below are well documented:

Where to start:

• A Tribe Called Quest — The Low End Theory (1991) and Midnight Marauders (1993).
• De La Soul — 3 Feet High and Rising (1989).
• Jungle Brothers — Straight Out the Jungle (1988).
• Gang Starr — Step in the Arena (1991); "Jazz Thing" (1990).
• Guru — Jazzmatazz, Volume 1 (1993).
• Pete Rock & CL Smooth — Mecca and the Soul Brother (1992); "They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)".
• Digable Planets — Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space) (1993) and Blowout Comb (1994).
• Us3 — Hand on the Torch (1993).
• The Pharcyde — Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde (1992).
• The Roots — Do You Want More?!!!??! (1995), live-band jazz rap.
• Madlib — Shades of Blue (2003).
• Nujabes — Modal Soul (2005).
• Kendrick Lamar — To Pimp a Butterfly (2015).

Boom bap is the closest relative and often the same music seen from a different angle: boom bap emphasises the drum sound and hard-edged rapping, jazz rap emphasises the jazz material and softer delivery. Our blog post What Is Boom Bap? covers the drum side in detail.

Acid jazz came from the London club scene of the late 1980s — DJs Gilles Peterson and Eddie Piller, bands like Galliano, Brand New Heavies and Jamiroquai — and is a jazz-funk dance style with live bands, usually sung rather than rapped. Us3 sits right on the border between the two.

Lo-fi hip-hop is jazz rap's instrumental descendant: the same Rhodes chords, jazz loops and dusty drums, slowed down and with the rapper removed, designed as background music for study and relaxation. And jazz fusion runs in the other direction — jazz musicians absorbing rock and funk — though modern players like Robert Glasper and Thundercat move freely between fusion and rap.

Jazz rap gives a classifier two strong and partly contradictory signals. The rapped vocal and the looped hip-hop drum pattern point firmly to rap; the extended chords, acoustic bass, horns and ride cymbal point to jazz. In most tracks the vocal wins, because a rapping voice is one of the most distinctive things a genre model can hear. Instrumental passages and intros — where only the sample plays — can briefly sound like jazz itself.

Some taxonomies recognise this explicitly with a "jazzy hip-hop" category, which is exactly the space jazz rap occupies. Run a track through the Genre AI music genre detector, then try an instrumental section of the same song: the shift in the labels shows how much of the genre identity comes from the rapper.

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