By Struan Douglas and Iain Harris

With an eye to the museums of music and an ear to rap innovation, Twotone productions discover that the soul of acid jazz is in the soles.

Evolution and cooking wear the same apron, wielding their wooden spoons with the same deft touch. Ginger, garlic, or genes - they mix it all up, adding in a bit of this, taking out a little of that, but always adding flavour. That same wooden spoon has whipped the jazz stirfry up into a fresh and funky format, continually evolving, mixing in the old with the new, and connecting the dots of the past masters to the numbers of the present innovators. But always concentrating on the feet. Take the vibrance of a Satchmo blow, throw in the passion of Ella’s scat or the fire of Bird’s bebop, and add the suave, swish and groove of the dance eclectic. That’s the recipe for acid jazz.

Its a recipe that’s loose and eclectic, a genre hopper that draws on just about every music style. Cape Town DJs the Jazz Professors mix in all sorts of tunes under the acid jazz banner, “from old traditional tracks, funk, soul, latin, disco and R&B to trip hop, hip hop, drum ‘n bass, kwaito and even movie theme tunes.” Typical acid jazz groups like Jamiroquai, The Brand New Heavies, US3 and The Charles Hunter Trio also draw on such disparate styles, producing music that varies in feel from light and dancy to dark and brooding. What makes it all acid jazz are the jazzy cuts, be they in the vocals, a sampled trumpet riff, a Hammond organ, or whatever it is that says ‘jazz’. But the emphasis is always on dancing, on shifting the jazz focus from the head to the feet. Acid jazz can flirt with any genre as long as there’s that jazzy feel that makes you want to jive. “It’s a feel more than a label,” say the Jazz Professors.

And that feel is in the bassline groove, a groove that was born in the sixties out of a desire to dance. The typical walking bass sound of traditional jazz, from Louis Armstrong to Charlie Parker, was replaced by an up-tempo and busy breakbeat. Topped with jazz in any form, this breakbeat was the start of the typical acid jazz sound, with Blue Note legends such as Herbie Hancock, Donald Byrd, Lou Donaldson and Lee Morgan doing the pioneering. But acid jazz only took off in the eighties when it found mainstream form in the DJ booth. With one eye on the dancing feet, and the other on improvisation and experimentation, turntables took the genre to a new level of popularity. By spinning vocal tracks over the beats, the importance of the voice as an instrument was pushed to the foreground. The big acid jazz groups like Jamiroquai and the Brand New Heavies emerged from this trend, exploiting the popularity of vocals and with huge record sales and chart topping hits establishing acid jazz in the mainstream. Despite such success, it still hadn’t tapped into the voice of urban youth. Rap had emerged from urban culture as a hugely commercial and unifying musical phenomenon that captured the essence of the streets and in order to achieve even greater exposure, acid jazz embraced it. Musicians like the Guru and Lonnie Liston Smith had been playing with this hybrid of acid jazz and rap in the late eighties, but the real breakthrough came with Miles Davis and rapper Easy-Moe-Bee’s Doo-Bop, a fusion of bebop and the doo-wop of rap. Guru also pioneered with Jazzmatazz featuring veteran jazzters such as Donald Byrd and Courtney Pine with rappers MC Solaar and N’dea Davenport. And by playing alongside and over samples from classic Blue Note recordings, US3 has reinvented these sounds as jazzy dance grooves. Their version of Cantaloop, stormed the charts and nightclubs, bringing the Herbie Hancock legend to a new generation.

It’s rap that has brought acid jazz full circle back to its roots, paying tribute to and building on the innovations of the past masters. And by adding the rhyming and timing of lyrical improvisation to the acid jazz eclectic, rap has bridged gaps and turned acid jazz into a powerful form of cultural expression.

Clearly, acid jazz is dynamic and malleable and is not afraid to explore all musical possibilities, mixing up eras, ideas and feelings into a cutting edge form. Funk and rap have found new voice with acid jazz, people are sampling it with techno and house and South African artists like Moses Mololekwa are experimenting with kwaito. The possibilities are limitless. As a genre acid jazz is somewhat indefinable, but as a stirfry, it is one where any ingredient will do, as long as the stirring is jazzy, the serving plentiful, the taste kicking and the feet leading the way.