
Kassa Overall – Blending & Bottling
Oxbow Live: Kassa Overall with Kafari and HiDuke
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NPR Tiny Desk
Live on KEXP
| Kassa Overall |
Kassa Overall is a Grammy-nominated musician, emcee, singer, producer and drummer who melds avant-garde experimentation with hip-hop production techniques to tilt the nexus of jazz and rap in unmapped directions.
On his first two studio albums GO GET ICE CREAM AND LISTEN TO JAZZ and I THINK I’M GOOD, Kassa layered virtuosic drumming, meticulous production techniques, and incisive lyricism to establish himself as a rhythmic innovator and visionary poet, using his voice to address the injustices of the carceral system, the pharmaceutical industry, and anti-black racism, while wrangling with the perils of his own mental illness.
On ANIMALS, his Warp Records debut out May 26, Kassa pushes his kaleidoscopic, subversive vision further. He layers Roland 808s against avant-garde drumming in the vein of his mentors Elvin Jones and Billy Hart, the latter of whom he studied with at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Virtuoso musos appear alongside rap poets, including Danny Brown, Wiki, Lil B, and Shabazz Palaces. Top-flight jazz improvisation weaves in and out of orchestral string arrangements by Jherek Bischoff. The album’s diverse, all-star roster of collaborators includes several of his close friends, like vocalists Nick Hakim, Laura Mvula, Francis and the Lights, and jazz stars like Theo Croker and Vijay Iyer.
ANIMALS pushes Kassa’s message further too, the title a loaded metaphor for the paradoxes of his life as an entertainer and as a black man in America. ANIMALS is the sound of an artist aware of the cost of embodying one’s natural self in the public eye, a deep reckoning with the two-sided truth that to perform one’s freedom for an audience can mean succumbing to life inside a cage.
| Kafari |
“Kafari’ (he/him) is the alias of Cincinnati, OH born, Portland, ME based pianist and rhythm bones-weilding beatmaker Ahmad Muhammad. Kafari’s music synthesizes his love of ambient piano music, instrumental hip-hop and acoustic percussion, taking inspiration from Detroit jazz harpist Dorothy Ashby, Detroit beatmaker J Dilla, and the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who in a 2014 performance sparked Kafari’s interest in traditional music and the Irish rhythm bones – a percussion instrument popularized in America in the 1800s through Blackface Minstrelsy. Kafari often distributes and teaches the rhythm bones at his performances, inviting his audiences to workshop basic rhythmic techniques and to share in the joy and magic of bones playing.”
| HiDuke |
As a DJ, HiDuke has been performing around the Portland area since 2005; specializing in All-Vinyl Funk, Soul, Boogie & Disco. With his vast record collection & tasteful mixing, HiDuke is recognized as one of the preeminent DJs in the Portland, Maine area.
[$20 Tickets | Doors 730PM | Show 830PM]